Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre
A unit of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
Set up with assistance of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India
History
The residence of the historian Jadunath Sarkar
The house was the former residence of the eminent historian, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958). When Sir Jadunath moved with his family into this newly-constructed residence in 1938, the house address was P62, subsequently P 255, Lansdowne Road Extension. The street was renamed Lake Terrace in 1943, and the house was subsequently renumbered 10 Lake Terrace. This is the place Sir Jadunath worked out of for the last two decades of his life, and it is in the ground floor study of this house that he passed away peacefully on the night of Monday 19 May 1958. His family continued to live here through the 1960s. Sir Jadunath’s wife, Lady Kadambini (1880-1964), left a will stating that that the house should be sold after her death and the proceeds given to a hospital.
- Jadunath Sarkar
- The Jadunath Sarkar Gallery
The CSSSC at 10 Lake Terrace (1973-2000)
When the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) was set up in 1973 under the Ministry of Education, Government of India, Professor J.P. Naik, then Education Advisor to the government, negotiated with the trustees of Lady Kadambini’s will and acquired the property for ICSSR, New Delhi, and the sale proceeds were donated to the T.B hospital in Jadavpur. Soon after it was founded on 1st February, 1973, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), one of the country's early research institutes established under the aegis of ICSSR, rented this house and subsequently purchased it.
Gradually building additions and extensions to the house, including its two present upper floors, to accommodate its offices, library and class rooms, the CSSSC was located here for the first 27 years of its existence. When the CSSSC first moved here in July 1973, it consisted of its founding Director, Professor Barun De, Registrar, Susanta Ghosh, Librarian, Arun Ghosh, 17 members of faculty and 30 members of administrative staff. The subsequent decades saw the Centre acquire its full strength of faculty and administrative staff and develop into one of the country’s premier institutions of social science research and inter-disciplinary studies. Its library came to be regarded as one of the city’s best-stocked book and periodical resources in the social sciences. Its seminars and lecture series came to be equally well-known for the lively discussions and debates these generated. And it is in this house that, from 1978, the Centre developed and ran its pioneering Research Training Programme, which is the precursor of the institution’s current M.Phil. programme. In this phase, the house bred many scholars who have gained national and international recognition, such as Javed Alam, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Nirmala Banerjee, Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Amalendu Guha, Ramachandra Guha, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, N. Krishnaji, Nita Kumar, Sugata Marjit, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Gyanendra Pandey, M.S.S. Pandian, Madhava Prasad, Ranabir Samaddar, Hitesranjan Sanyal, Asok Sen and Surajit Sinha. It opened up critical areas of theoretical and empirical scholarship and it also nurtured a close family of faculty, students and administrative staff.
The Jadunath Sarkar Resource Centre for Historical Research (JSRC)
In 2000, the CSSSC moved out of this location to its new campus at Baishnabghata Patuli. The house at 10 Lake Terrace thereafter underwent some restructuring to become a resource centre for historical research. The JSRC was inaugurated in December 2004 with a three-day international seminar on History in the Vernacular, that was in turn, was a part of a Ford Foundation project at the Centre for building a Cultural History Archive of Eastern India. Occupying the second and third floors of the building, the JSRC came to house the large Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Hindi and Urdu book and newspaper collections of the CSSSC’s library. Into this library also came the institution’s valuable scholar collections, consisting of books, pamphlets, photographs and other print material donated to the Centre on behalf of several eminent scholars such as Debiprasad Chattopadhyay, Edward Dimock, Hitesranjan Sanyal, Arun Kumar Dasgupta, Sukumar Mitra, Amales Tripathi, Buddhadev Bhattacharyya, Buddhadeva Bose and others. Several other scholar collections have, since then, also come into the Centre’s library, such as those belonging to Naresh Guha, Tapan Raychaudhuri and Sumanta Banerjee. The book collection of Ashok Mitra is also part of the library.
Between 2004 and 2012 (when the building was closed down for renovation), the premises housed in addition a large ground-floor auditorium, the office of the Eastern Regional Centre of the ICCSR, which also ran a guest house facility on the first floor. The Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre was formally inaugurated in the renovated precincts on 1 February 2015.
