Aims and objectives
The aim was to digitise several important but unavailable and endangered newspapers and magazines in Hindi and Urdu. We had rescued some of this material (Sadaqat) before the start of the project, the rest we acquired and transported from donors’ houses in different locations. All the images supplied to the BL were digitised by us, following which we created metadata for Sadaqat, Chand, Prabha, Madhuri, Bhavishya, Vishvamitra, Dipali and Filmdom, the last one being a book. Going beyond the brief of the proposal and the contract, we we also surveyed several other locations and found a couple of endangered archives, which we plan to digitise and make available in future. We also managed to hold several exhibitions in Delhi and Hyderabad, with the help of collectors. This validates their work and builds confidence in the collectors to undertake similar activities of showcasing and sharing old material lying in unknown nooks and corners.
Outcomes
All the materials digitised by CSDS date back to the period between mid-1920s and 1950. The weekly Urdu newspaper, Sadaqat, has a continuous run, except a gap of one year. The scanned files of the rescued Hindi monthlies - Chand, Madhuri, Vishwamitra, Prabha and the weekly Bhavishya are from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Published from such diverse locations as Allahabad, Kanpur, Bombay and Kolkata, these leading, omnibus illustrated periodicals covered a whole range of write ups in a variety of formats. Ideologically, all these monthlies were anti-colonial and pro-nationalist, laying strong emphasis on social reform in the arenas of caste and gender.
The tone of Bhavishya weekly newspaper was particularly strident and it enjoyed a short run in the eventful years of Bhagat Singh’s trial and execution, Gandhian Civil Disobedience Movement, Round Table Conference, London, during 1930-31. The Urdu newspaper Sadaqat (1925-), published from Kanpur, covered news of local, national, and global nature, with special emphasis on Islamic world. It also devoted substantial space to Urdu literature and carried a variety of advertisements. Dipali was an English film weekly published from Kolkata, and we have rescued and scanned files from the year 1940. Published by Shalimar Film Studio, Mumbai, the book Filmdom is a rare English language Who’s Who of the Indian film world in the 1940s. All this material is lavishly illustrated, occasionally in colour, and carry a large number of advertisements as well.
We have created pdf copies of all this material to provide local and global access through our own website. We also wish to share the scanned material with the original collectors who had preserved it for so long and finally donated the material to us.
The following methodology report was submitted as part of the project outputs:
