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Hitesranjan Sanyal was born in 1940 in Salop, Pabna, now in Bangladesh, to Bangranjan Sanyal and Lila Sanyal. After completing his school education, Sanyal earned his Bachelor’s degree from St. Paul’s College, and his Master’s degree at Calcutta University.
From 1959 to 1962, Hitesranjan Sanyal worked at the Asutosh Museum of the University of Calcutta and participated in the excavation of Chandraketu Garh. Thiswas when he came under the mentorship of Professor Niharranjan Ray (1903-1981), the eminent historian of ancient Bengal, and began to develop his project of studying the distinctive regional architectural style of the temples of Bengal. He also became a close friend of David McCutchion (1930-1972), the English scholar who taught Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University and became an expert researcher and photographer of the temples of Bengal. Sanyal accompanied McCutchion on several of his trips into the Bengal countryside and learnt from him the techniques of architectural photography.
Sanyal was given a huge opportunity to pursue his project in the years 1964 to 1967 when he was employed in the West Bengal District Gazetteers. He regularly visited the rural areas, especially the districts of south-western Bengal, and became closely acquainted not only with numerous temples, both famous and inconspicuous, but also with local cultures and festivals. Amiya Kumar Bandyopadhyay, the-then Director of the Gazetteers, who had himself written on Bengal’s antiquities and temples, encouraged Sanyal in his study.
From 1967 to 1973, Sanyal was a research fellow at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, working closely with the historian Professor Barun De (1932-2013). This was when he was able to complete his doctoral thesis entitled Temple-building Activities in Bengal: A Social Study, 1450-1900, under the supervision of Niharranjan Ray. He received his PhD from the University of Calcutta in 1973. The same year, he attended the Orientalist Congress in Paris. He visited Paris once more in 1978 to attend the European Conference on South Asian Studies. He attended the Bangladesh Itihas Parishad session in Sylhet in 1980, and the conference on a Hundred Years of the Indian National Congress in Oxford in 1985.
In 1973, Hitesranjan Sanyal joined the faculty of the newly established Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), whose founding Director was Professor Barun De. His research interest now shifted to the more recent period of the years preceding Indian independence. His political views were firmly located in Gandhian ideas and practice, and those views had been nourished by his close collaboration with Professor Nirmal Kumar Bose (1901-1972) in the latter’s encyclopedia project Bharatkosh.
Freedom Movement in South-Western Bengal
After joining CSSSC, Sanyal launched a research project in which he sought out and interviewed hundreds of leaders and participants of the freedom movement in the districts of Medinipur, Bankura, Purulia and Hugli. He found an able assistant in Tarapada Santra, himself a noted antiquarian and folklorist, to help him in this arduous task. Armed with a tape recorder, he scoured numerous villages in those districts, talking to veteran freedom fighters and collecting local newspapers, handbills and propaganda material. He published some of his findings in extended, often serialised, articles in Bengali and English, but his untimely death denied him the chance to write a complete account of his researches on this subject.
Vaishnavism, Kirtan and local culture
In the course of his extensive field research in the different districts of West Bengal, Sanyal became aware of the tremendous impact that various strands of the religious movement of Vaishnavism had on popular life. He studied this subject with great interest, as shown in his significant collection of books on the Gaudiya Vaishnav religion and the cultural history of the Rahr region. He published several important articles on this subject in Bengali periodicals, and in a major CSSSC Occasional Paper in English. Pursuing his abiding interest in tracing the distinctly regional form of Vaishnav culture, Sanyal completed a monograph on the evolution of the Bengali musical form of Kirtan which was published soon after his death. He also published several articles on local festivals.
Pedagogical activities
Sanyal would often be invited to be a part of important committees on the collection and preservation of historical records. In 1977, he did a series of interviews on Doordarshan Kolkata on the impact of Bande Mataram on the Freedom Movement. At CSSSC, Sanyal was keen to promote the dissemination of the findings of historical research among a wider public. Besides his lifelong commitment to writing on history in Bengali, he took the lead in organising annual workshops of high school history teachers. These workshops, held in schools and colleges in different districts, brought together school teachers and academic historians over several days to discuss historical topics in the light of new research.
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