'Young Bengal': How A Ragtag Group Of Bengali Students Became India's First Radicals

In 1831, the editor of The India Gazette; or, Calcutta Public Advertiser wrote a report about a group he called the ‘Radicals’, ‘Ultra-Reformers’ or ‘the Ultras’, who were responsible for an unprecedented upheaval in social, religious, and political thinking centred in Calcutta. Later christened the ‘Young Bengal’ group, the members of this reformist movement were students of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, the prodigious assistant headmaster of the Hindu College at the time. Himself barely older than his students, the 19-year-old Derozio and his students Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee, Hara Chandra Ghosh, Krishna Mohan Banerjee, Peary Chand Mitra, Radhanath Sikdar, Ramgopal Ghosh, Ramtanu Lahiri, Rasik Krishna Mallick, Sib Chandra Deb embarked upon a collision course with orthodoxy and authority, generating scandal and sensation in equal measure.

The son of an Indian-Portuguese father and a British mother, the Calcutta-born Derozio considered himself "a proud Indian". After initially gaining recognition as an adolescent poet prodigy, publishing sonnets and epic poems in English in local newspapers and magazines, Derozio came to be known as something of an enfant terrible among the early 19th-century Calcutta intelligentsia for his views against British authority as well as Hindu orthodoxy and religious dogmatism. Derozio's intense zeal for teaching, his admiration for David Hume's philosophy of skepticism, and his interactions with students created a sensation at Hindu College. He organised debates where ideas and social norms were freely debated. In 1828, he motivated his students to form the 'Academic Association', a literary and debate club where they argued over questions of equality, morality, and human rights.

The Academic Association published journals, in both English and Bengali, which encouraged public discourse and began to challenge aspects of colonial rule, such as forced labour, and to advocate for freedom of the press. But their questions and criticisms were not only pointed at the British Colonial authorities. They also challenged the inequity within their own society such as child marriage, the caste system, and untouchability. In bold defiance of these practices, the Academic Association shared meals with people of other religions and castes and agitated for the education of women. Most notoriously, some members even ate beef in defiance of strict Hindu orthodoxy, which was at the time, as it remains now, a taboo.

This coincided with a social, religious, and cultural reformist and revivalist movement now known as the Bengal Renaissance. Led by Bengali icons like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the Tagores, and members of the Young Bengal movement, the Bengal Renaissance was a century of intellectual, political, and social transformation which sparked some of the earliest flickers of what would become the Indian Independence movement.

Unfortunately, Derozio did not live to see his dream come true. Disgraced and disavowed by the Hindu College because of backlash from the Hindu orthodoxy, the young educator resigned from his post in April 1931 and succumbed to cholera later that year. He was 22 years old at the time of his death.

In 1852, Radhanath Sikdar, by then a mathematician, became the first person to accurately measure Mount Everest, known as Peak XV until then — something the British had been trying (and failing) to do for decades. Two years later, Harachandra Ghosh was elected judge in the Small Causes Court in Calcutta, the first Indian to hold the position under British rule. Around the same time, Ramgopal Ghose, founded the first “indigenous” import/export business of its size, trading in, among other things, Burmese rice. In 1938, the members of the Young Bengal group established 'The Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge' to carry on Derozio's dream and legacy of an educated and enlightened India. They argued for the rights of the peasant, campaigned against corruption in the police and judiciary, brought a legal case against a British magistrate for the mistreatment of labourers, and continued their fight against racial, gender, and caste discrimination in 19th-century Indian society.

To learn more about the Young Bengal movement, read 'India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire' by Rosinka Chaudhuri.

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