Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

10

Rishi Rajnarain Bose - Sri Aurobindo's Grandfather

We find the roots of this Tree in Rajnarain's Bengali autobiography, Atmacharit.

"My great grandfather, SUKDEB BOSE, received in dream the formula of a medicine," writes Rajnarain. And, as is to be expected, Sukdeb never charged anybody anything for it. Nor did his descendants.

"My grandfather, RAMSUNDAR BOSE, was a most generous-hearted man. Every morning, an umbrella slung over his shoulder, he would visit every house in the village and inquire if they had food for the day. And if there was no food in somebody's house, he would send some from his own. Also he would himself nurse the sick who came to him to be treated." Rajnarain adds in passing, "He was very fond of sheltering loonies."

Ramsundar had three sons. The second son, NANDA KISHORE BOSE, was the father of Rajnarain.

Nanda Kishore's younger brother, HARIHAR BOSE, was born in 1804. "Uncle was an expert in our system of medicine,"

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writes Rajnarain, "by feeling the pulse of a patient he could tell exactly when the person was going to die." The uncle had a soft spot for his nephew, without however approving of the latter's every action. "When the Alfanso mango tree planted in our house bore its first fruit, he put it in my hand saying, 'My planting this tree is justified today.'"

N. K. Bose was another character. "My father, Nanda Kishore Bose, was born in 1802. He seemed made of wax so fair was he. He was extremely lean. He never sat down to write, but always did it standing." The son outdid his father. We shall see how by and by.

Rajnarain writes, "He was one of the first disciples of Raja Rammohan Roy, and even worked as his secretary for some time after leaving school. My father was a believer in Vedanta; he died uttering OM, OM, OM. It was on 5 December 1845, at the age of forty-three."

Rajnarain Bose was born on 7 September 1826 in his ancestral village Boral, about twenty kilometres from Calcutta. He was a brilliant student of Hare School in Calcutta, which he joined at the age of eight; his answer papers were published in some of the leading newspapers. He was a favourite student of David Hare. In 1840 he joined the Hindu College (now the Presidency College) on a sholarship. The Hindu College was the first English College that had the support of both the Hindu community and the British rulers.

"My first marriage took place when I was seventeen. It was with Prasannamoyee Mitra, aged eleven."

Rajnarain was a voracious reader. "While still a College

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student, several times I changed my religion: from Hindu to Unitarian Christian to Muslim to agnostic ... all depending upon the influence of the book I was then reading. At the age of nineteen, I met the greatly revered Babu Debendranath Tagore, and became a Brahmo, which I still am [in 1889]." Sri Aurobindo remembered, "My grandfather started being a Brahmo and ended by writing a book on Hinduism and proclaiming it the best religion. Debendranath Tagore became rather anxious and feared he might run into excess of zeal."

Then Rajnarain fell into bad ways. "As a College student, I took to drinking. After college, several friends and I would go to the nearby Goldighi Park. From a shop across the road, where they prepared meat Muslim-fashion —highly seasoned meat skewered on a wooden stick and broiled over a charcoal fire —we would bring a mutton leg and eat it. And along with that drink brandy, neat. We all thought this to be the best possible sign of showing how civilized we were, and of reforming our society.

"One night I got home so tight that my mother said in annoyance, 'I won't stay in Calcutta any longer, I'll go back to our village.' Then my father, coming to know about my habit of heavy drinking, adopted a stratagem which revealed to me for the first time that he too ate food prepared by Muslims.

"I shall describe the trick he used to make me a moderate drinker. He called me one evening to his study. He shut the door behind me. I didn't understand what the matter was. Then I saw him open a drawer and pull out a corkscrew, a bottle of sherry, and a wine-glass. He then opened the big tin

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box which was sent daily to our house by his Office Chief, and which we always thought contained official papers for Father to work on. But when Father opened the tin box I saw no official papers inside, instead it was full of pulao [rice dish], meatballs, chops, and rich meat or fish curry. Father said to me: 'Daily, after evening has set, you can eat all this first-class food with me, but you will not get more than two glasses of sherry. If ever I hear that you are drinking elsewhere, I'll at once stop giving you this food.'

"But that moderate drinking did not satisfy me." His excess brought on an illness along with a high fever. "For six months I was bedridden. My father lost all hope for my life. But by the will of God I was cured. It was because of this illness that after only five years of college I had to leave it." It was in 1845. He was a senior scholarship holder.

