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Dr Ian Magedera‘s keynote lecture at a conference at Chandernagore College, West Bengal, India earlier this year has provoked a hunt for French-book ‘almirahs’. ‘Almirah’ is a word that has come into Indian English from the Portuguese armário and from Latin armarium (while still also used in Hindi अलमारी (almārī) and Urdu الماری (almārī).
Books from the almirahs. Credits: Sayantani Chakraborti & Antara Mukherjee
Following Dr Magedera’s lecture at the College’s English Department, Assistant Professor Antara Mukherjee began a hunt for references in Bengali sources to the French and French culture during the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. During that time, despite several interruptions by the Royal Navy and British Army, ‘Chandernagor’, as it is still known in French, was a trading post governed from France. Today’s Chandannagar is a busy town situated 35km upriver from Kolkata, a megacity of fourteen million people.
References found will enrich the MLC-hosted AHRC-funded, digital resource French Books on India, an open access digital library with bilingual annotations and links to full-text books via Gallica and Googlebooks. Though Chandannagar has an Indo-French Institute and its French language learners are served by the Alliance française du Bengale, French influences there are not as obvious as in Pondicherry (Puducherry) in South India.
As well as containing several unique items, these hitherto neglected ‘almirahs’ are a time capsule of books its donor considered important to hand down to Bengali students of French – Ian Magedera
Dr Ian Magedera in Chandernagore. Credit : Kaustav Roy
Dr Mukherjee has found traces in domestic architecture, insights that could feed into further outputs for the Liverpool-Kolkata ETIC project, but another thread led her right back to her own college library and to books that had been donated by the French-speaking Bengali philanthropist and historian Hari Har Sett in the 1930s.
Modern Languages and Cultures 