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Bengal Renaissance
Bengal Renaissance refers largely to the social, cultural,
psychological, and intellectual changes in Bengal during the
nineteenth century, as a result of contact between certain
sympathetic British officials and missionaries on the one hand, and the
Hindu intelligentsia on the other. The setting for the Bengal
Renaissance was the colonial metropolis of Calcutta.
Before 1830, earlier than any other Asian city, Calcutta already had a
school system using European methods of instruction and textbooks.
On their own initiative, the urban elite had founded Hindu College, the
only European-style institution of higher learning in Asia.
Newspapers, periodicals, and books were being published regularly in
English and Bangla. The city had a public library in European style.
Calcutta also boasted a native intelligentsia conversant with events in
Europe, aware of its own historical heritage, and progressively alert
about its own future in the modern world.
The representatives of the British in India who were mainly
responsible for these positive aspects of modernization were a group
of "acculturated" civil, military, and judicial officials (and some
missionaries) historiographically identified as Orientalists. They were
neither nationalists nor imperialists in the late nineteenth-century
Victorian sense. On the contrary, they were products of the
eighteenth-century world of rationalism, classicism, and
Enlightenment. Unlike later Europeans serving in British India, they
mastered at least one Indian language and used it as a vehicle for
scholarly research. Many Orientalists-notably William Jones, HT
Colebrooke, William Carey. HH Wilson, and James Prinsep- made
significant contributions to the fields of Indian philology, archeology,
and history. Moreover, these Orientalists did not ensconce themselves
in clubs or build a Chinese wall of racial privilege to keep the" inferior
races" they ruled at a distance. On the contrary, the Orientalists
formed enduring relations with members of the Bengali intelligentsia
to whom they served as sources for knowledge of the West and with
whom they worked to promote social and cultural change.
It was the Orientalist training centre for British civil servants in India
known as the College of Fort William, established in Calcutta by
Governor General Wellesley in 1800, which seemed to offer the most
perfect institutional setting for studying the results of British Indian
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contact and accommodation. The College was the first European-
created institution of higher learning in India to welcome Indians as
faculty members and to encourage cultural exchange between
Europeans and South Asians. By enlisting the support of qualified
Orientalist scholars to improve its education program, this College
also transformed the famed Asiatic Society, Calcutta and William
Carey's Xerampore Mission into highly effective agencies for the
revitalisation of Indian culture.
Between 1800 and 1830, in Calcutta, as a consequence of the
Orientalist impact, the Bangali intellectual was a confused but
optimistic individual striving to reconcile partially digested alien traits
and unsatisfactory indigenous traditions. He established relationships
with British civil servants, businessmen, and missionaries both for
profit and to use them as windows to the West. It was his good fortune
that the distance between Britain and India was great and that the
Orientalists with whom he associated had become "Indianized. The
Bangali view of the West during the sympathetic Orientalist period
helped to establish good rapport between Europeans and Indians
offering hope for the future.
It should be noted that the movement known as the Bengal
Renaissance, regardless of the good relationships established
between the British and Indians and the accomplishments resulting
from such interactions, the Bangali intellectual of the early 1800s was
insecure psychologically. The renaissance vision was in its early
stages often painful because of the contact and confrontation between
two civilisations and the awareness of a newly discovered historical
dimension. The Orientalists imparted to him their evocation of an
Indian golden age while the Serampore missionaries transmitted a
Protestant concept of the European medieval period as a dark age.
Both inspired in the Bangali a belief in the perfectibility of the whole
humanity. On the one hand, the intelligentsia regarded them as the
product of an exhausted culture and on the other, as representatives
of a culture disrupted by negative historical circumstances but
capable of revitalisation.
There were four aspects of the Renaissance movement, which the
Bangali intelligentsia developed systematically throughout the
nineteenth century. First, there was the modernization of the Bengali
language and the simultaneous birth of a new Bangali literature.
Secondly, there was the rediscovery of, and identification with an
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Indian classical era hailed as a golden age which placed South Asian
civilisation on a par with the grandeur of Greece and Rome. Thirdly,
there was the Serampore missionary interpretation of the Protestation
Reformation, which Indians applied creatively to their own historic
situation. And finally, there was the secular view of universal progress
on which India's hope lay not in resurrecting the past but in projecting
the golden age into the future.
When the College of Fort William hired the Baptist missionary, WILLIAM
CAREY, in 1801, as head of the Bangali Department every available kind
of financial, technological, and human resource was put at his
disposal. With an unlimited budget and a capable staff of Brahman
pundits, Carey found himself in a most enviable position. His dream of
creating a cadre of cultural intermediaries, who would disclose to him
the secrets of indigenous culture while also being persuaded to
disseminate Christianity to their own countrymen, seemed closer to
realisation.
