The first, most pioneering field of his scholarship, the temples of West Bengal take a central place in the intellectual career of Hitesranjan Sanyal. They help shape a set of methods and analytical concerns, grounded in fieldwork, ethnographic research, oral history, and detailed survey and documentation, that would extend into the entire gamut of his later work. Sanyal’s passionate foray during the 1960s into a study of this regional school of temple architecture over a 450 year period of Bengal’s history (from the middle of the 15th to the end of the 19th century) runs parallel with his deep engagement with local histories and the social and religious worlds of rural Bengal. It lays the ground for his later research on Gaudiya Vaishnavism and on the reminiscences of participants in the Gandhian nationalist movement in the districts of southern Bengal.
Standing apart from the grand schools of Indian temple architecture of the early medieval epochs, the type of small brick and laterite temples that proliferated across the districts of eastern, western and southern Bengal under Mughal and British rule represented a distinctly regional tradition. Sanyal recognized it as a humble, unpretentious trend of temple building of middling aesthetic merit. Yet, what drew him into the trail of studying these structures that lay littered across Bengal’s countryside (sometimes in complete neglect and disrepair, sometimes as better maintained sites of active worship) was the lead they provided into the cultural identity of this broadly Bengali-speaking region of Rarh, and the social histories of the occupational and caste groups who drove this temple-building movement.
There were different mentors guiding his approach – from Dinesh Chandra Sen’s two volumes of Brihat-Banga (published 1934-35) came the deep interest in the living folk and religious traditions of rural Bengal; from his supervisor, Niharranjan Ray, the training in art and architectural history and the quest for the history of the Bengali people; and from Nirmal Kumar Bose, the anthropological methods of linking temple forms and sculptural ornamentation with artisanal practices.
Hitesranjan Sanyal’s participation, since the early 1960s in the temple-study tours of Bengal’s districts of fellow scholar, David McCutchion, brought him his best hands-on initiation in this field. His years of work with the West Bengal District Gazetteers (1964-1968) saw the unfolding of a rare research partnership, led by the-then Director, Amiya Kumar Bandyopadhyay’s own work on the antiquities and temples of Bankura, and propelled full steam by McCutchion’s painstaking compilations of the locations, architectural types and sub-types, and (wherever available from records) the dates of construction and founders of temples for each of the 1960s District Handbooks of Bankura, Birbhum, Hugli, Howrah, 24 Paraganas, Purulia, Medinipur and Murshidabad. The field-trip photographs and letters in Hitesranjan Sanyal’s archives bear testimony to the close camaraderie between him and McCutchion and the huge promise of the work on Bengal’s temples undertaken by these two young scholars that would be rudely disrupted by McCutchions’ sudden death in Calcutta in 1972, the year Sanyal was submitting his Ph.D. thesis. McCutchion’s posthumously published book, Late Medieval Temples of Bengal (Calcutta, 1973) became a major resource for Sanyal, even as his own analysis charted new directions in social history. Another close partner in his field studies was the antiquarian, Tarapada Santra, whose own collection of temple measurements, inscriptions, sculptural fragments and photographs in a museum called Ananda Niketan Kirtisala at Nabasan, Howrah, became a major resource for Sanyal.
The foundation of Hitesranjan Sanyal’s study of the Bengal temples was laid by exhaustive village to village survey of a total of 1359 structures across the southern and western districts of Bankura, Birbhum, Hugli, Howrah, 24 Paraganas, Purulia and Medinipur, with Murshidabad as the only upper district that was drawn in. Of this group of temples, 260 were structures that were either in complete ruin or could not be dated; 1104 of these became the core group of his investigation which he was able to date through the evidence of architectural and ornamental features, and through the records he searched out with local families of temple founders and caretakers. Sanyal also marks out 908 temple structures that he physically measured and whose architectural features and sculptures he photographically documented.
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