Association Sampark Global

SAMPARK was founded in Calcutta, India towards the end of 1998. Its founder, Sunandan Roy Chowdhury set it up as a publishing house with the aim of fostering international dialogue. For around twenty-five years SAMPARK has published translations of world literatures and human sciences in English, Bengali and Hindi.

For more than a decade now SAMPARK has published and promoted French literature in India and beyond. In this journey a large number of French writers, publishers, editors and cultural managers have given great support to SAMPARK. Now Sunandan Roy Chowdhury and Stephane Amalir, who has decades of experience in leadership of cultural institutions, have come together to launch Association Sampark Global in France. Through this association we will connect the two countries of India and France as well as the continents of Europe and Asia. And not only that with France at the centre we will try to foster dialogues between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. The association will publish books as well as initiate and organise literary and cultural meets; and undertake research and training projects aimed at societal and economic transformation. Its solemn aim will be contributing to dialogue between nations and literatures that in its turn furthers world peace and harmony.

The idea behind SAMPARK was to bring to Indian readers translations of non-English literature. And through the translations, open up India’s English-centric world to the intellectual and literary worlds that exist outside the English language. Sampark’s books open windows into the thought-worlds of Asia, Europe and beyond. The press publishes translations from French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and other European languages as well as from Chinese, Turkish, Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Bengali and several other non-western languages.  

In the 1920s and 1930s, Rabindranath Tagore had opened up India’s world to the East of Buddhism and Confucianism, to the near-West of Iran and Iraq and to the far corner of Hispanic America. ‘Sampark’, which means ‘relationship’ in Sanskrit and several other Indian languages, has tried to make a modest contribution to this internationalist endeavour.