The Bengal Renaissance and British India

The “Bengal Renaissance” is one of those terms that is at once indispensable and slightly fraudulent. Indispensable, because the cultural and intellectual transformation of Calcutta, Dacca, and the wider Bengal Presidency in the nineteenth century was real, and produced a body of literature, science, and political thought that has shaped the modern Indian nation. Slightly fraudulent, because the very phrase implies a unified movement where in fact there were several, often sharply opposed. The Banglaproshaka (“Bengal Enlighteners”) of Henry Derozio’s Young Bengal movement in the 1820s, the Tattvabodhini Sabha of Debendranath Tagore in the 1840s, the Brahmo Samaj of Raja Rammohan Roy, the Adi Dharm of Matua devotion, the literary nationalism of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, and the political radicalism of the Swadeshi movement were all, in some sense, “the Bengal Renaissance” — and none of them would have recognised the others as allies.

The debate over what produced the Bengal Renaissance is one of the most energetic in modern Indian historiography. The British imperial presence, the introduction of English-language education under Macaulay’s 1835 Minute, the development of the printing press, the activity of the Christian missionaries, the social reform movements of Rammohan Roy, the influence of European Romanticism, the Hindu reformism of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, and the political radicalism of Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal have all been put forward as the principal cause. The more careful historians have, on the whole, abandoned the search for a single cause, and have settled for an account that stresses the interplay of all of them.

Henry Derozio and the Young Bengal Movement

The earliest phase of the Bengal Renaissance is the “Young Bengal” movement of the late 1820s and 1830s, centred on Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), the Eurasian son of an Indo-Portuguese father and an English mother, who taught English literature and history at Hindu College, Calcutta, from 1826 to 1831. Derozio was a free-thinker in the radical-Enlightenment tradition of Tom Paine, and his students — the “Young Bengal” group — were notorious for their heterodoxy, their European dress, their criticism of Hindu orthodoxy, and their interest in the politics of the French Revolution. The Derozian moment is important for two reasons. First, it showed that the English-language education introduced by the British could, very quickly, produce a generation of Indians who were critical of both British rule and Hindu orthodoxy. Second, it established a model of Indian cultural production — the essay, the periodical, the political pamphlet, the English-language novel — that would be imitated for the rest of the century.

Rammohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj

The more substantial, and the more lasting, phase of the Bengal Renaissance was the work of Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), the Bengali Brahman who, in the 1820s, founded the Brahmo Sabha (later the Brahmo Samaj), the first of the Indian reformist Hindu organisations. Rammohan Roy was a polymath: he edited the first Bengali newspaper, founded the first Bengali school on European lines, and wrote the first Bengali book on rational theology. He was also a serious social reformer: he campaigned against sati, the burning of widows, and he won the debate in the 1820s with the help of the British Indian authorities, who abolished sati in 1829. The Brahmo Samaj, as the movement was later known, was, in many ways, a Hindu reformist movement: it rejected image-worship, the authority of the Vedas as revelation, the caste system, and the more elaborate rituals of Hindu practice. It was also, in many ways, a Christian-influenced movement: Rammohan Roy corresponded with the Unitarian missionaries of Serampore, he wrote The Precepts of Jesus (1820), and he died at Bristol, where he was the Indian representative at the court of William IV.

Debendranath Tagore and the Tattvabodhini Sabha

The second generation of the Bengal Renaissance was the work of Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), the father of Rabindranath, who founded the Tattvabodhini Sabha in 1839 and assumed the leadership of the Brahmo Samaj in 1842. Debendranath’s contribution was, in some respects, more philosophical than the earlier reformers: he translated the Upanishads into Bengali, he systematised the Brahmo theology, and he was the first to articulate the doctrine of the “Vedantic theism” that became the principal intellectual tradition of the Brahmo Samaj. He was also a practical man: he was the founder of the Tagore estates at Jorasanko, the patron of the journal Tattvabodhini Patrika, and the principal Indian patron of the Calcutta Unitarian mission. The Tattvabodhini Sabha was, in effect, the institutional centre of the second-generation Bengal Renaissance, and it was from this circle that the Tagore family — and, through them, the literary and educational movements of late-nineteenth-century Calcutta — would emerge.

Bankimchandra and the Literary Nationalism

The third phase of the Bengal Renaissance was the literary and political one, dominated by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894), the first major Bengali novelist. Bankimchandra was, in his own way, as much a founder of modern India as Rammohan Roy: his novel Anandamath (1882), with its hymn “Vande Mataram” (“I praise thee, Mother”), became the most important single text of the Indian nationalist movement, and the hymn has been, since 1950, the national song of the Republic of India. Bankimchandra’s novels — Durgeshnandini (1865), Kapalkundala (1866), Krishnakanter Uil (1878) — were the first Indian novels in the European sense, and they established the form of the Indian novel for the next century.

The Bengali-language literary movement was accompanied by a parallel development in the Bengali-language periodical press. The Calcutta Review (1844), the Hindoo Patriot (1853), the Amrita Bazar Patrika (1868), and the Bangadarshan (1872) were the principal journals. The most consequential of them was the Hindoo Patriot, the English-language weekly founded by Harish Chandra Mukherjee, which was, in many ways, the principal organ of the early Indian nationalist movement. The British Indian authorities’ Press Act of 1878, which required the registration of printing presses, was the most direct response to the influence of the Indian-language press.

The British Indian Government and the Renaissance

The British Indian government’s relation to the Bengal Renaissance was, throughout the nineteenth century, ambivalent. The Government of India was the principal patron of the English-language education system that had produced the Renaissance: the Sanskrit College of Calcutta (1824), the Hindu College (1817), the Presidency College (1817), and the University of Calcutta (1857) were all, in some sense, government institutions. At the same time, the Government of India was deeply suspicious of the political radicalism that the education system had produced: the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, the Arms Act of 1878, the Indian Councils Act of 1892, the Indian Press Act of 1910, and the Rowlatt Act of 1919 were all, in some sense, responses to the political consequences of the English-language education system. The Bengali middle class was, by 1900, the most politically active in India, and the partition of Bengal in 1905 was the most direct British response to the political activity.

The Critique: The “Bengal Renaissance” as a Colonial Construction

The most influential critique of the “Bengal Renaissance” as a historical category is the work of Partha Chatterjee, whose Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986) argued that the so-called “Renaissance” was, in its intellectual content, a derivative of European Enlightenment thought and that its principal effect was to produce an Indian middle class that was, in many ways, the most loyal servant of the British Raj. The critique has been influential, but it has not displaced the older, more celebratory historiography. The most thoughtful response is S. N. Balagangadhara’s The Heathen in His Blindness… (1994), which treats the “Bengal Renaissance” as a category imposed on Indian intellectual history by nineteenth-century European Orientalism.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Bengal Renaissance has been transformed, since the 1960s, by the work of Sumit Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, and others. The earlier celebratory accounts — the works of R. C. Majumdar, J. K. Majumdar, and the contributors to the centenary volumes of the 1940s — have been supplemented, and in places supplanted, by the more critical accounts of the post-colonial generation. The unresolved question in the field is the same as for the Bengal Renaissance itself: whether the category is a useful historical abstraction or a colonial construction that has outlived its usefulness. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the category a clean bill of health.

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