Early Cultural Writings

The Bengal He Lived In

23-July-1894

The society by which Bankim was formed, was the young Bengal of the fifties, the most extraordinary perhaps that India has yet seen,—a society electric with thought and loaded to the brim with passion. Bengal was at that time the theatre of a great intellectual awakening. A sort of miniature Renascence was in process. An ardent and imaginative race, long bound down in the fetters of a single tradition, had had suddenly put into its hands the key to a new world thronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art and Learning. From this meeting of a foreign Art and civilisation with a temperament differing from the temperament which created them, there issued, as there usually does issue from such meetings, an original Art and an original civilisation. Originality does not lie in rejecting outside influences but in accepting them as a new mould into which our own individuality may run. This is what happened and may yet happen in Bengal. The first impulse was gigantic in its proportions and produced men of an almost gigantic originality. Rammohan Ray arose with a new religion in his hand, which was developed on original lines by men almost greater one thinks than he, by Rajnarain Bose and Debendranath Tagore. The two Dutts, Okhay Kumar and Michael Madhu Sudan, began a new Prose and a new Poetry. Vidyasagara, scholar, sage and intellectual dictator, laboured hugely like the Titan he was, to create a new Bengali language and a new Bengali society, while in vast and original learning Rajendra Lal Mitra has not met his match. Around these arose a class of men who formed a sort of seed-bed for the creative geniuses, men of fine critical ability and appreciative temper, scholarly, accomplished, learned in music and the arts, men in short not only of culture, but of original culture. Of these perhaps the most finished patterns were Madhu Sudan's friends,

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Gourdas Byshak, and that scholarly patron of letters, Rajah Jyotindra Mohun Tagore. At the same time there arose, as in other parts of India, a new social spirit and a new political spirit, but these on a somewhat servilely English model. Of all its channels the released energies of the Bengali mind ran most violently into the channel of literature. And this was only natural; for although the Bengali has by centuries of Brahmanic training acquired a religious temper, a taste for law and a taste for learning, yet his peculiar sphere is language. Another circumstance must not be forgotten. Our renascence was marked like its European prototype, though not to so startling an extent, by a thawing of old moral custom. The calm, docile, pious, dutiful Hindu ideal was pushed aside with impatient energy, and the Bengali, released from the iron restraint which had lain like a frost on his warm blood and sensuous feeling, escaped joyously into the open air of an almost Pagan freedom. The ancient Hindu cherished a profound sense of the nothingness and vanity of life; the young Bengali felt vividly its joy, warmth and sensuousness. This is usually the moral note of a Renascence, a burning desire for Life, Life in her warm human beauty arrayed gloriously like a bride. It was the note of the sixteenth century, it is the note of the astonishing return to Greek Paganism, which is now beginning in England and France; and it was in a slighter and less intellectual way the note of the new age in Bengal. Everything done byte men of that day and their intellectual children is marked by an unbounded energy and passion. Their reading was enormous and ran often quite out of the usual track. Madhu Sudan Dutt, besides English, Bengali and Sanskrit, studied Greek, Latin, Italian and French, and wrote the last naturally and with ease. Toru Dutt, that unhappy and immature genius, who unfortunately wasted herself on a foreign language and perished while yet little more than a girl, had, I have been told, a knowledge of Greek. At any rate she could write English with perfect grace and correctness and French with energy and power. Her novels gained the ear of the French public and her songs breathed fire into the hearts of Frenchmen in their fearful struggle with Germany. And as was their reading so was their life. They were

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giants and did everything gigantically. They read hugely, wrote hugely, thought hugely, and drank hugely.

Bankim's student days did not happen among that circle of original geniuses; his time fell between the heroes of the Renascence and the feebler Epigoni of our day. But he had contemporary with him men of extraordinary talent, men like Dinabandhu Mitra and Dwarkanath Mitra, men so to speak of the second tier. Bankim was the last of the original geniuses. Since then the great impulse towards originality has gone backward like a receding wave. After Bankim came the Epigoni, Hemchandra Banerji, Nobin Sen, Robindranath Tagore, men of surprising talent, nay, of unmistakable genius, but too obviously influenced by Shelley and the English poets. And last of all came the generation formed in the schools of Keshab Chandra Sen and Kristo Das Pal, with its religious shallowness, its literary sterility and its madness in social reform. Servile imitators of the English, politicians without wisdom and scholars without learning, they have no pretensions to greatness or originality. Before they came the first mighty impulse had spent itself and Bengal lay fallow for a new. It rests with the new generation, the generation that will soon be sitting in the high places and judging the land, whether there shall be scope for any new impulse to work itself out. Two years ago it looked as if this mighty awakening would lose itself, as the English sixteenth century lost itself, in Puritanism and middle-class politics.