Carey's first textbook (which would go through five editions) was the
Bengali Grammar, completed in 1801. Also in 1801, Carey helped to
edit a reader for the Bangali students entitled Kathopakathon or
Dialogues. This book is perhaps the first by a European that did not
concern itself with the Hindu high culture. For the first time, the
idiomatic language, manners, and customs of merchants, fishermen,
women, day laborers, and other common folk were given the dignity of
minute and sympathetic observation. It would not be farfetched to call
Carey, as a result of this work alone, India's first cultural
anthropologist.
Greatly influenced by Carey's work was Ram Comul Sen, the earliest
known Renaissance scholar among the Bangali intelligentsia. Born in a
Hughly village in 1790 as the son of a father who was proficient in
Persian, Sen moved to Calcutta at the age of seven and while there
learned English, Sanskrit, and Persian. It was Persian, which most
helped him establish his credentials as an indigenous member of the
Asiatic Society, Calcutta. He interacted with the Orientalists and
worked on their publications. Sen was especially friendly with HH
Wilson who helped promote the Bangali as an intellectual entrepreneur
who left an estate of 1,000,000 rupees when he died in 1844.
'It was Ram Comal who published the first modern Dictionary of the
English and Bengalee languages in 1834. In the introduction to the
second volume that year, Sen expressed sympathy for the generation
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of Englishmen who had responded favorably to his own language and
customs. He not only singled out Carey as a selfless, devoted father of
the new Bangali language, but predicted that the language would
come to be the equal of any in the world.
Why Ram Comul Sen correctly foresaw a brilliant literary future for
Bengali we may never know but that the literature in that language did
undergo a renaissance there can be of little doubt. Writers such
as MICHAEL MADHUSUDAN DUTT (1824-73) and RABINDRANATH
TAGORE (1861-1941) wrote beautifully in English but that they also
chose to express their literary genius creatively in Bangali certainly
helped shape the renaissance of that literature. Dutt's Meghnadhbadh
Kabya and Tagore's GEETANJALI for example, were renaissance
masterpieces in the manner that tradition was modernized. It is of no
small importance that Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1913, one year after he published an English translation
of Geetanjali (Song Offerings).
Of all the Orientalists seeking to reconstruct the ancient history of
India, none was more successful as a scholar than HH Wilson. In 1818,
the President of the Asiatic Society supported Wilson, its Secretary, in
new measures to enhance the effectiveness of the institution as an
agency for historical investigation. It can be said that the primary
function of the Society as historical and archaeological repository and
headquarters for all India really began in 1818. HH Wilson's close
friend, Ram Comul Sen, was hired to coordinate these activities.
One of Wilson's most formidable tasks was to demythologize the
legendary heroes of the Hindus. Wilson, as leading Indologist working
in Calcutta, constantly reviewed the most recently acquired historical
data and the various interpretations of the data. In the preface to the
Sanskrit dictionary of 1819, for example, he praised those who had
`rescued' Xankara from mythology and had transformed him into a
historical figure. Wilson had already performed this difficult feat with
Kalidasa in 1813 and after doing the same for Sankara, he hoped to
demythologize and give historical substance to the sacred figure of
Buddha. Thanks to Wilson and the Orientalists, Buddha ceased to be
conceived of solely as a god and became historicized as a human
being with a life story in the manner of Jesus Christ.
Wilson worked feverishly on different projects. He drew great
satisfaction discovering manuscripts as he did in 1825 when he
published his report of the Rajataribgini, a history of Kashmir to 1027
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AD It constituted the first Orientalist-inspired regional history of India.
Wilson also brought out a book on Hindu drama in the classical period
and a systematic history of Ancient Indian medicine.
By 1833, when Wilson set sail for England, he had himself brought to
light or inspired in others to bring to light so many original historical
disclosures that he might well be considered the father of classical
Indian historiography. Under Wilson, the first authentic histories of
Nepal, Orissa, and Rajasthan, as well as Kashmir were written.
It should be pointed out that with the exception of these regional
studies, which do include the Hindu Middle Ages, Orientalist
scholarship was largely focused on the pre-medieval classical past.
This is probably the primary reason why Islamic scholarship was not
pursued and why the Bangali scholars who were affiliated with the
Asiatic Society later in the century were for the most part Hindus. And
when one considers the wealth of diversity and profundity of what was
rediscovered in ancient Indian science, philosophy, medicine, the arts
and literature, society, and polity, one can understand why Hindus
would be so immensely proud of their ancestral achievements, which
they hailed as their own traditional heritage.
If the Bengal Renaissance produced one outstanding progenitor who
imbibed the Orientalist contribution as effectively as he did linguistic
and literary modernization and the effective defense of Hindu theism
against the double-edged challenge of Christianity and secularism, it
would be RAMMOHUN ROY (d. 1833).
