FORTHCOMING

Saturday 14 June, 2025, 3 - 4 pm IST
Japan in the eyes of Bengali Scholar Prof. Benoy Kumar Sarkar
During the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, a huge number of Indians visited Japan, especially for acquiring technological knowledge. Among the noted Bengali visitors, Prof. Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), a social scientist and an ardent nationalist, published a book Nabin Asiar Janmadata Japan (The birth giver of young Asia, Japan) in 1923 on his 1915-Japan tour experience. Sarkar’s book shares many facts not only worth reading but also very relevant even after a century.


Saturday 26 July, 2025, 3 - 4 pm IST
Twentieth Century Japan Observed by Seven Bengali Women
Calcutta (now Kolkata), the capital of British-held territories in South and Southeast Asia until 1911, was an important port city in Indian Ocean maritime routes linking India and Japan. As a result, Bengal had become a conduit of knowledge about Japan. The swift rise of Japan after the Meiji Restoration and its victory over Russia had increased curiosity among the Bengalis to know and see Japan. Overseas travels by women were rare those days. In her lecture, Dr Lopamudra Malek will talk about the travelogues and memoirs of seven Bengali women, namely, Hariprabha Takeda, Saroj Nalini Dutta, Abala Basu, Shanta Devi, Parul Devi, Charubala Mitra, and Aparna Devi. Their vivid accounts provide rich insights of Bengali women’s perspectives of Japanese society and culture of modernising Japan.
Speaker Dr. Lopamudra Malek | Chair Dr. Debjani Sengupta

