It didn’t surprise me when the front wall of a spacious flat in what used to be ‘Old Ballygunge’ sprouted miniature swastikas amidst Devanagari writing. Like photographs of the president carrying a bundle up the steps of Sabarimala temple, it confirmed that the modernist revolution that was launched one evening in 1868 when four young men sat down to dinner in Calcutta’s Auckland (also called Wilson’s) Hotel is unravelling.
Zohran Mamdani might have called Monomohun Ghose’s dinner for three young Bengali aspirants for the Indian Civil Service the dawn of a better day for humanity. “The waves of the ocean of Indian progress” were not yet “dashing against the breakwater of English prejudice”, as Sir Henry Cotton wrote, but the empire’s waters were choppy. Like Canute’s courtiers, colonial Britons (then termed Anglo-Indians) had been “calling loudly on the government to restrain the advancing tide” since 1863 when Satyendranath Tagore’s solitary brown face among 916 White Civilians suggested the “insidious threat” of a depraved and idolatrous background one day providing the ICS’s entire manpower.
Not that a single ‘native’, to use contemporary terminology, could make much dent in what David Lloyd George was to call called “the steel frame”. As Bepin Chandra Pal, a fervent swarajist, warned, even 300 Indians would make no difference. Nevertheless, Civilians like Sir Alfred Lyall (“But I’d sooner be robbed by a tall man who showed me a yard of steel,/Than be fleeced by a sneaking Baboo, with a peon and a badge at his heel”) preferred the status quo.
The Auckland Hotel dinner was an entrée to the future. The three guests were sitting at a Western table for the first time, facing the challenge of knives, forks and a European menu. They were very young. At 19 years and seven months, Romesh Chunder Dutt, married at 15 and with two small daughters, was the veteran. Surendranath Banerjea was three months younger. All of 18 years and five months, Behari Lal Gupta told a Public Service Commission that he had been “meditating” for a year on the ICS and brushing up his Sanskrit for the examination in London. They were alumni of the Colootola Branch School and Presidency College; their teacher, the jurist, Sir Gooroodas Banerjee, thought them “the most distinguished scholars and public men” of the age and deemed it a “privilege” to instruct them.
Monomohun Ghose, their host and mentor, was a hoary 24 with a villa in Cossipore where the trio spent the night before embarkation. He and Satyendranath were childhood friends. They had journeyed together to London in 1863 and had two cracks at the ICS. Monomohun was called to the Bar from Lincoln’s Inn, Calcutta’s first Indian barrister.
Gupta was already a budding poet and something of a humanist. Dinabandhu Mitra’s Neel Darpan, especially the plight of indigo cultivators, had impressed him profoundly. When a Public Service Commission member, Salem Ramaswami Mudaliar, asked, “I believe you were the writer of the letter to the Local Government which led to the introduction of the Ilbert Bill?” the 27-year-old answered with quiet confidence, “Yes; I was”. Mudaliar was a successful lawyer and founder-editor of the Madras Law Journal whose nationalist commitment had prompted the Commission to discuss a greater administrative role for Indians. He must have been awed by the young man’s nonchalance about an episode that had shaken the foundations of the raj. When Mudaliar also wanted to know if he had had any experience of planters, the Ilbert Bill’s fiercest opponents, the non-confrontational Gupta replied that Purneah and Berhampore where he had served were “full of planters” with whom he was “on cordial terms”.
Sir Charles Aitchison’s question about “family difficulties” over going to London produced another bland understatement, “Yes, I had to run away from home.” History books still repeat Dutt’s version that all three had “run away from home under cover of night” because “the least hint about (their) plans would have effectually stopped (their) departure.” Dutt wrote, “Our guardians would never have consented to our crossing the seas, our wisest friends would have considered it madness to venture on an impossible undertaking.”
Dutt’s father had died, leaving him financially independent. His wife raised no objection. Neither did his elder brother who gladly looked after her and the two girls in their Rambagan mansion. His much-travelled family was nothing if not cosmopolitan. An uncle had written a perceptive essay titled “Young Bengal, or Hopes of India”. Another, who converted to Christianity and published an anthology, The Dutt Family Album, lived in Europe with his daughters who knew little Bengali. His brother, Girish, called himself “Greece”. Another Dutt, Kylas Chunder, was the first Indian writer of fiction in English.
Banerjea was even less a fugitive. His father, a leading Calcutta doctor, not only approved of his son’s venture but had set aside money for it in his Will. His carriage rumbled to Cossipore early the following morning for the doctor to bless his son’s undertaking and bid him goodbye. It was to be their last meeting.
Gupta’s was the only clandestine flight. His father had tantrums when he learnt of it and disinherited him. But why did Dutt foist the runaway fiction on all three? Perhaps Gupta’s parental outrage prompted him to imagine a dramatic scenario. Perhaps a furtive night in Cossipore and passages booked in the names of Banerjea and “two friends” sounded romantic? The comment by the historian, Judith Walsh, that Dutt wrote home “only after he had passed the ICS examination in London” suggests that izzat might have provided an explanation.
Everything hinged on success. “Shall we achieve that success?” Dutt wondered. “Or shall we come back to our country, impoverished, socially cut off from our countrymen, to be disappointed in our hopes, to face the reproaches of advisers and the regrets of our friends?”
Sixteen Indians heeded the call but only Satyendranath was chosen by the time of Monomohun’s dinner. If they succeeded, the victory would be of Monomohun’s quiet revolution in bridging the “unfathomable” chasm “between the brown man and the white” that Meredith Townsend, the editor of the Friend of India, spoke of. “By the late 1820s Bengalis in the new city of Calcutta, with Raja Ram Mohun Roy at their head, began to discover what they called the ‘Hindu race’ and, a little later, ‘India itself’”, according to C.A. Bayly. It may not have satisfied nationalist aspirations but it would have taken India much farther on the road to the enlightenment that the Young Bengal pioneers dreamt of by promoting modern ideas, challenging social and religious orthodoxies, and narrowing the gulf among communities. Intellectual freedom and social reform would follow as a matter of course. No wonder Curzon peremptorily rejected Dutt’s request for Indians in the viceroy’s council.
Jubilation this side of the divide was tinged with envy. Banerjea complained that even Monomohun Ghose had implied in a lecture on the civil service “that Satyendranath had cleared the examination” because he was Dwarkanath Tagore’s grandson. Gupta, “his Christian friend” — probably so called because he was a liberal although not a Brahmo and certainly never Christian — had attended the lecture without endorsing the slur.
Banerjea, who earned both a British knighthood and the “Surrender Not” sobriquet from Indians, is today the least forgotten of the trio. The cognoscenti may respect Dutt as the economist who took on Curzon on the cause, effects and cure for famine. But Gupta, who was never into politics and always content with anonymity, was part of a reformist thrust that eschewed both bigotry and populism. Dawn into dusk, the inclusive India of their vision is being written out of history amidst selective lynchings, ghar wapsi, love jihad and Mustafabad renamed Kabir Dham. As Clive Dewey noted, “history is written by the victors, so decolonization wiped the ICS off the agenda.”