Vidyasagara, : Īśvara Chandra (1820-91) laboured like a Titan to create a new Bengali language & a new Bengali society. He is considered the father of Bengali prose. “Educationist, reformer, philanthropist: of a high-caste Brahmin family in reduced circumstances: educated at the Sanskrit College, Calcutta: studied Hindu philosophy & law & obtained the title of Vidyāsāgara in 1839: Head Pandit of the College of Fort William & Professor 1850: Principal 1851 of the Sanskrit College during which period mastered the English language. His first literary work was Betal Panchabinshati (1846) remarkable for purity of style. In 1851, on the death of Drinkwater Bethune, the Bethune school was placed under his care & he was associated with it for next 20 years. In 1855, he was appointed, in addition, Inspector of Schools & established several girls’ schools in Hughli & Burdwan. As a result of unremitting labour & strenuous agitation, Vidyāsāgara succeeded in inducing the Government to pass a measure in 1856 legalising the remarriage of Hindu widows. In 1858, in consequence of a difference of opinion with the Director of Public Instruction, he resigned his appointment: from 1864 he managed the Metropolitan Institution, Calcutta: Fellow of Calcutta Univ. in 1857: after leaving the public service, he continued to interest himself in educational questions, esp. of female education. He laboured to break down, by legislation, the system of polygamy, but without success: he started the widow-remarriage movement. Though persecuted for his reforming zeal, he never lost heart in his educational, social & philanthropic efforts. He published numerous works, chiefly in Bengali on education: a carriage accident in 1865 gravely affected his health. [Buckland]
... prepared for them. Many daring minds were already at work, but they fell short of their high conception. Rammohan Ray, the great Vidyasagara, Okhay Kumar Dutt and the Bengali playwrights were all working bravely towards the same consummation. But Page 112 Vidyasagara, though he had much in him of the scholar and critic, was nothing of an artist; Okhay Kumar's audience ran only to the subscribers... contempt for things Bengali. Among the rest the Bengali tongue was put by as an instrument hopelessly bad and unsatisfying; even Madhu Sudan in his youth neglected and forgot it. The strivings of Vidyasagara and Okhay Kumar Dutt were the strivings of a few far-sighted and patriotic men in a generation misled by false ideals. On that generation Madhu Sudan's first great poems, Sharmishtha and Tilottama... Lauded with rapturous enthusiasm by the cultured, they were anathematised by the pedants. All the Pandits, all the Sanscritists, all the fanatics of classicism, even the great Page 113 Vidyasagara himself, then the intellectual dictator of Bengal, were startled out of their senses by these magnificent and mighty poems. Tilottama was a gauntlet thrown down by the Romantic school to the classical ...
... 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 ...
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.