Review: India’s First Radicals by Rosinka Chaudhary

In both academic and popular history, sole credit for this reform is often given to Ishwar Chandra ‘Vidyasagar’, while Dakshinaranjan and his comrades in the radical Young Bengal Party are ignored altogether at best or vilified at worst. Rosinka Chaudhary writes in her latest book, “The tendency to deify Vidyasagar and denigrate young Bengal has little basis in history.” India’s first radicals: young Bengal and the British EmpireThrough painstaking archival work, Chaudhary shows that Vidyasagar’s campaign for widow remarriage was not the result of a “eureka” moment from some “great man”, but emerged from a number of socio-political debates that had taken place in Calcutta over the previous decades, in which members of Young Bengal had actively participated. Chaudhary, in fact, shows that many of the socio-political ideas later adopted by Indian nationalists – secularism, freedom of expression, equality, inclusivity – had their origins in this radical group that has been largely ignored until now.

Choudhary writes of how, as a student at Oxford University in the early 1990s, she was inspired by her supervisor Robert Young to find a book on the Young Bengal Group. However, even after a whole day’s search of the then New Bodleian building, he could not find any trace of it. Over the years, Chaudhary also asked several historians why there were no books on Young Bengal, but received only unsatisfactory answers. In the introduction to the book under review, Chaudhary writes: “Every historian of nineteenth-century India has heard the name ‘Young Bengal’… is aware of the enormous disruptions caused to the social and political order by this group… yet no serious analysis has been done to document (them).”

Chaudhary argues that the scholarly indifference that the group has faced is a result of certain trends and approaches in Indian historiography, which has focused on the lives of “great men” such as Gandhi, Nehru and more recently Ambedkar, and, since the 1970s, on lower-class people such as Dalits, tribals, women, etc. The university-educated, professional middle class, to which almost all members of Young Bengal belong, “does not fit into these patterns at all”. However, Choudhury claims that the members of Young Bengal were not only the forerunners of the Indian nationalists who emerged in the late 19th century, but they were, in fact, catalysts of modernity in Indian society. Chowdhury proceeds to prove her claim through a detailed analysis of the work and life of some of the prominent people of Young Bengal, keeping pace with our contemporary times.

Although the name Young Bengal was given to the group only in the 1840s – around the same time that Mazzini’s Young Italy in Dublin and Young Ireland were being mentioned frequently in Calcutta papers – their origins can be traced to the appointment of the 17-year-old Anglo-Portuguese poet and journalist Henry Louis Vivian Derozio as a lecturer in 1826 at the newly founded Hindu College. (Most Indians will be familiar) with his sonnet which was posthumously titled To India, my native land.) Inspired by the American and French Revolutions as well as the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, Derozio and his students put out publications and formed societies where they challenged both the misrule of India by the EIC and the dogmatic traditionalism in Hindu society.

In keeping with his youth, many of his activities were deliberately provocative. For example, Sibnath Shastri wrote in his 1903 book, Ramtanu Lahiri is the then BangsamajHow Hindu college students drank liquor openly, ate beef in violation of caste taboos and mocked clean-shaven Brahmins on the city streets. In 1831, a scandal broke out in Calcutta when some students gathered at the house of his friend Krishna Mohan Banerjee, consumed beef and liquor and threw the bones into the neighboring house of a Brahmin. Due to this, Krishna Mohan was expelled from his home and he converted to Christianity. Chaudhary’s 2012 book Freedom and Beef Steak: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan) begins with a reference to this incident.

Unfortunately, these are phenomena that have gained widespread prevalence and acceptance in the popular imagination. Satirical articles and accounts of Young Bengal members in both English and Bengali – such as poetry by Henry Meredith Parker Young India: A Bengal Eclogue (1831), a diatribe against Derozio and his students by Ishwar Gupta in the conservative publication Samvad PrabhakarSatire of Michael Madhusudan Dutta AKE’s spoken civilization? (1860) and Dinabandhu Mitra’s Sadabar Ekadashi (1866) – He has focused on his Western attire and promiscuous actions, such as consumption of beef and alcohol. Even more sympathetic portrayals, such as the 1979 Bengali film springWritten and directed by actor Utpal Dutt, it included unproven material such as the romantic relationship between Dakshinaranjan and Derozio’s sister, Amelia.

Chaudhary rescued the group from the smoke of misinformation and indifference that had shrouded it for more than a century. In 1831, Derozio was dismissed from his post at the Hindu College on charges of teaching atheism to his students, and later that year, he fell ill with cholera. However, even after his death, his students – including Dakshinaranjan, Krishna Mohan, Tarachand Chakraborty, Ramgopal Ghosh, Ramtanu Lahiri, Rasik Krishna Mallik, Peeri Chand Mitra, Radhanath Sikdar – held important posts in government or private service, edited newspapers and magazines, formed associations such as the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge (SAGK). Did. The first political party, the Bengal British India Society (BBIS), formed in 1838 and 1843. “(T)he also wrote original poetry, plays and prose (including the first play by an Indian in English and the first novel in English as well as Bengali).”

The vast material collected by Chaudhary over decades has been thematically organized into six chapters. In the first chapter, Chaudhary shows how members of Young Bengal responded to the crisis in the agricultural sector in India following the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793. His focus was mainly the ryots or middle peasants, who were suffering from increasing demands for taxes. Chaudhary analyzes two texts by Piyari Chand Mitra – one fictional and one non-fictional – that criticize the sole logic of the EIC’s policies: revenue. Chaudhary shows how the concerns of Young Bengal were not merely the passive sympathy of urban intellectuals towards their fellow rural citizens, but were in fact socialist concerns that would find more radical expression in the 20th century.

In the second chapter, Chaudhary analyzes two leading books on geography – by Akshay Kumar Dutt, among other documents. Geography (1841) and Krishna Mohan Banerjee’s geography britain (1848) – which not only educates readers about Indian and global geography, but are fundamental imaginings of the nation itself. Despite differences in language, customs, religion or tradition, both authors imagine India – they use the term ‘Hindustan’ – as an inclusive place, laying the groundwork for how nationalists would imagine it a few decades later. In our times, as a more exclusivist imagination of the nation (sometimes called a united India or Hindu Rashtra) has gained popularity, such a liberal concept has strong resonance.

While the third chapter of the book focuses on the formation and work of the SAKG and the BBIS, the three final chapters include the terms liberty, equality and fraternity, pointing to the ideals of the French Revolution that inspired both Derozio and the Young Bengal. Although self-conscious subjects of an autocratic regime, Young Bengal members consistently attempted, as Chowdhury shows, to demand democratic rights such as freedom of speech and action; benevolent governance; Racial, class, gender and caste equality. Due to his social activism he was described as a “traitor” (by DL Richardson, the then principal of Hindu College). Later, they would also be described as “denationalizing” – a possible precursor to “anti-nationalism”, which is often used these days.

In the final chapter, Chaudhary argues that Young Bengal’s rejection of religion, for which it has often been maligned, was not simply a youthful, performative stance, but a political strategy. Taking inspiration from Akil Bilgrami’s definition of secularism, Chaudhary claims that “secularism as a political principle in India was born explicitly in two resolutions written by him (Young Bengal)”. Although the word “secular” as a descriptor of the nation was added to the Preamble of our Constitution as early as 1976, it is in the writings of Young Bengal that we first find this concept of radical inclusivity which is being increasingly challenged by anti-democratic forces in our times. Preserving his legacy, as Chaudhary has done, is a revolutionary act in itself.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a freelance writer and journalist. The translations from Bengali are his own.