In 1826, a seventeen-year-old Anglo-Portuguese aspiring poet, Henry Derozio, was appointed lecturer in the senior school of the Hindu College, established just about a decade before in 1817 at the insistence of Indian‘gentlemen of distinction’, who had emphatically asserted to Chief Justice Edward Hyde East (as he wrote in his correspondence) that they wanted their children to have ‘a liberal education’ and that ‘they should wish to be informed of everything that the English gentlemen learnt’.4 Some of Derozio’s students (all of whom were only a few years younger than their young teacher) formed a tightly-knit circle around him, debating political and social issues with great involvement at the Academic Association they founded in 1828. They also, however, embarked upon a collision course with orthodoxy and authority, transgressing Hindu codes of pollution and other caste strictures publicly and profligately, with little care for the consequences. Alarmed, the Indian managers of the college dismissed Derozio on charges of preaching atheism in April 1831; seven months later in December that year he died of cholera, leaving his students bereft. Having completed their education by this time, they took up jobs (most of them aspiring to be independent of government employ), pursuing their agenda of radical change independently and in diverse ways.
In the following years they were active on issues of free trade and colonization, campaigned for the freedom of the press, set up schools or became schoolteachers, published the first bilingual newspapers and textbooks available in the country, criticized and attacked government policies and corrupt administration in public speeches, and set up the first Indian political party. Importantly, they also wrote original poetry, plays and prose (including the first play by an Indian in English and the first novels in English as well as Bengali) while arguing publicly against discrimination, superstition and religiosity. Focusing on the activities of this set of modern Indians, later named Young Bengal, this book will consider the achievements and activities of this heterogenous group of men, radical in their politics and vocal in their demands for social reform, as they pressed for change alongside and with the support of a number of ‘non-official’Englishmen (those not employed by the East India Company) as well as members of the mixed-race East Indian community. We will see, as we follow their activities and impact, how they transformed so much in relation to the cultural fabric that constitutes modern Indian life that to ignore it is to miss an important aspect of the history of the Indian modern as we all inhabit it to this day.
Extract from Rosinka Chaudhuri’s India’s First Radicals Copyright@Penguin Random House India
Included on this website by express written permission of the copyright holder.