Then tragedy struck. "Just a little after that, my first wife died by drowning at her father's place. She had gone swimming in a pond with friends, went underwater, and never surfaced.

"And then my father died some time after that."

This shock treatment jolted Rajnarain back to moderation, till finally he entirely gave it up.

In April 1847, Rajnarain married again. NlSTARINI was the daughter of Abhayacharan Dutta of Hatkhola. She wrote poetry, and in the 1870s some of her poems were printed. They had eight children, five daughters and three sons. Some of them were talented. The eldest son, Jogindranath Bose (Sri Aurobindo's 'Boromama') was a sought-after columnist, and the Bengal

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correspondent of the Madras-based newspaper The Hindu. His articles regularly found a place of prominence in The Bengalee of S. N. Banerji, The Indian Mirror of Keshab C. Sen, Hope, Amrita Bazar, etc. The youngest, Munindranath, was also a man of letters. The youngest daughter Lajjabati Bose's (1870-1942) poems were a feature of many Bengali magazines of the time. Neither she nor Jogindra ever married. The eldest daughter, Swarnalata, was a lady of parts —she wrote stories and dramas.

Rajnarain Bose himself was a prolific writer; his themes were of course of a serious nature. He was equally well versed in Bengali, English and Persian. Bepin Chandra Pal, describing the life and thought of Rajnarain, wrote, "He represented the high-water mark of the composite culture of his country — Vedantic, Islamic and European. . . . He also seems to have worked out a synthesis in his own spiritual life between the three dominant world-cultures that have come face to face in modern India."¹

He was an acknowledged leader in Bengali literature. Poems, essays, articles flowed freely from his pen. And he gave lectures. His words —from his pen or his tongue — always stirred up a hornet's nest, however innocent the subject might be. Complained Debendranath, "Whatever you say or write always generates much debate, even controversy." But Rajnarain was not one to be cowed down by his critics, of whom he had many to be sure. Not only did he speak or write on Brahmoism, but he lauded Hinduism ! The day at the end of 1872 when he gave a

1, Karmayogin, N°7, August 1909.

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lecture on the 'Superiority of Hinduism,' with Maharshi Tagore in the Chair, the hall was packed to capacity and overflowed across the street. Because, "people thought, what can anybody say in favour of this rotten Hinduism? It is our duty to hear him."

It was worth their while. The lecturer undertook to prove, in the face of the younger Brahmo body as well as Christian Missionaries, that Hinduism is superior to all other religions, because it owes the name to no man (let us add: no Pope, no Ayatollah either), in other words, it is the only 'religion' which is not based on a God-chosen personality; because it is the only 'religion' which knows no heresy; because while other scriptures inculcate worship for the rewards it may bring or the punishment it may avert, the Hindu is taught to worship God for the love of God; because, being unsectarian and believing in the good of all religions, Hinduism is non-proselytizing and tolerant, and possesses an antiquity which carries it back to the fountainhead of all thought.

Rajnarain concluded his lecture thus:

"... I see this rejuvenated nation again illumining the world by her knowledge, spirituality and culture, and the glory of the Hindu nation again spreading over the whole world." Bankim Chandra, greatly appreciative, wrote: "Let there be a shower of flowers and sandal on the pen of Rajnarain Babu."

Dayananda Saraswati (1824-83), the founder of the Arya Samaj, was a great reformer in the theological and social fields. A visit to Calcutta at the end of 1872 made a deep impression on him; for Calcutta was then a cauldron of new ideas. There he

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learnt the power of the printed word. At Calcutta he met people after his own heart who, like him, were concerned with the fallen condition of Hinduism. Among them was Rajnarain Bose, one of the makers of modern Bengal.

A wind, gentle or stormy, seemed to be blowing across the globe in 1872, suiting itself to the land over which it blew. If it was a budding nationalism in the East, it was a growing movement for Nature conservation in the West. If Bankim began serializing the novel Ananda Math, including the national mantra 'Bande Mataram,' with the first issue of his magazine Bangadarshan in 1872, the first national park in the United States, Yellowstone, was also established the same year. Sri Aurobindo's birth had stirred the Earth's air. And heavens too. In 1872 Halley's comet began its approaching journey to the sun.

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