Kalikata Kamalalaya: Calcutta in the Early Nineteenth Century (An Old and Rare Book)

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G.M. Trevelyan defines social history "negatively as the history of a people with politics left out." Basically, the definition is unasailable. It is, however, a common experience in India that material for social history of a people at a given time and of a given region is not as plentiful as sources which shed light on politics, administration, arts etc. As such, enquiries into our social history have, on the whole, yielded less harvest than investigations into and accounts of dynastic changes, political events and administrative evolution etc. This comparative infertility is due to the fact that material for social history is mainly supplied by regional literature which remains largely unexplored.

This neglect is largely due to the fact that under the colonial set up in India, English received virtually the monopoly of attention. Our Universities, far too long. Did not give necessary stress on the study of regional languages and literature. Even today the scope of interchange between one regional language and another is sadly restricted. In consequence, a regional language fails to attain a status higher than that of a local language, except perhaps Hindi and we grew accustomed to living in a state of linguistic isolation.

The situation has, of late, tended to change. Indigenous literary sources are now receiving more attention than they received in the past. Till we advance more in this direction, a comprehensive Social History of India will remain a pious desideratum. It is indeed encouraging that efforts are now on, aimed at providing opportunities to scholars for acquainting themselves with material available in regional sources. The present work, an English rendering of Kalikata Kamalalaya by Shri Satyabrata Datta is a move in the right direction.