It was in the early eighties, when Professor Naresh Guha joined Rabindra-Bhavana as its Director, that the first IT initiatives were taken. Being a professor of Literature, he was familiar with the use of concordances to the works of various world poets. He introduced us to the concordances to the writings of Yeats and Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson and we realized why one to the works of Rabindranath was essential. Considering Rabindranath’s vast output, doing the work manually was ruled out straightaway. Consultations began with the fledgling computer centre in Visva-Bharati. Professor Dipankar Chattarji arranged a FORTRAN IV course and some of us joined. In those days, one did not have a range of ready-to-use software available – one simply had to write out one’s own program. After I completed the course successfully (many dropped out!), I realized that both Professor Guha and Professor Chattarji expected me to write the program for the preparation of a concordance!
Eventually, much to my relief, the high-profile Electrical Engineering department of Jadavpur University came to our rescue and the UGC-sponsored Concordance Project to commemorate the 125th Birth Anniversary of Rabindranath could be launched in 1986 with their technical collaboration. Professor Naresh Guha was the Chief Editor. The editorial board comprised of, among others, Prof Bhabatosh Datta, Prof Sankha Ghosh, Prof Pabitra Sarkar and Prof Dipankar Chattarji. Considerable progress was made during the tenure of Prof Guha and his successor Prof Sankha Ghosh. A 3000-page concordance to the first ten poetical works was brought out in 1987. The entire poetical corpus was also keyboarded using Vidyasagar, a Bengali text processing system developed by Jadavpur University. However, with the retirement of Prof Guha and later Prof Sankha Ghosh the work lost its momentum and, with rapidly evolving technology, much of the hardware became obsolete and we all moved on.
A bibliographic database on Tagoreana in the Modern Review was created using UNESCO’s CDS/ISIS software at the Rabindra-Bhavana Library on a PC/AT in 1988. This was later published as a book in 1998. It received critical acclaim from The Hindu which hailed it as a ‘model bibliography’. A number of other databases were also prepared but due to inexperience and inadequate back-up facilities, much of these were unfortunately lost. Rabindra-Bhavana did, however, make a mark in the field of publishing. A number of elegant books, some newsletters and even a revamped Visva-Bharati News appeared. Even today, the smartest brochures and newsletters are brought out by Rabindra-Bhavana.
In May 1996 the Department of Electronics (now Department of Information Technology), Government of India, sanctioned a project to digitize the Tagore corpus by preparing a multimedia exposition on Rabindranath Tagore. The project envisaged the production of three multimedia CDs in the first phase for which the DoE sanctioned Rs 49.8 lakhs. Professor Dipankar Chattarji was the Principal Investigator for the first few months who was succeeded by Prof Swapan Majumdar in March 1997. A Project Review and Steering Group comprising representatives of DoE, outside experts and officers of the University oversaw the project and approved all purchases and major decisions. The content was overseen and approved by Professor Sankha Ghosh and Professor Sisirkumar Das. Five Research Fellows and four Part-time student technical assistants were recruited besides a Senior Systems Analyst who came on deputation from the Computer Centre. Several hundred carefully chosen photographs from the Rabindra-Bhavana photo archives were scanned in high resolution, restored and put on CD-ROMS. Selected important manuscripts like the Malati Punthi were also digitized. Nearly all voice recordings of Rabindranath available in the RB Archives were digitized and restored.
Rabindranath and the Indian National Movement was the first multimedia CD-ROM brought out in August 1998. The second multimedia CD-ROM, an animation of the parable A Parrot’s Training was released by Shri K R Narayanan, President of India during his visit to Santiniketan in November 1998. He wrote in our visitors’ book, “I am thrilled to see the Multimedia Project of Rabindra-Bhavana. It is immensely educative and entertaining.”
Among the other valuable work done in this project were:
a) The entire archival film library of Rabindra-Bhavana was taken to Prasad Film Laboratory in Chennai in October 2000 for restoration and digitization on digital beta and DVD.
b) Over eight hundred original paintings by Rabindranath were photographed using a digital still camera in 2001.
c) Nearly 100 Tagore songs were transcribed in staff notation and orchestral arrangements made in notation processor software. Some of these have been brought out commercially later in two volumes titled Visva-vina I & II which were well received by discerning listeners. Visva-vina 2 released in May 2003 was Visva-Bharati’s maiden CD launch under its own music label.
d) Restoration of some unpublished recordings of songs by Santidev Ghose which was later released as a CD.
e) During the Project we created a website ( www.vbharat.ernet.in ) on ‘Rabindranath and the Indian National Movement’ to commemorate the 50th anniversary of India’s independence. It was formally inaugurated by Shri I K Gujral, the then Prime Minister of India on 31 August 1997. The site was hosted on a server at Rabindra-Bhavana itself on a 9.6kbps IP link on VSAT. The ERNET VSAT earth station and the webserver came out of a MPLAD grant of Rs.10 lakhs received from Shri Pranab Mukherjee. Despite the low bandwidth the media-rich site proved quite popular, getting over 2000 hits every month.
Later in 1999 it was designated as the official website of the University and it started carrying important news, all job and tender advertisements and other notices and circulars. In 2001 a e-mail server was also made available for all email users (60+ then) on the vbharat.ernet.in domain. Users could send and receive e-mails by logging in to the servers from anywhere within the campus through Gitanjalinet as well as from outside via the Internet. The monthly e-mail traffic then was over 0.5 GB. The web and e-mail servers on the VSAT IP link remained operational round the clock, even during holidays, till July 2002 when Visva-Bharati got its 512kbps leased line.
Future Plans
We intend to start the work of digitization of all our archival material very soon with the arrival of two planetary scanners, computers and personnel from C-DAC. This setup will be augmented with servers, film scanners, 16.7 megapixel digital SLR, etc, to be acquired with the X Plan Equipment Grant received by the Bhavana. The equipment for digitizing audio is already in place thanks to a Rs 2 million grant from State Bank of India. The open source digital repository software DSpace developed jointly by MIT Libraries and HP Labs will be used to capture, store, index and preserve the digitized content.
