Oindrila's Story

Dr Oindrila Ghosh is Associate Professor and Head of Department of the English Faculty at Diamond Harbour Womens’ University, in West Bengal, India.

Oindrila was awarded a short research grant by CWIT in 2019 to pursue post-doctoral research in the UK. Unusually, CWIT had also encouraged Oindrila with a grant in 2009, when she was completing the research for her thesis.

In 2019, Oindrila’s mission was to locate epistolary correspondences to Hardy from his Indian readers and fans, by studying around 4000-5000 still-unpublished letters written to him from his global readers, fans and acquaintances. These letters form part of Dorset County Museum’s Thomas Hardy Memorial Collection. The archives, the largest Hardy Collection anywhere in the world, has recently been selected for the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Programme register. Oindrila’s research was primarily centred in Dorchester, Dorset, in the heart of Hardy’s ‘Wessex’. The Dorset County Museum was undergoing renovation and has been closed to the public since 2018 and will only reopen only in 2020. This meant that all the material in the Hardy Archives had been sent for storage and safekeeping to several other museums and archives in the county. Oindrila was lucky that the materials that she needed to look at were housed in the Dorset History Centre, in Dorchester.

Oindrila had met Helen Gibson, the Chief Curator of the Hardy Archives in 2016, when she had been invited by the Thomas Hardy Society to speak at its Biennial Hardy Conference. Helen had been instrumental in directing Oindrila towards the vast collection of unpublished letters to Hardy from his Global correspondents. As a result of the digitizing project (linked to UNESCO’s recognition of the collection), at one stage Oindrila was informed by the archivists at the Dorset History Centre, that they could not lend the manuscripts to anybody! Thanks to a timely intervention by Helen Gibson, in the end Oindrila was given the necessary permission to handle the 5,000 plus manuscripts of letters to Hardy.

What a relief it was, and a moment of joy! It was perhaps for the last time that any researcher was going to be allowed to handle those fragile letters, with the digital versions available they would no longer be physically accessible. It was a very special and spine-chilling experience to have touched and read the same letters which Hardy had touched, read and replied to.

Oindrila’s research has already been published in a reputed journal of Hardy Studies – The Hardy Review – published by the Thomas Hardy Association, USA. She had shared her discovery of three letter writers from Colonial India to Hardy. This independent research visit promises to open new vistas in postcolonial appraisals of British Canonical writers. Oindrila says that travelling through landscapes with deep Hardy connections, talking to the people who know Dorset’s history and topography like the back of their hand, and being able to pore over the manuscripts of notebooks and letters in her favourite author’s hand “was an experience of a lifetime!”

Wool House Manor (Hardy's imagined Honeymoon house of Tess and Angel Clare)

Arts, ResearchWilliam BurtonOctober 27, 2020