Geraldine Forbes. Picture by Rashbehari Das

In 1969, Geraldine Forbes had taken a direct flight from London to Calcutta. ?I did not want to mess up my perception by going to Delhi or Mumbai first,? says the Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York, then a research scholar working on positivism in Bengal.

Since then, ?Gerry? has become what her friend and Jadavpur University teacher Anuradha Chanda describes as a migratory bird, coming over every summer. The summer of 2005 brought the prolific author to town with a new book, Women in Colonial India: Essays on Politics, Medicine and Historiography, and to Oxford Bookstore this week, with a delightful chat on her experience of researching women in colonial India over three decades.

Forbes?s account can give lessons on how to turn unlikely things to tools of research. ?I started with the idea that all I would have to do is walk into a library and it (material on Jogendra Chandra Ghosh, who set up a positivist society in Bengal) would all be there.? But after futile hours at National Library, a tired Forbes decided to look up an address on a hand-written letter that was archived there ?to get over the boredom?.

That set her looking for a 100-year-old address in Kidderpore, which turned out to be Mohanchand House, ?a crumbling mansion with sari hanging from the upper tier?. She found old magazines with articles on the family. Next stop was the residence of a married daughter of the house who collected souvenir books of positivist society meetings, letters and pictures. ?The lady, who was educated in English, had gone to Europe and met Eleanor Roosevelt, practised purdah at home,? the historian recalls.

Yet, lengthy conversations revealed ?tiny ways of self-assertion?. ?She would turn away visitors she did not want to meet by pleading purdah. But she would go to parties to advance her husband?s career. Since eating in the presence of men was a taboo, she would take her tea and cake, kick the cake under her sari and spend the evening with the teacup in hand.?

This is why Forbes is critical of the earlier school of women?s historians that discarded the existence of women?s liberation in this part of the world.

She also interviewed women revolutionaries, like sisters Bina and Kalyani Das. Kalyani showed Forbes her jail writings while Krishna Bai Rao, a Madras-based activist with ?a great sense of her own history?, showed her photographs. All these materials became invaluable documents for her.

?There are historians who confine themselves in a library. But I am sceptical of what we have preserved in institutions,? is the final word on research from the scholar who is ?hoping to get away from the polemical?.

Her request to Calcuttans is to dig into family trunks and look for diaries by grandmothers. Reconstructing such tales is a project that she and the women?s studies department of Jadavpur University have undertaken.