Roy seems to have lived in Calcutta for the first time between 1797
and 1802. He came from a family with a vested interest in the old
established order and his father, a small landowner of the traditional
ruling class in Bengal, lost his property in 1800. Rammohun's
`professional' activity in Calcutta between 1799 and 1802 was to loan
money to civil servants presumably in or near the College of Fort
William. His civil service employer, Johan Digby, was among the
earliest College of Fort William students (1801-1803) and Rammohun
acquired his knowledge of the Engilish language from Digby, who
presumably provided him with his first `window to the West'.
After Rammohun settled in Calcutta and published his translation of
the Vedanta in 1815, he committed himself to a view of Indian culture
that he would defend in private and public debates until his death in
1833. He spent much time and effort resisting Christian missionaries
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such as Jon Clark Marshman on the one hand and fought a long
struggle with fellow Bangalis in his effort to reform Hinduism of its
contemporary abuse.
In The Abridgement of the Vedant, Rammohun argued that image
worship as then practiced in India was and aberration from the
authentic monotheistic tradition. Worship of the true and eternal God
left no room for idolatry. Whether his knowledge of Islam influenced
him in this regard we do not know. We do know that in the manner of
Orientalists such as William Jones and HT Colebrook, Roy divided
Indian history into a Vedantic period that was the authentic model for
the whole body of Hindu theology, law, and literature, and a later
period of `Hindu idolatry' with its innumerable gods, goddesses, and
temples which have since been destroying the texture of society.
Misguided Brahmans in their priestly functions preferred to conceal
the wisdom of the Vedanta within the dark curtain of the Sanskrit
language, argued Rammohun, rather than transmit the truth to the
people in their own vernacular languages. For this reason, he had
himself translated the Vedanta and other classical sources into
Bangali. Rammohun stressed again and again that in the Hindu Middle
Ages the wisdom of classical literature and philosophy vanished as
society embraced the absurdities of an idolatrous religion. In a book
on the Upanshads that Rammohun brought out in 1816, he argued that
the true Indian faith was no different than the true Christianity and
Islam in that all three had developed a notion of the unity of the
Supreme Being as the sole `Ruler of the Universe'.
As a proponent of renaissance and modernity, it was not merely
religious reform, which Rammohun advocated but social reform as well
in the name of religion. His eloquent Defense of the Vedas in 1817 is a
striking case in point of his attitude. He maintained that there was
nothing in the scripture, for example, to authorize sati or the burning of
widows and yet widows were being immolated. He wrote against
dowries, sati and kulinism.
Secularism, the fourth aspect of the Bengal Renaissance, was the
least influcenced by British Orientalism, and its appeal to that
segment of the intelligentsia who sought the true Hinduism in remote
ages of gold. The so-called `Young Bengal Movement' made up of a
coterie of students at Hindu College, rejected the idea of seeking
answers to India's decadence in the historic dimension instead of
advocating cultural change by looking to the future. Originally nurtured
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by Henry Derozio, a teacher at the College in English literature during
his brief but influential tenure between 1828 and 1831, Young Bengal
imbibed the secular progressive spirit of the contemporary West,
which they interpreted as entirely future-oriented.
DEROZIO, a Eurasian with a Portuguese father, shared with Rammohun
Roy and advocacy of popular sovereignty for all nations of the world
but was far more Westernized in his religious skepticism and
unyielding rational spirit. On the other hand, Derozio shared with the
Orientalists and Rammohun a faith in the eighteenth-century ideal of
universality. Whether it is William Jones linking Europe and Asia
through a common linguistic source, the Indo-European languages, or
the Xerampore missionaries de-Westernizing their Reformation model
to accommodate Asians, or Rammohun arguing for the universality of
monotheism, each position rested on a common cosmopolitan base.
Derozio, who died a victim of cholera at twenty-two after a brief period
of meager literary activity, has left nothing to suggest Byronic
cynicism or post-Napoleonic nationalism. Instead, he held steadfastly
to his faith in the eighteenth-century concept of human perfectibility.
His legacy to his students, which became their contribution to the
Bengal Renaissance, was his conviction that the way to revitalise
India was not to revere ideals and values long gone, but to open Indian
minds to the cultural offerings of the West so that India might join in
the race for a hopeful future.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Calcutta was Asia's most
notorious repository for diverse sources of knowledge, both ancient
and modern, from all corners of the world. In this renaissance
atmosphere, tracts, journals, and newspapers helped produce a feeling
of cultural identity among the intelligentsia through the transmission
of cultural attitudes.
Alongside the intellectual aspect of the Renaissance there developed a social
identity and solidarity among professionals who had emerged largely as a result
of close European contacts, special training, and European-style occupational
status. The new Bangali elite boasted a library in every home and an ardent
record of patronage of printed works. Bookstores had multiplied throughout
Calcutta and education had become a sought-after commodity. The socio-
intellectual adventure would not be confined to Calcutta or to Bengal, but culture
would spread to other metropolitan centers with different linguistic and cultural
backgrounds such as Bombay and Madras.
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[David Copf]
