A glimpse inside the second edition of The City As A Museum

For the penultimate event of DAG Museum’s ‘The City as a Museum, Edition 2’, visitors were taken on a guided walk of the historic public library in Uttarpara that was established by Jaykrishna Mukherjee in the mid-nineteenth century (it opened for the public in 1859). It is now recognized as one of the earliest—if not the first—public library of its kind in Asia and was an important centre of intellectual exchange between British and Bengali intellectuals of the time.It has a couple of residential rooms on the first floor and has hosted literary figures like Madhusudan Dutt and educationists like Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar and Mary Carpenter.
The walk was led collaboratively by the researchers Sarbajit Mitra and Amreeta Das, who took visitors through the range of periodicals that are held by its collection—focusing on the evolution of printed artwork and illustrations within them. Some of the most prominent artworks produced in Bengal, found life in these periodicals that were circulated regularly, instead of salon viewings or exhibitions, making them an important resource for recreating our artistic heritage.
“The City As A Museum is DAG’s annual festival of art and heritage celebrated during International Heritage Week. Over the week we have travelled across Kolkata and beyond exploring lesser-known treasure troves of art. With this visit to Uttarpara, we see how imprints of rare works of art can be found within the pages of the periodicals in the library’s collection, and travel back in time to experience the vibrant literary debates of the time," said Sumona Chakravarty, Vice President, DAG Museums.
The sheer range of names associated with illustrating these periodicals and evolving new methods of printing technology offers a sense of their importance in churning the intellectual cultures of its day. The pioneering Bengali antiquarian Rajendralal Mitra wrote accounts of India’s architectural past that were usually illustrated by Annada Prasad Bagchi; Joseph Fayrer—a surgeon at the Calcutta Medical College—published a volume titled Thanatophidia of India: Being a Description of the Venomous Snakes of the Indian Peninsula (1872), delivering quite explicitly on the promise of the title with illustrations of the creepy-crawlies executed by students of the Government Art School.
Other famous names included Nandalal Bose, who illustrated several editions of the literary magazine Bichitra, along with Surendranath Kar, Mukul Dey and Asit Haldar. Some rare early illustrations by Gaganendranath Tagore, Upendrakishore Roychowdhury—who also put forth his scepticism of the Bengal school works that were being painted at the time—and some early book cover designs by Satyajit Ray as the survey took us up to the years before Independence.
After this detailed overview of the library and its collection, the visitors were in for another special closing programme - a set of performative readings by Sujoy Prasad Chatterjee. Chatterjee held the audience in thrall as he declaimed an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo’s famous speech on the eternal verities of the Sanatan Dharma (originally delivered at the Uttarpara library), and then he read from the works of Sunil Gangopadhyay and Swapnomoy Chakrabarty, creating a complex view of the past as a source of sacred as well as profane histories that mixed learning and devotion —with the Dakshineshwar Temple visible across the teeming blue thread of the Hooghly river.
As Chatterjee read from the immortal lines of Aurobindo and the evening spread slowly across the lawns of the library, a magical atmosphere was created, transporting the audience across the centuries when such readings and exchanges were more commonly seen in the library premises, making it one of the most important centres of learning and reformative education in the country. With his dramatic and empathetic readings, Chatterjee’s performance struck the ideal closing note to this event. "I was thrilled to perform here and I hope museums and libraries in the city adopt this model of cultural programming for future engagement and education", said Sujoy.