India’s pre-Independence history in demand: Public access push for KMC’s colonial archives
Telegraph | 30 January 2026
The archives of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation have records documenting a critical phase in India’s pre-Independence history, and they should be available to common people, a Trinamool councillor proposed at the civic body’s council meeting on Thursday.
Arup Chakraborty, the councillor from Ward 98, said such a move was necessary at a time “when there is an effort to distort history and truth”.
Also, a spokesperson of the party, Chakraborty, stated that the municipal authority should establish a system that allows individuals to access archival records by visiting Town Hall, where a museum and resource centre will be established. Town Hall itself houses more than 12,000 books and documents, which are also expected to be digitised.
“When we are witnessing attempts to distort history, digitising the records available in the KMC archives becomes more necessary. Many scholars and journalists would like to access the historical records,” he said at the monthly meeting of all councillors.
In his speech, Chakraborty targeted the BJP, which he said “misrepresented and humiliated” icons from Bengal by distorting the truth. “Someone said Raja Rammohan Roy was an agent of the British. Yet another said Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Peace Prize,” he said.
Madhya Pradesh higher education minister Inder Singh Parmar had in November said: “Jismey ek Raja Ram Mohan Roy bhi theh, woh bhi Angrezo ke dalal ke roop mein desh mein kaam karte rahe (Raja Ram Mohan Roy, too, was one, he too kept working as an agent of the British),” Parmar said.
Parmar later issued a statement of “apology and repentance”, apparently after requests from the Bengal BJP and instructions from the national leadership.
On his first visit to poll-bound Bengal, BJP national president Nitin Nabin said Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for peace while addressing party workers in Durgapur on Wednesday.
Tagore was the first Asian to have won the prize for literature in 1913.
Speaking during the KMC debate, Vijay Ojha, the BJP councillor of Ward 23, welcomed the proposal but said he was not sure whether it was proposed with “a clean heart” or had an element of “malice in it”.
“If there is malice behind the proposal, then it is not good,” he said.
When some Trinamool councillors tried to disrupt Ojha’s speech, he said: “Let me speak. I am an Ojha, but yet I am speaking in Bengali. Don’t you like that?”
“My father was born in Calcutta. I was born in this city,” Ojha said.
KMC chairperson Mala Roy intervened in Ojha’s support and asked the Trinamool councillors to let him speak.
Sources in the KMC stated that the civic body’s archives include the first speeches of C.R. Das after he became mayor in April 1924 and those of Subhas Chandra Bose, when he became mayor in August 1930.
In 1924, C.R. Das became the mayor of the then Corporation of Calcutta after the Indianisation of local governments began.
The archives have detailed accounts of the city during the Bengal Famine of 1943 and the riots of 1946. There are many rarely seen pictures.
“When Das took office as mayor, he appointed Subhas Bose to the position of chief executive officer. Unfortunately, Bose was detained within a few months. The deputy mayor, Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy, addressed the council meeting concerning the arrest of Subhas Bose. That speech is archived,” remarked a KMC official.
Suhrawardy, then a promising young Muslim politician, later became prime minister of Bengal and, after Independence, the Prime Minister of Pakistan.