Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar
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Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (Bangla: ঈশ্বর চন্দ্র বিদ্যাসাগর Ishshor Chôndro Biddashagor) (1820-1891), born Ishwar Chandra Bandopadhyaya (ঈশ্বর চন্দ্র বন্দ্যোপাধ্যায় Ishshor Chôndro Bôndopaddhae), was a Bengali polymath and a pillar of the Bengal Renaissance . He was an academic, philosopher, educator, printer, entrepreneur, writer, translater, reformer and philanthropist. His efforts to simplify and modernize Bangla prose were significant. He also rationalised and simplified the Bengali alphabet and type which had remained unchanged since Charles Wilkins and Panchanan Karmakar had cut the first Bangla types in 1780.
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[edit] Biography
Born at the village of Birsingha in Midnapore, (now part of West Bengal, India) to a poor Brahmin family, his childhood was poor but full of learning, as his father was a teacher of Sanskrit and wanted his son to follow his profession. Vidyasagar's early education was at the village pathshala or traditional school. His father was a clerk at a metal goods shop in Burrabazar in Calcutta and in 1828 he accompanied his father to the city. A relative of his, Madhusudan Bachaspati, persuaded his father to send him to Sanskrit College instead, so that he would be exposed to both Western and Eastern systems of learning. Vidyasagar continued to show the brilliance he had displayed in Birsingha, studying in extremely deprived circumstances (he is said to have sat under a street lamp to read after dark). However he soon began to win scholarship which somewhat eased his penury.
He graduated in 1839 in Hindu law, for which he received the title 'Vidyasagar' (Ocean of knowledge). Two years later he took a job as head pundit (Sanskrit teacher) at Fort William College. In 1846 he joined Sanskrit College as Assistant Secretary. A year later he and his friend Madan Mohan Tarkalankar set up the Sanskrit Press and Depository, a print shop and bookstore (see below). In 1849 Vidyasagar tangled with Rasamoy Dutta, then Secretary of Sanskrit College. One of the issues Vidyasagar fought for was whether Sanskrit College should remain a Brahmin preserve or whether boys from lower castes could study there. Vidyasagar wanted not only lower caste boys but also women of all communities to receive the best education, and he was not afraid to say so in the teeth of opposition from the Hindu establishment. The establishment felt this all the more keenly because on the surface he was one of them: a Brahmin teacher of Sanskrit who began his career in the traditional village school. Vidyasagar delighted in mischievously upsetting people's assumptions about him.
Vidyasagar resigned from Sanskrit College in 1849 and was reinstated a year later by his admirers in the education department who created a special post for him as teacher of literature in 1851 (the year Rasamoy Dutta resigned). He agreed to return on the condition that the college be reformed. He also served as Inspector of Schools and set up twenty model schools in six months. In 1854 the British government began making preparations to wind up the East India Company and bring India under the Crown, and Fort William College was closed down. However, the new University of Calcutta was proposed, and Vidyasagar was made a founder member. Vidyasagar continued to serve as a teacher at Sanksrit College till 1858. By then the Sanskrit Press was a roaring success and was absorbing all his energies. He was also by now deeply involved with the campaign for women's rights.
The Calcutta Training School had been set up in 1859; in 1864 Vidyasagar became its director. It was renamed the Hindu Metropolitan Institute and in 1872 it was granted the status of a college. Today it is a university named after its greatest benefactor -- Vidyasagar University.
Vidyasagar's generosity and kindness have been attested by many who interacted with him personally. Unlike many of the reformers of his time, he was not a wealthy man. He could not underwrite his own campaigns, and he could not afford the arrogance of wealth, and this intensified his sympathy for the less fortunate in society. Indeed he sought to teach humility and tolerance to all he encountered, great and small alike. Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) said of him "There is not a man of my age in Northern India, on whom his shadow has not fallen."
[edit] Vidyasagar and Widow Remarriage
Perhaps Vidyasagar's greatest legacy is the result of his unflinching campaign to better the situation of Indian women, specially in his native Bengal. Vidyasagar lived in a time where many social reformers, such as the luminaries of the Brahmo Samaj movement -- Raja Rammohun Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Debendranath Tagore -- and Christian missionaries like Alexander Duff, Krishna Mohan Banerjee and Lal Behari Dey, were attempting to reform Indian social practice. But unlike them, Vidyasagar did not seek to set up alternative societies or systems of manners, he worked for transformation of orthodox Hindu society from within. As the principal of the famous Sanskrit College, he encouraged scholars to study ancient sacred texts and interpret them for the times. His study of these texts convinced him that the debased status of women in nineteenth century Hindu society was not sanctioned by the scriptures, but had more to do with existing power relations in society. The bias in law against female inheritance, wealth and property, and the social prejudice against female autonomy and education, were in his eyes comparatively recent phenomena.
