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Family History is something worth preserving and caring for. Realizing that and putting an effort into safeguarding our family heritage has led us to take up this endeavour.
High-resolution images have been captured and conservationists have been consulted to restore the fragile items, as much as possible, while respecting their originality and dignity.
The process of setting up our archive constituted sorting, minimising, and eliminating materials within the collection depending on their fragility and significance, cataloguing, coding, photographing, conserving, and preparing relevant content to go along with the materials.
While most of the original artworks by Shyamal Kumar Majumdar were in brittle form, the black and white prints of photographs were in much better quality. The hardbound books and the old documents of Majumdar's student life are in most vulnerable forms and need a lot of care and as little touch as possible.
Documentation of family history starts essentially with questioning, which yields fractured recollections of stories, often repetitive. Oral histories, ie. scraps of memory and facts which are bind together with decades old stories and anecdotes establish newer realms out of the structured historical analysis. Therefore, besides a thorough organised documentation, speaking to the family members and going over the old stories of the persona of ancestors also comprise a fundamental part of building the archive.
The documentation process was completed wholly by the grand-daughters of Shyamal Kumar Majumdar, Srilagna and Sripurna, as an attempt to preserve their family history and their grandfather's artistic and intellectual legacy. They were assisted by the larger family in collating their personal memories.
'I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away.'
-Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
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