Acknowledgements

Donors

SHEELA SINHA (*1955): wife of Karmendu Shishir M. A. [Hindi]. Her literary creations can be seen on the pages of Sāmānyajan Sandeś, Janmat, Pariṣad Patrikā and Ṛtugandh. She has written and published the summary of Gurdayal Singh’s novel Ādh cāndnī rāt. In fact, the decision to donate the collection for wider readership was hers. She also prepared the content list of Samkālīn Bhāratīya Sāhitya.

SIMRAN SHISHIR (*1981): daughter of Karmendu Shishir. She has contributed a lot at different levels during the project. She not only came up with the idea of preparing a CD of the letters and photographs of different authors but accomplished the same herself.

UMANG SAGAR (*1982): son of Karmendu Shishir. He has been instrumental in completing the initial phase of digitization of this project and has contributed a lot at every step of the project. Though he belongs to the IT-field professionally, he is a littérateur himself. A lover of books, he has a flair for book collection like his father.

Donor’s Statement

Karmendu Shishir Shodhagar is a project very close to my heart for more than one reason. My father started collecting books much before I was born, something I could decipher from the receipts of many books I saw in the collection. I suppose it started as hobby but in course of time it became his all-consuming passion. He found an able ally in my mother who supported him in his endeavor through thick and thin. Given the limited resources at hand, it was not an easy decision for them. In fact, his love for books was shared equally with us. Initially, as children, we wondered if he has read all the books himself given that he used to purchase so many of them. Even before we realized, we were already in possession of a huge collection of books and journals, a good number of them were quite rare and more than a hundred years old. However, the bigger the collection grew, the more difficult it became to preserve and manage it, especially the rare volumes whose pages were fast decaying.

I have seen my father constantly worried about the preservation and maintenance of the books. It drained away a lot of his energy which could have been used elsewhere

My father tried to donate some of the books to some literary institutions and universities where they could be managed according to his vision, but sadly enough, this was not to be. It was the right moment when the Head of the Department of Indology, University of Wuerzburg , Prof. Dr. H. Brueckner approached him with the proposal of a literary collection and we agreed to it.

We could see the realization of our dream of the books and journals reaching a wider audience.

Each of us tried in our humble ways to help my father during this project but there are several others as well who have helped us a lot and I take this opportunity to express our family’s sincere gratitude to each of them. First of all, I would like to thank Prof. Dr. H. Brueckner, Department of Indology, University of Wuerzburg and Prof. Dr. Klaus Butzenberger, Department of Indology and Comparative Religion, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Tuebingen, who approved the idea and extended unconditional support to the project. We are especially thankful to Divyaraj Amiya, M. Phil., Lecturer in Modern South Asian Studies and Hindi, University of Tuebingen, whose efforts made this dream possible. I express my gratefulness to each one of them who have contributed by donating journals from their own collections, or contributed in various other ways and more importantly being a moral support throughout.

Umang Sagar
15th December 2010, Delhi.

The Team in India and Germany

The project in its different critical phases would have been unthinkable for us without the close and intensive cooperation at the international level. Two teams in Patna, India and in Tuebingen, Germany should be especially mentioned and thanked. We are sure of their future cooperation in the next phase of the Shodhagar project.

ARUN KAMAL (*1953): One of the most important contemporary poets of Hindi, he has received several literary awards, including the most prestigious Sahitya Academy Award. Arun Kamal has also visited various foreign countries several times to represent India at cultural and literary events. His collections of poems, Apnī keval dhār, Sabūt and Naye ilāqe meṁ were awarded and well-received in literary circles. He has translated several foreign works including the poems of Tohu, the Vietnamese poet. Arun Kamal teaches English Literature at Patna University. He has contributed some invaluable material to the collection.

MADAN KASHYAP (*1954): A poet and a social-cultural activist, he has published two collections of poems – Udās hai pṛithvī and Nīm rośnī meṁ. He further published a collection of his political commentaries, Matbhed. He has enriched this collection by donating several initial issues of Uttargāthā and other numbers of political magazines like Janmat, Lokyuddh, Mazdūr Kisān Nīti, Samajh and several otherwise unavailable issues of Uttarārdh, Samkālīn Tīsrī Duniyā, Qalam etc.

YOGENDRA KRISHNA (*1955): He has written some poems, stories and book reviews, published in literary journals of repute. Despite rather little writing and publication to his credit, he has attracted the attention of many readers. His first collection of poems, Khoyī duniyā kā surāg was published by Saṃvād, Meerut. Hatyāre jab buddhijīvī hote haiṁ, Hatyāre jab masīhā hote haiṁ and Hatyāre jab premī hote haiṁ (When murderers become intellectuals, When murderers become messiah and When murderers become lovers) is a series from his second collection of poems, Bīṭ cuke śahr meṁ (2008), that won him acclaim from all quarters of India. Apart from contributing journals and magazines to the Shodhaghar, he is responsible for most of the English texts of the homepage.

ARUN NARAIN (*1979): is a young freelance literary journalist. He has to his credit several articles and interviews with important writers published in journals and newspapers of repute. He worked altruistically to shape this project and has also contributed certain otherwise unavailable issues of magazines and books.

VIJAY SINGH: The software expert behind the website from Varanasi. (watch this space)

We express our sincere thanks to the following persons for making available the journals and other material listed below:

Gyan Darpan, Mahavir Aggarwal, Anant Kumar Singh, Akhauri Ghanshyam Prasad, Mukesh Pratyush, Uday Raj Singh, Shiv Dayal and Anadi Krishna.

The team in Germany consists of: Neeti and Satyendra Singh, Elisabeth Kuehnel, Mirella Lingorska, Heike Moser, Ulrike Bausch.

Aishwarj Kumar, Research Scholar, University of Cambridge, England.

Satyan Jha, Research Scholar, University of Sorbonne, Paris.

Prabhat Kumar, Research Scholar, University of Heidelberg.