Sir William Jones arrived in India in the latter half of the eighteenth century with a limited objective. A scholar and an associate of Dr Samuel Johnson, Sir William had planned to spend only six years in India, amass enough wealth from his earnings as a member of the judiciary under Governor General Warren Hastings and then return to England to pursue academics again. Once he reached Calcutta, however, Sir William’s life took a curious turn. He became so engrossed with the rich and varied culture of the Orient and the study of Sanskrit that he stayed on in India for more than a decade. By the time Sir William decided to return to England, his health had deteriorated and he died in 1794. His burial took place in Calcutta. His grave still lies neglected in one corner of the Park Circus cemetery, a telling commentary on how a nation has ignored and forgotten the man who was among the first notable western scholars to have revealed to Indians their own rich heritage and culture.
Sir William’s contribution to the Indian reawakening is formidable. He embraced the Indian way of living, arranged to learn Sanskrit at Krishnagar in Bengal with the help of Indian scholars, yet remained British at heart (he kept a black turtle as one of his pets and named it Othello). In about a decade’s painstaking work, Sir William helped discover the Indo-European family of languages, the richness of Sanskrit literature (with his translation of Kalidas’ Abhijnana Shakuntalam) and the first date in ancient Indian history.
He solved the mystery over the date of the Chandragupta dynasty and, with that, managed to reconstruct India’s ancient history. Sir William was also instrumental in setting up the Asiatic Society that exists even today. The establishment of the Asiatic Society was a landmark event that laid the ground for the Indian awakening in the nineteenth century and a movement that led to an intellectual revival also known as the Bengal renaissance.
It is, therefore, reasonable to expect Subrata Dasgupta to begin his story of the intellectual awakening in the eastern part of India with Sir William Jones. However, he fails to recreate the excitement that accompanied the spirit of discovery that inspired Sir William. Equally intriguing is the manner in which Dasgupta ignores Sir William’s seminal role in situating the Chandragupta dynasty on a timescale that gave Indians the first authentic date in India’s ancient history. It is difficult to argue that Dasgupta did not find Sir William’s role in resolving the mystery of Sandracottus and Erranboas as a critical component in his thesis on what contributed to the Bengal renaissance. For, the Bengal renaissance was indeed an outcome of a gradual discovery by Indian intellectuals of their own rich heritage and culture. The setting up of the Asiatic Society was as critical a trigger for that process as was the reconstruction of India’s ancient history. Ignoring the latter, therefore, did not make much sense.
A similar mistaken emphasis is noticeable in Dasgupta’s rendering of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s contribution to Bangla literature. Dutt was a brilliant poet, who dared challenge a member of the venerable Tagore family on the natural flexibility of Bangla as a language. Dutt believed that Bangla was naturally amenable to the use of blank verse as well and the reason no Bangla poet ever tried experimenting with that metre was a comment on the poverty of talent in Bengal and not of the language. Just to prove himself right, Dutt produced an epic written in blank verse within the promised time frame.
Dasgupta mentions all this, but his account of such exciting developments is almost anodyne. A Bengali poet installs a statuette of John Milton at his house and requests a handful of Sanskrit scholars to be around to help him understand the various nuances of Sanskrit in which the Ramayana was originally written. Thus, with Milton as his inspiration and the Sanskrit scholars as guide to the scriptures and the Sanskrit language, Dutt paces up and down in his room and dictates Meghnaadbadh Kavya, which celebrates the heroism and death of Meghnaad, as Lakshman, brother of Ram, kills the unarmed son of Ravan in what the poet considers an unethical war.
Recounting Dutt’s contribution to the Bengal renaissance without these exciting details cannot be justified on any ground. The bibliographical references, annotations and excerpts from speeches and writings, which readers will find aplenty in this book, may have added a lot of value to the researchers who want to dig deeper into the issues concerning Bengal renaissance. However, in the process, Dasgupta has made serious compromises by not bringing to life the drama, details and the important events around the key personalities associated with the Bengal renaissance.
He makes some amends in the later chapters in the book, where he delves into the lives of Jagadish Chandra Bose, Swami Vivekananda, Rasasundari Devi and Toru Dutt, and brings out fresh aspects of their growth and contribution to the intellectual awakening of Bengal. In his analysis, Dasgupta is no different from the established view that the intellectual awakening was an outcome of the confluence of leading thinkers, social reformers, spiritualists, scientists and creative writers. He argues that this process continued for more than a century and was in good measure influenced and encouraged by western intellectuals and administrators. The final and the most productive fruit of that awakening was Rabindranath Tagore, whose Nobel prize in literature in 1913 also marked the culmination of that intellectual revival.
Dasgupta’s significant contribution is his discovery of a common thread that binds most of the renaissance figures. That common thread is the presence of an “Indo-western mind, the fusion of two cultures, two traditions and even two religions” and “switching from one to the other and back”. He establishes this while presenting the lives and works of Rammohun Roy, Madhusudan Dutt or even Swami Vivekananda. That is a key takeaway from Dasgupta’s story of the Bengal renaissance.
AWAKENING
The Story of the Bengal Renaissance
Subrata Dasgupta
Random House India
394+XX pages; Rs 499
