The Journey of Kalidas Datta and the Construction of Regional History in Pre- and Post-Independent Bengal, India

Abstract

Through the work of amateur archaeologist Kalidas Datta, this paper explores an alternative view of archaeology in India. Datta's writings, produced between the late 1920s and the early 1960s, reconstruct the regional history of the Sundarbans, a region lying in the south 24 Parganas, West Bengal, in eastern India. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the crystallization of a nationalist reaction against British colonial rule. Datta's publications, produced outside the institutional structure of the Archaeological Survey of India, the University of Calcutta, and the local societies dedicated to promoting Bengali history and archaeology, can be used to reveal how a geographical region was transformed into a cultural entity in pre- and post-independent Bengal. This paper explores whether this transformation led to the formation of a distinct regional identity and to what extent this regional identity was important when considering the professional institutional efforts to create an overarching Bengali history and identity. These queries are situated in the backdrop of early twentieth-century developments in the intellectual milieu of Bengal. Although framed in regional terms, these developments have wider implications for understanding Indian nationhood, during a period when nation states in much of Asia and the Middle East were emerging.