Social-Cultural Anthropology in the Oldest Department of Anthropology in India: Writing History or the Suppression of Records?

The recent narration of the history of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calcutta (CU) by a world-renowned social scientist, Partha Chatterjee, in a lecture at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences misrepresented and suppressed historical records. Chatterjee’s contention that the Department of Anthropology at CU only practiced Physical Anthropology and Archaeology and not Social-Cultural Anthropology was highly biased and suppressed the records available in the public domain.