The Derozio effect: a brief, disruptive moment in 19th century colonial Calcutta

The Hindu

13 hours ago

'On or about April 1831 in Calcutta, human character changed.' Echoing Virginia Woolf's reflection about modernity, Rosinka Chaudhuri in India's First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire (India Viking) describes a brief, disruptive moment in colonial Calcutta that would send ripples through the history of 19th century Bengal and the British Empire in India.
But first, Henry Derozio. In 1826, the gifted 17-year-old Anglo-Portuguese poet was appointed lecturer at the Hindu College in Calcutta. The college itself had been started only a decade ago, with the aim of providing sons of affluent Indians with 'a liberal education' given to English gentlemen.
Derozio published two collections of poems in English in the two years that followed: Poems and The Fakeer of Jungheera: A Metrical Tale. He directly addressed his homeland, describing it as a captured eagle: 'My country! In thy days of glory past/A beauteous halo circled round thy brow…/Where is thy glory, where the reverence now?/Thy eagle pinion is chained down at last,/And grovelling in the lowly dust art thou.'
Meaning of freedom
In another poem, he compared the country to a musical instrument lying unused, 'like ruined monument on desert plain.' In another, he talked about what freedom would mean to the enslaved man, suggesting that to free the unslaved is in fact the principled way forward for the right-thinking person: 'Blest be the generous hand that breaks/The chain a tyrant gave,/And, feeling for degraded man,/Gives freedom to the slave.'
Derozio was a catalyst. His bright and spirited students, the Derozians, formed a group — the Academic Association — to debate social issues of the times. Fiercely committed to liberty, reason, and original thinking, the young members opposed the entrenched social, cultural, and religious orthodoxies of the times.
In April 1831, Derozio was dismissed from the college on charges of propagating atheism; months later, he died of cholera. Nevertheless, his students continued to advocate for change and make efforts to shape public opinion.
In 1843, with the support of British abolitionist George Thompson, the Young Bengal group set up India's first political party, the Bengal British India Society. The new party was underpinned by a powerful vision of equality: 'to secure the welfare, extend the just rights and advance the interest of all classes of our fellow subjects.'
Bold and different
Young Bengal was not like Macaulay's idea of a 'class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.' These young Indians were boldly different. The Scottish missionary Alexander Duff would describe them as 'a new race of men in the East.'
Their radical perspective of equality manifested in principled acts of courage. Radhanath Sikdar, a brilliant mathematics student of Hindu College and member of Derozio's inner circle, joined the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India under George Everest. When Sikdar saw his workmen being unfairly forced to carry personal goods by Indian burkandazes (footmen) of the police establishment, he confiscated the goods and confronted the British magistrate: 'There is no regulation authorising the forcible seizure and employment of anybody.' When asked, 'Who the devil are you?' Sikdar replied, 'A man and so are you.' Eventually, Sikdar filed a complaint against the magistrate in a court of law for mistreating the Indian labourers. In doing so, he set a new example for challenging British colonial rule.
Some years later, as Chief Computor at the Survey of India, Sikdar would first perform the set of calculations that confirmed that Peak XV — later named Mount Everest — was the highest in the world. In due course, the Surveyor General, Andrew Waugh, would then report Sikdar's results officially, win a medal, and become a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. However, Sikdar would be left out of the narrative.
Young Bengal was a short-lived phenomenon, but it had planted a seed that would continue to grow. Chaudhuri's engrossing history of India's 'first radicals' notes that their idea of India was similar to that of Gandhi, Nehru, and so many others: 'inclusive, tolerant, eclectic, open to the best of the world's ideas and articulations in their own formulation of the culture of the nation.'
What's in a name?
In The Great Arc: the Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named, British historian John Keay writes about the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Waugh proposed that the peak should be named after his predecessor Everest, who had not been popular among Indians. The Buddhist scholar Brian Hodgson suggested the Nepali name 'Devadhanga.' Waugh objected, setting up a committee which noted that the name Devadhanga could apply to many peaks and not just to this one.
By 1857, when the great Indian rebellion broke out, the debate over the peak's name ceased. It was taken up again in the early 20th century. Keay mentions one of the Tibetan names that was suggested but not taken up: Mi-thik Dgu-thik Bya-phur Long-nga, which one writer translated as 'You cannot see the summit from near it, but you can see the summit from nine directions, and a bird which flies as high as the summit goes blind.' Disappointingly, Keay's book mentions the contribution of Sikdar in just three paragraphs of as many pages.
Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is in the IAS.