Calcutta Collages, an exhibition on the history of Kolkata through collective initiatives, unveiled at Victoria Memorial Hall on Monday, links the city’s past with the present and attempts to provide an insight into its future.
It’s being organised in collaboration with Victoria Memorial Hall and Sustainable Heritage and Policy in Kolkata, a thematic partnership between Jadavpur University and University of Liverpool.
Displaying photographs from the 19th century and researches by heritage restorers till date, Calcutta Collages depicts the city’s composite, rich and inclusive history from the perspective of people who inhabited it and those who inherited it and the stakeholders.
The frames from the past are of daily lives in places that have changed over two centuries. While free spaces in the images of 19th century Kolkata, sourced from the archives of the British Library, have been taken over by civic infrastructure, the stamp of colonial history is firmly in place. It contains features from ‘Recalling Jewish Calcutta: Memories of Jewish Community in Calcutta’, ‘The Scottish Cemetery Project’, ‘The Messbari Project’ and ‘Mutty Lall Seal, The Legacy of Philanthropy’.
“The exhibition has three broad categories that include British Calcutta of the 19th century, a metropolis as a space of co-existence and refuge from the perspective of heritage restoration and a town central to progress and philanthropy,” said Abhijit Gupta, professor and head, department of English, JU.
Jayanta Sengupta of the Victoria Memorial Hall said the response to the exhibition even before it started was so overwhelming that no end date was put.
Source: Times of India
