Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age: A Comparative Analysis of Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum and BLEAP 1612

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the interaction of institutional power, technological use and political ideology in the preservation of South Asian literature, specifically Bengali literature. A comparative analysis of the digital archive of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum, funded by the Ministry of Culture, India and supervised by a team of experts from Jadavpur University, and the manuscript digitisation and preservation project of Kazi Nazrul Islam, BLEAP 1612, funded by Arcadia is presented here. While Bichitra has emerged as a self-contained digital island to showcase the aesthetic evolution of Rabindranath Tagore’s writings, BLEAP 1612 is working to save the neglected manuscripts of the Rebel Poet from destruction in Churulia near Asansol. The differences between these two projects have been identified in the light of digital representation and archival noise theories. The main objective of this article is to bring forward the marginal and unique struggle of Kazi Nazrul Islam in the discussion of digital humanities and to establish that BLEAP 1612 is not just a simple digitisation project, but rather a very crucial post-colonial initiative to break the elitist or metropolitan-centric narrative of the history of modern Bengali literature.