Hitesranjan Sanyal’s voluminous Ph.D. dissertation, Temple Building Activities in Bengal: A Social Study, 1450-1900, was never published. The dissertation itself mentions the many small Bengali articles on this subject that he serially published in the Eastern Railway Magazine during 1963-64, and the journal, Samakalin, between 1966 and 1968. These have been brought together 25 years after his death, in the book Banglar Mandir (Karigar, Kolkata, January, 2012). An immensely valuable legacy of his scholarship on Bengal temples that he left behind was a meticulously labeled and ordered photographic archive. The visual archives of the CSSSC is fortunate to have received from his wife, Manaswita Sanyal, a collection of nearly 3000 photographs (original photographs, negatives, contact sheets and photographic prints) that he himself took during the 1960s and 70s on the temples of Bengal, with an additional body of photographs taken by David McCutchion that were in his collection.
Hitesranjan Sanyal’s photographs of the temple complexes show high levels of perception and precision, with a broad spectrum of shots taken from various angles to substantiate the documentation process and provide additional information on the architectural structure as well as embellishments. He uses the camera to mark out the close interrelations between the substructures and the superstructures in individual temple forms – and to scrutinize, frame by frame, the architectural style, the entrance facades, the schematic arrangement of the terracotta panels and the appendages to the main temple complex in a single site. We see examples here from his photographing of the panchabingshatiratna (structure with 25 turrets) Sridhar temple edifice at Sonamukhi in Bankura. He also photographed some of the edifices from a specific distance in order to provide a general view of the landscape, and explore crucial links to surrounding archaeological remnants, ruins and sculptural debris.
Particularly admirable is his painstaking work on the schematic layout of the terracotta panels on pillars and facades, in photography and correspondingly in his notes. They are also outstanding because of the parallels that were laid out between folk-culture and the varying artistic expressions surrounding these temples. This photographic archive of Hitesranjan Sanyal also includes detailed studies of the early mosque architecture of Bengal of the Sultanate period in Hugli and at the sites of Gaur and Pandua in Malda.
The digitisation project began in the early 2000s. The archive contained original photographs and transparencies by Hitesranjan Sanyal along with copy transparencies and copy photographs. It also included over 200 original photographs by David McCutchion. Manaswita Sanyal played a key role in the process of identifying the temples and creating a foundational catalogue for the collection.
The funding received by the CSSSC through OH-31 programme of the ICSSR led to the creation of the web-archive. It has been built as two separate subdomains: the Religious Architecture of Bengal archive landing page (designed on WordPress) and the Hitesranjan Sanyal archive (on Omeka, a digital collection and exhibition platform). The rationale of the physical photograph archive and its catalogue had to be reordered to make the database comprehensible in the simplest terms, i.e. by bringing together photographs (referred to as “items” on Omeka) of a single temple or mosque together in the form of a “collection”, and then placing the collections under “parent collections” or the districts they are located in.
The metadata for the archive prepared and accessible at Jadunath Bhavan has 28 fields, categorised as object detail, image detail and temple/mosque’s architectural detail. But when putting a digital archive online, it is essential to accommodate possibilities of subsequent growth. For example, if other similar collections were to become available online, a standardized metadata schema would ensure interoperability and interlinked search options. Therefore, while uploading the material on Omeka, the Dublin Core international standard has been maintained, but with certain improvisations. Each item, i.e. each photograph, has 13 fields of metadata that describe the object details and image details. The collection, i.e. the temple or mosque, which includes all photographs pertaining to it, contain the fields pertinent to the site, e.g. building material, present condition, etc. The archive welcomes experts in the field (literally) to help populate these fields over time. Additionally, users are invited to contribute to the archive by providing information that may be missing in the metadata, suggesting corrections, or adding GPS coordinates for temples and mosques.
The collaborative potential of the digital archive, however, goes beyond that, being built in a way that enables it to easily connect with and offer a template for other efforts at digitizing similar archives. The digital archive recognizes that the long and rich history of documenting the temples and mosques of Bengal has been a cumulative and collaborative process, seen through different disciplinary perspectives. It is hoped, therefore, that other archives, like David McCutchion’s, Tarapada Santra’s, or Amiya Kumar Bandyopadhyay’s will, in time, become available online to create a comprehensive, interlinked archive stretching across decades of documentation and research.
The foundation of the present archive was laid by the pioneering work of Dr. Hitesranjan Sanyal. We remain ever-grateful to him and to Manaswita Sanyal for sharing with the CSSSC his archive, and for assisting with the initial cataloguing. For their invaluable inputs and curatorial notes, we thank Prof. Partha Chatterjee, Prof. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Dr. Pika Ghosh, and Debjani Chakrabarty. For their guidance and support, we thank Prof. Rosinka Chaudhuri, Dr. Debarshi Sen, Dr. Rajarshi Ghosh, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee and Shri Abhijit Ghosh. The digital archive has been funded through the OH-31 programme of the ICSSR.
Principal Investigator: Dr. Prachi Deshpande
Archivists: Abhijit Bhattacharya, Kamalika Mukherjee, Runu Sen
Digital Archive Concept & Design: Dr. Sujaan Mukherjee
Research & Metadata: Atmajit Mukherjee, Chayana Mondal
Contact:
The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
R-1 Baishnabghata Patuli Township
Kolkata 700094
Phone: Tel: +91 33-24625795/24368313/24627251
Jadunath Bhavan Museum & Resource Centre
10 Lake Terrace, Kolkata 700029
Phone +91 33 24666472
© The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 2022
