Arup K. Chatterjee in Wikipedia Article on Grindlays Bank

Professor (Dr.) Arup K. Chatterjee’s scholarship has been cited in the Wikipedia article on Grindlays Bank.

The article in question — “Robert Melville Grindlay: The artist, Indophile and imperialist who founded Grindlays Bank” (Scroll.in, 6 March 2018) — examines the life and career of Robert Melville Grindlay, foregrounding the entwined roles of visual culture, travel-writing, and commercial enterprise in the nineteenth-century formation of a trans-imperial banking house.

Chatterjee’s essay reads Grindlay as a composite figure: a sketch artist and travel-chronicler whose images of India circulated in metropolitan Britain, and an entrepreneur whose cultural capital helped anchor the commercial networks that later evolved into Grindlays Bank. The piece combines archival research, close readings of Grindlay’s paintings and lithographs, and institutional history to argue that Grindlay’s aesthetic productions performed social and commercial work—representing India to British audiences while simultaneously lubricating circuits of credit and imperial mobility.

Why this Matters — Academic Scholarship Meets Public History

Wikipedia is often the first port of call for students, journalists, and travellers seeking contextual information about historical institutions. The inclusion of a public-facing, researched essay in the Grindlays Bank entry demonstrates how scholarly investigations of cultural history can enrich widely consulted reference resources. Chatterjee’s article foregrounds how visual culture and entrepreneurial practice intersected in the colonial encounter, and the Wikipedia citation helps bring that interpretive frame to a broader audience. In doing so, it underscores the value of cross-disciplinary work—where art history, institutional biography, and economic history illuminate one another—for public understanding of imperial legacies.

A citation on Wikipedia also signals the practical reach of accessible scholarship: it connects academic inquiry to everyday knowledge economies and invites readers of the bank’s entry to follow a line from a concise encyclopaedic summary to a fuller contextual analysis.

A Brief Note About the Article

Published on Scroll.in on 6 March 2018, the article is intended for a general readership while grounded in primary sources and historical methods. Chatterjee situates Grindlay within networks of travel, print culture and finance, and avoids simplistic hagiography or wholesale condemnation. Instead, the essay reads Grindlay’s career as emblematic of nineteenth-century practices where representation and commerce were mutually reinforcing—an approach that complicates tidy distinctions between cultural appreciation and imperial enterprise.

Chatterjee’s research draws attention to how portraits, sketches and travel imagery functioned as forms of knowledge and persuasion that had material consequences in colonial economies. For readers seeking to explore these intersections further, the Scroll.in essay provides a readable entry point and a set of references that point towards archival sources and additional scholarship.