This sub-fonds consists of 18 Bengali 'Popular Market' Books digitised as part of the EAP127 project. The original material which forms this collection at the School of Cultural Texts and Records was collected by Sujit Mandal, a lecturer in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University during the time of the project. The original material comes from Gosaba, a large island village in the Sundarbans region at the southern extreme of West Bengal. It is therefore of a markedly different provenance from the other SCTR collections.
The books were mostly published in the 20th and 21st centuries. An exact date range is hard to identify as much of the collection is undated.
The collection covers a range of subjects typical in Bengali 'popular market', or chapbooks, including: religious texts and devotional verses; popular literature, including horror stories and humour; manuals of health and the application of medicine; educational material; and songbooks.
Publishers represented in this collection include: Ashkyay Library; Benimadhab Sil's Library; chaturbhuj pustakalay; General Library and Press; Sriguru Trading; Tara Library.
