This change in the ambience of the city, which indeed transformed
it from a primarily British trading and political centre into
a pacesetter in literary and cultural matters, occurred in
the 19th century. The british adopted a policy of reforming
Indian society in line with the mores of Western science and
reason. Macaulay proclaimed in the minute of 1835 that it
was his intention to initiate a policy of education that would
produce a strand of people who would be English in all but
the colour of their skin. Such an edict sums up very well
the imperial sense of racial superiority. Calcutta was the
first city in India to feel the social and political impact
of this colonialism.
The Bengali elite, in the main, responded enthusiastically
to this agenda of reform. Since English was the language of
the new rulers it was imperative to master it. With this in
mind, Hindu College (later in 1856 taken over by the government
and renamed Presidency College), was established through private
Bengali and British Initiative and government encouragement.
The purpose of the College was to educate the scion of the
Bengali elite in English and Western sciences. Thus educated,
Bengalis would be better equipped to administrate the expanding
bureaucracy of the empire in India and accept their place
within it. The establishment of Hindu College was followed
by the setting up of a number of schools and, in 1857, a university.
These developments brought Calcutta to the centre of the
19th century reform movement. Raja Rammohun Roy, often described
as the founder of the Indian Renaissance, initiated a campaign
against idolatry and the caste system in 1816. He founded
a new religious group called the “Brahmo Samaj”,
a movement advocating a purer interpretation of Hindu scriptures
which emphasised monotheism and argued against the advocation
of the caste system. Rammohun was also in favour of English
pedagogy and Western science. He vigorously campaigned for
the abolition of sati, a custom which ordained that an upper
caste Hindu widow immolate herself on her husband’s
funeral pyre, and eventually succeeded in persuading the government
to pass an act prohibiting it. Significantly, Rammohun’s
arguments against sati were not based on principles of Western
reason, but on his interpretation of the scriptures which,
Rammohun argued, did not sanction such a barbarous act. In
Rammohun’s wake came Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, an orthodox
Brahmin pundit, who campaigned, again on the basis of the
scriptures, for the remarriage of Hindu widows. The Widow
Remarriage Act was passed by the government in 1856. A major
revitalising of India’s heritage was under way, with
Calcutta placed at it’s cutting edge.
The enthusiasm for English education, Western sciences and
lifestyle led not only to the establishment of influential
learning establishments but also to a proliferation of smaller
schools and crammers. The system in such institutions was,
at times, far from what had been visualized by Macaulay. Tutored
in these “schools”, Bengalis began to pepper their
conversation with English words. The vulgar imitation of the
West contributed to the growing concern that Indians were
losing their identity on the road to modernisation . A major
reason for the proliferation of these schools was the difficulty
involved in gaining entry into the premier institutions. Ramtanu
Lahiri, a stalwart of the 19th century reform movement, was
obliged, as a boy from the moffussil to run for days after
the palanquin of David Hare, one of the pioneers of English
education, before he was admitted to Hare School. Western
education and enlightenment remained throughout this epoch
an essentially elitist enclave which spawned a coterie of
sycophants and anglomaniacs.
Exposure to Western ideas and ideology produced an extreme
reaction among some of the students of Hindu College. Under
the influence of Henry Vivian Derozio, a brilliant young Eurasian
teacher, students in the “Young Bengal” movement
not only avidly read western philosophy in the 20s and 30s
but also, in an attempt to emulate Western lifestyle, ate
ham and beef. This rebellion caused fractures in family life
as tradition and revolt met head-on. Such iconoclasm often
had its comic side, as in the case of one young man who when
asked to pay his respects to the family deity, the sacred
goddess Kali, raised his hat and said “Good Morning”
ma’am”. More often than not, such irreverence
was merely a passing youthful phase. Raja Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee:
a fire –eater in his youth, he spent his middle age
as an orthodox Brahmin landlord in Uttar Pradesh.
The hallmark of the English educated in the first half of
the 19th century was loyalty to British rule. This was never
more in evidence than during the uprising of 1857. During
that year the elite of Calcutta was gripped by the panic of
the sepoy uprising. They feared that if the Sepoys attacked
the city they would inevitably be the targets of the rebels’
wrath and were terrified of the consequences for their lives
and property. A natural corollary was even greater support
to the British who, even if beleaguered, seemed to be the
only possible source of security. The response of the wealthy
inhabitants of Calcutta to the crisis was therefore to organize
meetings to publicly avow their loyalty.
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