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The Hindu
a day ago
- Politics
- The Hindu
The Derozio effect: a brief, disruptive moment in 19th century colonial Calcutta
'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.
Scroll.in
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Podcast: The radical legacy of the 19th century ‘Young Bengal' movement
In October 1843, a European journal in Calcutta noticed a group of educated Bengalis, graduates of the city's Hindu College, and savagely mocked them. They were 'cutting their way through ham and beef, and wading to liberalism through tumblers of beer'. The object of the magazine's satire, Young Bengal, was a group that did, indeed, gain infamy for their hard drinking and a propensity to fling beefsteaks into the houses of orthodox Brahmins. But, as Rosinka Chaudhuri notes in India's First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, there was much more to this group than their dietary and drinking habits. Young Bengal constituted the first generation of modern Indians, individuals who espoused liberty, equality, secularism, and a more representative form of government. They set a template for progressive reform that resonates in India even today. In this episode of Past Imperfect, Chaudhuri provides a corrective to this maligned and misunderstood cohort. Members of Young Bengal entered the Hindu College in the late 1820s and were taken under the wing of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a masterful instructor who was only a few years older than them. Under Derozio's guidance, they pored over the works of John Locke and Thomas Paine, recited the verses of Milton and Byron, and began questioning everything in the world around them. Derozio died tragically young, at the age of 22, but his students kept alive his love of liberty and a penchant for heterodox ideas. Parents were not so pleased about this. As Chaudhuri tells us, many irate fathers, horrified at their sons' rejection of caste and Hindu rites, went so far as to drug and abduct them, hoping to cast them as far away as possible from the gates of the Hindu College. Such tactics, however, did not quite go to plan. By the early 1830s, Young Bengal was establishing newspapers which broadcast their reformist ethos. Members were busy laying the foundations for a much bigger movement which included schools, a learned society, and what Chaudhuri believes is India's first political party. The very name Young Bengal, applied retrospectively to the group, reflected their modern, cosmopolitan outlook: it was a nod to Young Italy and Young Ireland, idealistic nationalist groupings in Europe. They certainly gained international attention. An American bookseller, learning of their interest in Thomas Paine, arranged for shipments of his works to be dispatched to Calcutta, where students offered five times the market rate for copies. But Young Bengal's most notable international project was helping convince George Thompson, a celebrated British campaigner for abolition and Indian political reform, to visit Calcutta. In 1843, Thompson worked with Young Bengal to establish the Bengal British India Society, a political body committed to 'extend the just rights and advance the interest of all classes' in India. In fora like the Bengal British India Society, these Bengalis did not simply pontificate about things like free speech and equality. They prized a very public demonstration of these ideals. Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee delivered a speech which was so condemnatory of British colonial rule that the Hindu College's principal cut him off and publicly accused him of treason (members of Young Bengal, in turn, condemned the principal for his behavior). Radhanath Sikdar, a mathematical genius and the first man to ascertain that Mount Everest was the highest point on earth, filed a case against the white magistrate of Dehra Dun for mistreating coolies. As could be expected, these confrontations triggered deep resentment and opposition. Sikdar was hounded by colleagues at his place of employment, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. These colleagues subsequently scrubbed Sikdar's name from the story of how the highest mountain in the world gained its title. A resentful Sikdar chose early retirement, deliberately relocating beyond the frontiers of the British Raj to the French enclave of Chandernagore. Aside from irate parents, many other Indians took umbrage at how the group flouted the norms of traditional Hindu society. Observers as far away as Bombay and Madras surveyed their activities with a mix of incredulity, outrage, and admiration. And, beyond the beer and beef, one other thing stuck to Young Bengal: the notion that they were a failure. What did they accomplish, after all? Radical open-mindedness did not quite take off beyond their small circle. The Bengal British India Society went bust in a few years. By the late 19th century, even other educated Bengalis, men like Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, were heaping scorn on the group, criticizing their overtly Westernised manners and mocking their excesses. Chaudhuri regrets this turn against Young Bengal, but acknowledges that it had a very long influence. To this day, historians have been wary of studying the cohort, seeing it as somewhat of an embarrassment. A book like India's First Radicals, therefore, is long overdue, a much-needed chapter in the longer story of modern India's genesis. While that chapter included its share of alcohol and red meat, it was also marked by courage, a love of truth and a burning desire to make India a better society. Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.