Vidyasagar almost single-handedly introduced the practice of widow remarriage to mainstream Hindu society, where previously it had only occurred sporadically among progressive members of the Brahmo Samaj). The prevailing custom of Kulin Brahmin polygamy allowed elderly men (often on the verge of death) to marry many teenage girls or even infants, supposedly to spare their parents the shame of having an unmarried girl attain puberty in their house. The girls were usually abandoned soon after marriage and left behind in their parental homes, with their parents bearing the entire expense of their upkeep in addition to the financial burden of the wedding and dowry. The children would often be widowed within a few years, and thereby condemned to live in abstinence, grief, torture, deprivation and discrimination. They were not allowed to eat meat, fish, onions, garlic and (often) sugar, had to rise before dawn to carry out worship and rituals, bathe in icy water and wrap a clean sari around their bodies without drying them, and pick flowers with the night's dew still on them. By custom they ate last in the household, or went without. They had to dress in plain white cotton saris and shave their heads for the rest of their lives to render them unattractive to men. Some would even be thrown out of their houses or sent to Varanasi or Vrindavan, supposedly to pray and purify themselves, but in reality they frequently ended up as prostitutes, rape victims and unsupported mothers.
Vidyasagr proposed and pushed through the Widow Remarriage Act no XV of 1856. In December of that year Shreeshchandra Vidyaratna, a teacher at Sanskrit Colege and Vidyasagar's colleague, contracted the fist marriage with a widow under the Act. Vidyasagar was materially involved in arranging this wedding, and he campaigned tirelessly to implement the Act in society, offering to officiate as priest at the marriage of widows since orthodox priests refused. He encouraged his son to marry a widow and established the Hindu Family Annuity Fund to help widows who could not remarry. He financed many such weddings, sometimes getting into debt as a result.
Goutam Ghose's film Antarjali Yatra is based on the theme of Kulin Brahmin polygamy in nineteenth century Bengal. In it a young widow waits for her elderly husband to die on the banks of the Ganga (where sick people were often abandoned).
[edit] The Sanskrit Press
In 1847 Vidyasagar set up the Sanskrit Press and Depository on Amherst Street in north Calcutta with a loan of six hundred rupees.[1] His first titles were Bharatchandra Ray’s Annadamangal Kavya for which his copy-text was a rare manuscript owned by the Krishnanagar zamindars, and the Betal Panchabingshati (Twenty Five Tales of a Demon), traslated from the Sanskrit epic Kathasaritsagar. In 1849 his partner Madan Mohan Tarkalankar began an illustrated series for children, Shishu Shiksha (A Child’s Lessons). This was the first set of illustrated books for children produced in Bengal. Vidyasagar contributed the third volume of the series, which was his famous textbook Bodhodoy (The Dawn of Comprehension, 1850). Five years later he published Barnaparichay (বর্ণপরিচয় Bôrnoporichôe), a manual of the Bengali alphabet. "Barna" (বর্ণ bôrno) means "letter (of the alphabet)", "parichay" (পরিচয় porichôe) means "introduction". To this day, this is the first book that a Bengali child reads to learn the Bengali alphabet and its elementary use.
Vidyasagar and Tarkalankar were anxious to replace the ubiquitous Shishubodhak, Ballobodh, Bornobodh, and other popular textbooks, often pseudonymous or written by many hands. These were unscientific and unsystematic grab bags of folktales, proverbs, rules for negating curses, shlokas from the Arthashastra, charms and rituals, excerpts from the epics and other edifying fragments, more like a household manual than a child's textbook. Vidyasagar also reformed Bengali typography into an alphabet of twelve vowels and 40 consonants, He tried to streamline the system of 'joined letters', which as a printer he found both irrational and expensive, but without much success, as no consensus could be built on what alternative to use for them.[2] In 1857, the Sanskrit Press printed and sold 84,200 copies of its books.[3]
The success of the Sanskrit Press was extremely important for Vidyasagar, since he lacked familial or personal wealth and had to support himself as well as find money for his campaigns. It also gave him an instrument trhough which he could speak to Bengal, and it magnified his words and distributed them cheaply to every child in the land. Furthermore, the print shop's ever growing hunger for texts stimulated him to write and publish. It not only allowed him to reach an audience, but also meant he could help others to be heard as well, and thus tied in to his philanthropic projects. Lastly, it allowed him to put his ideas about education into concrete form and make real and useful tools for education. Rather than expound his ideas to others, he could put them directly into practice and show everyone the results. The enormous popularity of his books bore him out.
Today, however, Bornoporichoy looks somewhat dated, and though it is still used, this is more out of respect for Vidyasagar's memory than for its intrinsic attractiveness or child-friendliness. It has been largely superseded by Rabindranath Tagore's Sahaj Path series, which is much more attractively formulated, and better illustrated (by the famous artist Nandalal Bose). Nevertheless, we must not forget that Bornoporichoy inaugurated the era of modern Bengali prose, and trained a whole generation of Bengali writers in the use of their mother tongue. Its aphorisms are still quoted today, and its name is still instantly recognisable.
The Vidyasagar Mela, a fair dedicated to spreading education and social awareness, has been held in his memory every year from 1994. Since 2001, it has been held simultaneously in Calcutta and Birsingha.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Nikhil Sarkar, ‘Adijuger Patthopustak’ (Early Textbooks) in Chittaranjan Bandyopadhyay, Dui Shotoker Bangla Mudron o Prokashon (Two Centuries of Bengali Printing and Publishing), (Calcutta: Ananda, 1981) pp. 172-74 (Bengali language source).
- ^ Barun Kumar Mukhōpadhyay, ‘Bangla Mudroner Char Jug’ (The Four Ages of Bengali Printing), in Chittaranjan Bandyōpadhyay, Dui Shotoker Bangla Modron o Prokashon, p. 89.
- ^ Nikhil Sarkar, p. 167.