But when Bankim was a student, the traditions of the Hindu college were yet powerful, the Hindu college, that nursery of geniuses, where the brain of the New Age had worked most powerfully and the heart of the New Age had beat with the mightiest vehemence. The men around Bankim were calmer, sedater, more temperate; but they walked in the same ways and followed the same ideals. To that life of hard thinking and hard drinking Bankim was drawn not merely, as some were, by the power of youthful imitativeness, but by sympathy of temperament. He had the novelist's catholicity of taste and keen sense for life, and the artist's repugnance to gloom and dreariness. Even when the thoughts turned to old faith, the clear sanity of the

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man showed itself in his refusal to admit asceticism among the essentials of religion. He never indulged in that habit of frightful and inveterate riot which has killed one or two of our second-rate talents, but it cannot quite be said that he never overstepped the limits or always observed the principle of "nothing in excess," which is the only sure rule for a man's conduct. Some would like to see in this sensuous exuberance the secret of his early decay. It may be so; but speculation on this subject will remain a solemn farce, until it is taken up in a disinterested spirit. At present all our wise disquisitions proceed from unchastened sentiment. Dr. Bhandarkar is a violent social reformer and wants to throw odium upon Hindu society; Mr. Ranade's hobby is a Conservative Radicalism and the spirit moves him to churn the ocean of statistics in a sense more agreeable to his own turn of mind; a third authority, prejudiced against Western Culture, traces all premature deaths to pleasure and wine-bibbing. Each starts from his own sensations, each builds his web of argument in the spirit of a sophist. To this Dr. Bhandarkar brings his moral ardour and grave eloquence, Mr. Remade his trained reason and distinguished talent, the religionist his prejudices and cold precepts. Widely as they differ, they have this in common that they have not for their aim to speak usefully: they are simply trying to find reasons for their own likes and dislikes. Dealing with subjects of scientific interest in a spirit of this sort is only to invite confusion and exclude light. We in Bengal with our tendency to the sins of the blood are perhaps more apt than others to call to our aid the gloomy moralities of the Puritan; in censuring Bankim we are secretly fortifying ourselves against ourselves; but in this instance it is a false caution. The cultured Bengali begins life with a physical temperament already delicate and high-strung. He has the literary constitution with its femineity and acute nervousness. Subject this to a cruel strain when it is tenderest and needs the most careful rearing, to the wicked and wantonly cruel strain of instruction through a foreign tongue; put it under the very worst system of training; add enormous academical labour, immense official drudgery in an unhealthy climate and constant mental application; crown all with the

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nervous expense of thought and fever of composition plus the unfailing exhaustion that comes after; and we need not go to the momentary excesses of a generous blood to find the explanation of broken health and an early decline. The miracle of it is not that the victims die prematurely but that they live so long. Perhaps we might begin to enquire into the causes of that phenomenon for a change.

One thing however is certain that whatever else Bankim lost, he gained from his youthful surroundings much emotional experience and great flexibility of mind. There too he got his initial stimulus. Like Telang, and perhaps even more than Telang, Bankim was blessed or cursed with an universal talent. Everything he touched, shaped itself to his hand. It would have been easy for him to make disastrous mistakes, to miss his vocation, waste himself in English and at the end to leave no enduring monument of his personality behind. What saved him? It was the initial stimulus and the cultured environment; it was that he lived among men who could distinguish a talent when they saw it and once distinguished were bent on realizing it; among men in fact who had some instinct for finding their way. With a limited creature like man, the power of the environment is immense. Genius it is true exists independently of environment and by much reading and observation may attain to self-expression but it is environment that makes self-expression easy and natural; that provides sureness, verve, stimulus. Here lies the importance to the mind in its early stage of self-culture of fine social surroundings;—that sort of surroundings which our Universities do nothing and ought to have done everything to create.

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