College Street bicentenary celebrations conclude at Presidency Museum

KOLKATA: The gates of Presidency Museum were thrown open on Friday, at the closing of the bicentennial celebrations held in the College Street campus by Governor and Chancellor Keshari Nath Tripathi. The museum is an idea and vision based on the long history of association with the country’s scientific discovery, social movement, and freedom fight. The illustrious institution has a lot of artefacts, letters, documents, specimens, journals, historic charters in its possession. Based on research the museum has been painstakingly curated by Presidency alumnus,

Presidency Mentor Group

Member and celebrated scholar Swapan Chakravorty over the past two years.

“Through involvement as individual or collectively we have accumulated a lot of artefacts which signifies historical events. The letters, signatures, articles are a testimony of what was happening in that period. Though we couldn’t involve every single detail, whatever we had, we have recreated. In the Presidency Museum, there are scientific instruments, specimens collected over time and preserved in Zoology and Botany departments,” said vice-chancellor Anuradha Lohia.

The Cathode Ray Tube which is displayed in the museum and every single part of it is hand blown in glass and was done in perfect precision. “Today most scientific instruments are done in factory, are digitized or are done through advanced technology. Those days no scientific instruments are manually done. These rare instruments had much more precision and they had led to epoch making scientific discovery. We have a lot more in our possession which we will display in Baker laboratory building, Derozio Building and at the second campus,” added Lohia.

In future the university has a plan to introduce a highly digitized museum where the displayed articles, relics and letters will be linked with QR code when a visitor can scan them and link it to the history of the event. “We will finally link it with the virtual world,” informed the VC.

Among some of the items on display in the museum are attendance sheet of Meghnad Saha, Satyendra Nath Bose and Nikhil Ranjan Sen. “They attended every class,” pointed out Lohia. The museum also has the original signature of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose on display.

“Harberiums are actual plants which were pressed by hands and preserved which even today can be mounted and framed. They had used great quality of chemical. It needs a lot of space and we will later display

Harberiums

over the next few months. On display at the museum are cameras which are not available anymore. The East German company made microspores which can be used even today are in the museum. They are manual microscope on display,” said the vice-chancellor.

The oldest map of the Everest region which connects to

Radhanath Sikdar

’s discovery of measuring the height of Everest can be found in the museum. The two big rooms covering 1800 sq.feet and corridors surrounding the rooms are open to students and will be accessible to visitors soon.

At the closing bicentennial celebrations on Friday celebrated scientist

Bikash Sinha

, PMG chairman Sugata Bose, governor Keshari Nath Tripathi, former advocate-general

Anindya Mitra

and Jayanta Mitra were present.