This project is a public history initiative that has aimed to digitize, annotate and historicize part of the vast visual archive of illustrated humour in Bengal. Illustrated humour has been a key part of India’s public life. It is a history of intelligent influence and then comparative decline, but no doubt the form has lately received new ballast in the social-media soaked ecosystem of the contemporary. But its long life in the subcontinent is to be categorically historicized.
