Bengali Oral Histories

Collection

Call Number: MS165

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Scope and Contents

This collection contains oral histories, transcripts, and images recorded with senior intellectuals from West Bengal and Bangladesh who were born in the years from 1920 to c. 1950. This collection provides the opportunity to explore South Asian history in ways that problematize national and regional frames of historical analysis. Interviewees reflect on historical events from the era of freedom struggle to the rise of nation-states, including the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Interviewees also speak about continuities, breaks and new developments in the intellectual history of the Bengal region, and of South Asia more generally from the 1920s to the 1970s. This project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the Berger Family Digital Humanities Grant.

Dates

2006 -- 2015

Creator

Manjapra, Kris, 1979-

Language of Materials

English

Bengali

Access

This collection contains some restricted material. Restrictions related to specific material are listed in the detailed contents list.

This collection may require review before it is available for use. Please contact DCA for further details.

Conditions Governing Use

Some material in this collection may be protected by copyright and other rights. Please see “Reproductions and Use” on the Digital Collections and Archives website for more information about reproductions and permission to publish.

No documentation is available regarding the intellectual property rights in this collection.

Arrangement

This collection is organized into four series: Bengali Oral Histories; Corpora; Additional accessions; and 2021 accessions.

Extent

209 Digital Object(s) (160 unprocessed digital objects)

583 Megabytes (Of the 209 digital objects, 9 have extent information comprising 583 MB.)

Additional Description

Biographical / Historical

Kris Manjapra (1978-) was born in Nassau, Bahamas on July 28, 1978. He joined the Tufts University history department in 2008 after completing his dissertation at Harvard in 2007 and a postdoctoral year at UCLA. At Tufts he teaches courses on South Asia and globalization, comparative anti-colonialism, South Asian and modern European intellectual history, and post-colonialism. Manjapra's research is on South Asian and German history, with a focus on transnational and post-colonial perspectives.

As co-director of the South Asia Digital Humanities Lab at Tufts, Manjapra organizes the Corpora multimedia archiving project that aims to create an indexed and federated repository of oral histories, lectures, and other educational audio-visual materials across disciplines.

Processing status

Portions of this collection are minimally processed and may require review before it is available for research. 2021 accessions were processed by Records and Accessioning Archivist, Jane Kelly, in 2021. Materials were bagged using Bagger and ingested into the Tufts Digital Library. Received order was maintained. A file-level inventory was created, and series and collection-level description were updated at the time of processing.