2405, 2018

Digitisation of ‘Quarterly Lists’: Catalogues of Indian Books

By Galia Umansky|May 24, 2018|Uncategorized|0 comments

Tom Derrick As well as digitising rare early printed Indian books, the Two Centuries of Indian Print project is making available online some wonderful catalogues held by the library, generally known as the Quarterly Lists, recording all books published quarterly and by province of British India between 1867 and 1947. Some of the lists can already be viewed through the British Library catalogue. A full list of the Quarterly Lists that are

2405, 2018

Nineteenth Century Bengali Farces and the Comic Tradition

By Galia Umansky|May 24, 2018|Uncategorized|0 comments

Priyanka Basu A farce has often been deemed as a genre not complete in itself, but more in the form of appending a comic representation. Farces have been considered ‘lower’ in status to ‘high comedy’ primarily due to the excess of the comic body in performance and the inherent absurdities in dialogue. In 19th century Calcutta, farces—better known as prahasana—found a prolific expression both in print and on-stage. Proscenium stage

1903, 2018

Working on rare and fragile 19th Century Bengali books at SOAS

By Farzana Whitfield|March 19, 2018|Uncategorized|2 comments

Priyanka Basu has identified about 30 Bengali texts from the 19th century, at our off site Egham repository. These will be looked at closely for metadata enhancement, to assess whether they should be added to our fragile or rare classmark sequence in SOAS Library, (closed access) or are duplicated on our online card catalogue. They are regarded as priority works due to the nature of their subject, their physical status

1912, 2017

Kautukabilāsa (Biography of Maharaja Krishnachandra Ray of Nabadwip)

By Priyanka Basu|December 19, 2017|Uncategorized|0 comments

Kautukabilāsa by Shyamacharan Mukhopadhyay was published in 1864 from the Hindu Press in Calcutta. There were two previous editions of the same text published respectively in 1843 and 1847 from Kamalalay Press and Sambad Bhringadut Press. As the initial subtitle of the text revealed, Kautukabilāsa was primarily published as a collection of humorous stories from the life of Maharaja Krishnachandra Ray of Nabadwip in Bengal. However, the third edition of

0712, 2017

Cataloguing Bengali rare books

By Farzana Whitfield|December 7, 2017|Uncategorized|0 comments

As one of the co-investigators on the project I have been working with a Bengali cataloguer at SOAS, Priyanka Basu who joined us in April 2017 to enhance the metadata of our Bengali library records and identify further unique titles up to 1914. Pre 1914 South Asian-language printed books are unavailable in other library collections or are extremely difficult to locate and access. With the aid of a Bengali cataloguer

0512, 2017

Welcome to the 2 Centuries of Indian Print SOAS blog!

By Farzana Whitfield|December 5, 2017|Uncategorized|0 comments

SOAS Library in partnership with the British Library is proud to be working on the Two Centuries of Indian Print project. Money has been received from the Newton Fund (which uses science and innovation partnerships to promote economic development and social welfare) to digitise unique material from our South Asian printed books collection. The project will digitise 4,000 early printed Bengali books as part of the British Library’s collection, amounting