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
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
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
