Rosinka Chaudhuri’s new book brings a fresh and thoroughly researched documentation of the ‘Young Bengal’ of 19th century Bengal. Krishnamohan Banerjea, Ramgopal Ghose, Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee, Radhanath Sikdar and Ramtanu Lahiri, all students of radical thinker and teacher Henry Louis Vivian Derozio at the Hindu College, are known to have raised eyebrows and stirred the consciousness of Indians with their radical activities.
Talking about what led Chaudhuri to the book, India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, to a gathering at Starmark, she said: “I did a definitive edition on Derozio, not just the poetry, but everything that I could find that he had written. During this period I also collected some material on this group, the people that I’m calling India’s first radicals. Plans to make it into a book was shelved for a lot of reasons, during that time. However, I kept returning to it primarily, not just because there was material that was waiting to see the light of day, but also because of a question that has always intrigued me about this book, and I’ve mentioned it in my acknowledgements,” said Chaudhuri giving everyone the context of her new book.
The author of Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project, Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture, and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere, added: “It was after I submitted my DPhil that I first realised there was no book on this group. So, it was very surprising when my supervisor at the time asked me to find him a reference, a book on Young Bengal and, despite my efforts, I couldn’t find one. I did find Sumit Sarkar’s Complexities of Young Bengal and other essays, but no books. I asked the best historians I could lay my hands on — Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gautam Bhadra, Tanika Sarkar, all of them… and what I gleaned from all of these people was that historians whose task was to write a book on this group had not thought it worth their while. Now, this was also extremely interesting to me.”
Chaudhuri’s honest explanation for selecting the topic engaged the panellists — professors Ananda Lal and Samik Bandyopadhyay, and poet and writer Anjum Katyal — into an enriching conversation that piqued the interest of history buffs, et al. Congratulating Chaudhuri on the book, Bandyopadhyay reflected on his boyhood days and growing up with “banned Left”, re-reading the Bengal Renaissance, the language of critique and challenge, and the larger cultural experiences of Bengal.
Theatre historian and literature specialist, professor Lal, began by throwing light on Krishnamohan Banerjea, a prominent Young Bengal figure, and his radical activities, including writing a modern Indian play. The most interesting point made by Lal during the session was: “We are the products of Young Bengal: India’s first radicals, and Rosinka has done an important job.”
Moderator Katyal said: “One of the most interesting things, I feel about this book, is that it locates and re-exhumes a very long and strong tradition of the critique, questioning... something that our country has had for centuries and has manifested itself in different ways at different points in time. It’s an interesting example of the spirit of free thinking, which, for a long time, was trivialised or subsumed and ignored.”