(I) Collective Memory, Institutional Archives and the Writing of Contemporary History (II) The Promise of Women’s Writing: Ashapurna Debi, a hundred years on

Speaker: Indira Chowdhury

March 26 to 27, 2009 | 6.30 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Lecture I: Collective Memory, Institutional Archives and the Writing of Contemporary History

In this presentation, Indira Chowdhury will draw on her recent experience in setting up the Archives of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Science in Mumbai and focus on the factors that shape the writing of contemporary history. What are the resources that contemporary history can draw on to rediscover and document the environment in which particular events took place in the not too distant past? While setting up the Archives of the Institute that Homi Bhabha built, it soon became clear that examining just the annual reports and technical papers were insufficient to understand the historical circumstances that gave birth to the Institute two years before Indian independence. What resources could then be used in understanding, accessing and assessing the influence of the environment on this particular formation? What kind of institution did Homi Bhabha, whose centenary year 2009 is, aim to create when he set up TIFR? And finally, how does a historian tap into other forms of resources to face the challenges that any institutional archives presents? These are some of the questions that this presentation will address.

Lecture II: The Promise of Women’s Writing: Ashapurna Debi a hundred years on

This talk will offer Indira Chowdhury’s reflections on how we can read women’s writing by drawing on the writing of the Bengali novelist Ashapurna Debi whose centenary year 2009 is. Until her death in 1995, Ashapurna was undoubtedly one of the most prolific and successful of Bengali writers. Brought up in a conservative family that did not believe in even tutoring the girls, she learnt to read and write on her own. In a writing career that spanned over sixty years she published 181 novels, 38 anthologies of short stories and 52 books for children and won the Rabindra Puraskar (Tagore Prize, 1966) and the Jnanpith award (1977). Almost a decade ago when the Chowdhury undertook to translate Ashapurna’s novel Pratham Pratisruti into English, she was struck by the way in which her writing challenged frequently accepted notions about traditional and cultural resources. Indira Chowdhury suggests that a paradigm shift is called for in understanding the links between women’s writings and the cultural resources that women writers draw on. The speaker will include readings from her translation The First Promise (Orient Longman, 2004).

Indira Chowdhury was formerly Professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. A PhD in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, her book The Frail Hero and Virile History (OUP, 1998) was awarded the Tagore Prize (Rabindra Puraskar) in 2000. She also compiled the Supplement of Indian English words published in the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary in 1995. In 2004, she published The First Promise – a translation of a major Bengali novel into English. She is based in Bangalore and works as a Consultant Archivist for several institutions among them, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, IIT Kanpur and Naandi, Hyderabad.