May 20: The Bengali department of Pragjyotish College has opened a little magazine study and research centre in association with Ninth Column, a literary publication.
The effort came in for praise from the National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC), which sent a survey team to the college recently.
The department has collected nearly 650 magazines from different sources with the aim of preserving them for posterity and conducting research on little magazines in various languages of the Northeast.
These include magazines in Assamese and Bengali from Assam, in English from Tura and Shillong towns of Meghalaya and in Bengali from Nagaland and Tripura.
The college has collected an assortment of little magazines from West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh and New Delhi, too.
Housed inside the department of Bengali of the college, the collections are catalogued under different heads.
A management committee was formed to run the centre smoothly with college principal Dayananda Pathak as president and Jyotirmoy Sengupta as co-ordinator.
Prasun Barman and Soumen Bharatiya from Ninth Column are also in the committee.
The centre was inaugurated by Sandip Dutta, head of the Calcutta Little Magazine Study and Research Centre.
He praised the initiative of the department in setting up the first little magazine study centre of its kind outside West Bengal.
Sengupta said his department would try to regenerate interest in little magazines through various programmes.
“Little magazines hardly get space in the reading rooms of district libraries. Since 1950, about 400 little magazines were published in the state. For lack of a safe place for preservation, these are now scattered and lost forever. At that time, those also reflected the various incidents of state and abroad like Assam revolution, past picture and culture of Assam. But from now we are trying to collect and preserve those for the benefit of mankind,” the co-ordinator of the college’s little magazine centre said.
Though the subject of little magazines is often non-academic, these may be useful for students of language and history.
Mumpi Gupta, a research scholar, is at present writing a thesis on the subject, “Faults in editing little magazines”.
“As the job opportunities of the language students are very less, students can learn the art of editing, writing and publishing from the little magazine study and research centre. Through project work or field studies on the subject, students can earn more knowledge,” Sengupta said.
Apart from trying to preserve the legacy of little magazines, the Bengali department of Pragjyotish College has been translating select articles to Assamese. It has already published a periodical appropriately named Anubaad.
Sengupta said Anubaad would play an important role in reducing the cultural divide between various languages.
