Blair Kling Papers, 1950-2008

Accession #1:

Arrangement: Chronological

Accession #2: 2021

Arrangement:

Series 1: Subject Files contains Professor Kling"s correspondence with colleagues, applications for funding and his research notes on Jamshedpur. Also included are his personal academic transcripts and his CV, his teaching material including lecture transcripts and syllabi. This series is arranged alphabetically by title, with his CV as the first folder.

Series 2: Research Material and Drafts contains research materials and unpublished research drafts of Professor Blair Kling and in particular his research on the Tata Iron & Steel Company in Jamshedpur, India, and early American and British influences on Indian entrepreneurship and heavy industry. Also included are Kling"s interviews and transcripts in Jamshedpur with representatives of social movements, industry, unions, tribes, schools, etc. Of note is also the grey literature, internal reports, and pamphlets by the Tata Steel Company; grey literature by India"s labor movement , the Communist Party, and small publications on topics such as rural development, nationalism, and geology. This series also includes 8 microfilm rolls of the Motif newspaper (1973-1992), Tata Steel Company records, copies of the Frederick Charles Temple Papers, and 5 unidentified rolls. This series is organized alphabetically by folder title.

Series 3: This series contains publications of Professor Blair Kling from 1962 to 2008. Notably are his publications on Dwarkanath Tagore, e.g. Partner in Empire; Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Easter India and on the Tata Iron and Steel Company. This series is arranged chronologically.

Blair Bernard Kling (1929-2011) was professor of history (1962-2000) and professor emeritus (2000-11) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He was a noted scholar of nineteenth-century Indian and Southeast Asian history, and he helped to establish the first Asian center at UIUC.

Kling was born on April 17, 1929, in Chicago, Illinois. He completed high school in Long Beach, California, and earned a bachelor's degree (1950) and a master's degree (1955) from the University of California, Berkley. He studied in India on a Fulbright grant (1957-58) and earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1960, specializing in the history of India and Southeast Asia. Kling held positions at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, and Harpur College prior to joining the history faculty at UIUC in 1962. Kling's research interests were primarily in entrepreneurial activity and economic development in nineteenth-century Bengal. His publications include The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859-1862 (1966); Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (1976); "Paternalism in Indian Labor: The Tata Iron and Steel Company of Jamshedpur" (1998); and "Hollywood's India: The Meaning of RKO's Gunga Din" (coauthored with Frederic Copie Jaher, 2008).

Kling married Julia Norian, and together they had one daughter (Julia) and one son (William). He died on May 2, 2011.

Source:

"Blair Kling," News-Gazette, May 5, 2011, accessed May 28, 2020, https://www.news-gazette.com/obituaries/blair-kling/article_cde64f56-39b2-5a1b-a88d-bbc0a916e346.html.