The Hindu/Presidency College

Rochona Majumdar is Professor at the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago. Her writings span histories of gender and sexuality, Indian cinema especially art cinema and film music, and modern Indian intellectual history.  Majumdar also writes on postcolonial history and theory. She is the author of Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2009). Sukanya Sarbadhikary is Assistant Professor at the Presidency University, Kolkata. She works at the interface of anthropology of religion, anthropology of embodiment, religious studies, and philosophy. She is the author of The Place of Devotion: Siting and Experiencing Divinity in Bengal-Vaishnavism' (University of California Press, 2015). Upal Chakrabarti is Assistant Professor at the Presidency University, Kolkata. His research interests range over intellectual history, colonialism, political economy, agrarian studies, science studies, and governance. He is the author of Assembling the Local: Political Economy and Agrarian Governance in British India (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2021).

• Introduction: A Liberal Arts College in a Colonial Milieu Rochona Majumdar, Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti; Part I: 1. The Multi-Institutional Form of the Presidency College Upal Chakrabarti; 2. Useful Knowledge, Areligious modernity: Pioneering Global Trends in Education at the Hindu College, 1817–1835 Rosinka Chaudhuri; 3. Seductions of the Supercilious: The Mofussil Histories of Presidency College, Calcutta Bodhisattva Kar; Part II: 4. The Rise and Fall of College Square Common Sense: A History of Philosophy at the Hindu and Presidency College Thomas Newbold; 5. Relentless Discursivity: Political Economy at the Hindu College/Presidency College in the Nineteenth Century Iman Mitra; 6. J. C. Bose's hand-machines: Instrumentation as the Transcendence of Limits in Presidency College Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti; 7. Chemical Vernaculars: Chemistry and Vernacularity in Twentieth Century Bengal Projit Bihari Mukharji; 8. A Chemistry Lab for Presidency College: Reading Between the Lines of A Historic Floorplan Madhumita Mazumdar; 9. P. C. Mahalanobis and the Question of Research at Presidency College Sandipan Mitra; Part III: 10. Remembered Teachers: Who and Why? Rochona Majumdar; 11. Politics in Print: The World in the Magazine, The World of the Magazine Titas De Sarkar; 12. Contours of Commemoration: Locating Material Mnemonics in the Hindu/Presidency College Sohini Sengupta and Sourav Chattopadhyay; Afterword Dipesh Chakrabarty; Appendix; Acknowledgments.

'This edited volume offers a collection of outstanding articles, coming together with a rare level of coherence. It presents a history of the Hindu College/Presidency College over roughly 150 years, covering the institutional history and the relations with the colonial state no less than the history of the knowledge produced and transmitted, the lives of the professors and the students and closing with a close look at practices of memorialization. While the focus in on the college, it remains embedded in the world beyond its walls, be it Kolkata's vernacular publics and policies or the transnational influences shaping the educational and scientific policies. The book is a welcome addition to the growing, but still relatively small collection of monographs on South Asian educational institutions. It will hopefully encourage other ventures in the field, setting a high standard against which future projects will be measured.' Margrit Pernau, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin