Reminiscences of teachers by former students pervade accounts of the Presidency College, whether they are articles in the Presidency College Magazine, Autumn Annual, or autobiographies and other kinds of recollections. Not all teachers, however. A select list of names recur repeatedly in memories of the college. My effort in this chapter is to understand why it is that some individuals stand out over hundreds of others. A teacher, I argue, gains a storied reputation though several types of collective memorywork. First, there are some teachers who are remembered as transformative pedagogues, both inside and outside the classroom. Second, there are some whose names are associated with movements of political and cultural import that reach far beyond the college's walls, such as nationalism and modernity. Third, and most important, a remembered teacher is someone about whom there are anecdotes that get handed down generations and eventually make their way to us in writing. While there may be many teachers who are privately remembered by individual students, only some generate a trove of anecdotes that become part of institutional lore.

In an essay on the anecdote as a critical resource in Bengali history and public culture, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that a narrative that is based primarily on anecdotal evidence is different from historical biography. The latter are more exhaustive about the life of their chosen subjects while anecdotes are, by definition, fragmentary. Their fragmentary character allows anecdotes to travel between orality and writing.