Early Cultural Writings

His Youth and College Life

16-July-1894

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, the creator and king of Bengali prose, was a high-caste Brahman and the son of a distinguished official in Lower Bengal. Born at Kantalpara on the 27th June 1838, dead at Calcutta on the 8th April 1894, his fifty-six years of laborious life were a parcel of the most splendid epoch in Bengali history; yet among its many noble names, his is the noblest. His life shows us three faces, his academical career, his official labours and his literary greatness; it will be here my endeavour to give some description of each and all. The first picture we have of his childhood is his mastering the alphabet at a single reading; and this is not only the initial picture but an image and prophecy of the rest. Even thus early men saw in him the three natural possessions of the cultured Bengali, a boundless intellect, a frail constitution and a temper mild to the point of passivity. And indeed Bankim was not only our greatest; he was also our type and magnified pattern. He was the image of all that is most finely characteristic in the Bengali race. At Midnapur, the home of his childhood, the magnificence of his intellect came so early into view, that his name grew into a proverb. "You will soon be another Bankim,"—for a master to say that was the hyperbole of praise, and the best reward of industry. He ascended the school by leaps and bounds; so abnormal indeed was his swiftness that it put his masters in fear for him. They grew nervous lest they should spoil by over-instruction the delicate fibre of his originality, and with a wise caution they obstructed his entrance into the highest class. Bankim had always an extraordinary luck. Just as at school his fine promise was saved by the prudence of its guardians from the altar of High Education, the Moloch to whom we stupidly sacrifice India's most hopeful sons, so it was saved at Hugly College by his own distaste for hard work. At Hugly College

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quite as much as at Midnapur he had the reputation of an intellectual miracle. And indeed his ease and quickness in study were hardly human. Prizes and distinctions cost him no effort in the attaining. He won his honours with a magical carelessness and as if by accident while others toiled and failed. But while unconquerably remiss in his duties, he bestowed wonderful pains on his caprices. He conceived at this time a passion for Sanskrit and read with great perseverance at a Pandit's toll. In a single year he had gone through the Mugdhabodh, Raghuvansa, Bhatti and the Meghaduta. Advancing at this pace he managed in something under four years to get a sense of mastery in the ancient tongue and a feeling for its literary secrets which gave him immense leverage in his work of creating a new prose. Not that there is the least touch of pedantry in his Bengali style: rather it was he and Madhu Sudan Dutt who broke the tyranny of the Sanskrit tradition: but one feels how immensely his labour was simplified by a fine and original use of his Sanskrit knowledge. At the age of seventeen, being then a student of five years' standing, he cut short his attendance at Hugly College. He left behind him a striking reputation, to which, except Dwarkanath Mitra, no student has ever come near. Yet he had done positively nothing in the way of application or hard work. As with most geniuses his intellectual habits were irregular. His spirit needed larger bounds than a school routine could give it, and refused, as every free mind does, to cripple itself and lose its natural suppleness. It was his constant habit, a habit which grew on him with the lapse of time, to hide himself in a nook of the College Library and indulge his wandering appetite in all sorts of reading. At the eleventh hour and with an examination impending, he would catch up his prescribed books, hurry through them at a canter, win a few prizes, and go back to his lotus-eating. I believe this is a not uncommon habit with brilliant young men in all countries and it saves them from the sterilizing effects of over instruction; but it hardly strikes one as a safe policy for slower minds. At the Presidency College, his next seat of instruction, he shaped his versatile intellect to the study of law. He had then some project of qualifying as a High Court Pleader, but at the

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right moment for literature the Calcutta University came into being and Bankim took literary honours instead of legal. The Courts lost a distinguished pleader and India gained a great man. Bankim, however, seems to have had some hankering after Law; for he subsequently snatched time from hard official drudgery and larger literary toil to appear with his usual distinguished success for the B.L. But his chief pretension to academical originality is perhaps that he was, together with Jodunath Bose, our first B.A., even in this detail leading the way for his countrymen. His official appointment followed close on the heels of his degree. At the age of twenty he was sent as Deputy Magistrate to Jessore.

I have drawn out in a manner as little perfunctory as I could manage, this skeleton of Bankim's academical life. In any account of an eminent Hindu a dry sketch of this sort is a form that must be gone through; for we are a scholastic people and in our life examinations and degrees fill up half the book. But examinations and degrees are a minor episode in the history of a mind. An European writer has acutely observed that nothing which is worth knowing can be taught. That is a truth which Dr. Bhandarkar, when he can spare time from his Carlyle, might ponder over with profit. Not what a man learns, but what he observes for himself in life and literature is the formative agency in his existence, and the actual shape it will take is much determined by the sort of social air he happens to breathe at that critical moment when the mind is choosing its road. All else is mere dead material useless without the breath of a vivifying culture. If examinations and degrees are the skeleton of university life, these are its soul and life-blood, and where they exist poorly or not at all, education, except for the one or two self-sufficing intellects, becomes mere wind and dust. Among what sort of men did the student Bankim move? From what social surroundings did his adolescent personality take its colour? These are questions of a nearer interest than the examinations he passed or the degrees he took; and to them I shall give a larger answer.

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