Oh the bittersweet High Court of Calcutta.

How much work must I put in for little gain?

My letter requesting permission to digitize their copies of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette was rejected. The employees of the High Court, including the lawyer who had helped me much and the assistant in the research room had declined informing me that my petition was rejected because they did not want to be the bearers of bad news—a fairly typical custom in India.

I received my rejection letter yesterday. It took the correspondence section all of 15 minutes to get it to me, which is about the quickest thing I’ve ever seen them do.

Given my rejection, I asked the research room if there was anything else I could do. Hence, I rewrote my application, arguing that if I can digitize this copy of Hicky’s Bengal Gazette then I will be able to preserve an historical part of India’s history before it is too late. I hope this tact will grant me success. Another change in tactic is addressing the judge in a very obsequious manner. This process took the entire day, bringing me to three different offices.

My new application is 24 pages long (that includes a duplicate copy). The triplicate copy which I had printed out turned out to be unnecessary.

Ugh.

Additionally, I realized there is another court record I need to look at. A trial in 1797 involved James Augustus Hicky versus some Bengali inhabitants who were convicted of assault and battery against him. The trial mentions Hicky’s wife. If I can find out more about her, I can understand another side of Hicky—and understand him, his wife and their family better. Perhaps she was a British woman and not a Muslim as is historically thought?