\n| <\/p>\n
\nII <\/span><\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nThe Bengal He Lived
\nIn <\/span><\/b><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n
\n
\nT<\/span>HE SOCIETY<\/span><\/b>
\nby which Bankim was formed, was the young Bengal of the fifties, the
\nmost extraordinary perhaps that India has yet seen, -a society electric with
\nthought and loaded to the brim with passion. Bengal was at
\nthat time the theatre of a great intellectual awakening. A sort of miniature Renascence was in
\nprocess. An ardent and imaginative race, long bound down in the fetters of a single
\ntradition, had had suddenly put into its hands the key to a new world
\nthronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art and Learning. From this meeting of a foreign Art and civilisation
\nwith a temperament differing from the temperament which created them, there issued, as there usually does issue from such
\nmeetings, an original Art and an original civilisation. Originality does not lie in rejecting outside influences but in accepting them as a new mould into which our own individuality may
\nrun. This is what happened and may yet happen in Bengal. The first
\nimpulse was gigantic in its proportions and produced men of an almost gigantic originality. Rammohan Ray arose with a
\nnew religion in his hand, which was developed on original lines by men almost greater one thinks than he, by Rajnarain Bose
\nand Debendranath Tagore. The two Dutts, Okhay Kumar and Michael Madhu Sudan, began a new Prose and a new Poetry.
\nVidyasagara, scholar, sage and intellectual dictator, laboured hugely like the Titan he was, to create a new Bengali language
\nand a new Bengali society, while in vast and original learning Rajendra Lal Mitra has not met his match. Around these arose a class of men who formed a sort of seed-bed for the
\ncreative geniuses, men of fine critical ability and appreciative temper,
\nscholarly, accomplished, learned in music and the arts, men in short not only of culture, but of original culture. Of these
\nperhaps the most finished patterns were Madhu Sudan’s friends,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nPage \u2013 94<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nGourdas Byshak, and that scholarly
\npatron of letters, Rajah Jyotindra Mohun Tagore. At the same time there arose, as in
\nother parts of India, a new social spirit and a new political spirit, but
\nthese on a somewhat servilely English model. Of all its channels the released energies of the Bengali mind ran most violently into
\nthe channel of literature. And this was only natural; for although the Bengali has by centuries of Brahmanic training acquired a
\nreligious temper, a taste for law and a taste for learning, yet his peculiar sphere is language. Another circumstance must not be
\nforgotten. Our renascence was marked like its European prototype, though not to so startling an extent, by a thawing of old
\nmoral custom. The calm, docile, pious, dutiful Hindu ideal was pushed aside with impatient energy, and the Bengali, released
\nfrom the iron restraint which had lain like a frost on his warm blood and sensuous feeling, escaped joyously into the open air of an almost Pagan freedom. The ancient Hindu cherished
\na profound sense of the nothingness and vanity of life; the young
\nBengali felt vividly its joy, warmth and sensuousness. This is usually the moral note of a Renascence, a burning desire for
\nLife, Life in her warm human beauty arrayed gloriously like a bride. It was the note of the sixteenth century, it is the note of the
\nastonishing return to Greek Paganism, which is now beginning in England and France; and
\nit was in a slighter and less intellectual way the note of the new age in Bengal. Everything done
\nbyte men of that day and their intellectual children is marked by an unbounded energy and passion. Their reading was
\nenormous and ran often quite out of the usual track. Madhu Sudan Dutt,
\nbesides English, Bengali and Sanskrit, studied Greek, Latin, Italian and French, and wrote the last naturally and with ease. Toru
\nDutt, that unhappy and immature genius, who unfortunately wasted herself on a foreign language and perished while yet
\nlittle more than a girl, had, I have been told, a knowledge of Greek. At any rate she could write English with perfect grace
\nand correctness and French with energy and power. Her novels gained the ear of the French public and her songs breathed fire into the hearts of Frenchmen in their fearful struggle
\nwith Germany. And as was their reading so was their life. They were <\/span><\/p>\n
\nPage \u2013 95<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\ngiants and did everything gigantically. They read hugely, wrote
\nhugely, thought hugely, and drank hugely. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nBankim’s student days did not happen among that circle of original geniuses; his time fell between the heroes of
\nthe Renascence and the feebler Epigoni of our day. But he had
\ncontemporary with him men of extraordinary talent, men like Dinabandhu Mitra and Dwarkanath Mitra, men so to speak of
\nthe second tier. Bankim was the last of the original geniuses. Since then the great
\nimpulse towards originality has gone backward like a receding wave. After Bankim came the
\nEpigoni, Hemchandra Banerji, Nobin Sen, Robindranath Tagore, men of
\nsurprising talent, nay, of unmistakable genius, but too obviously influenced by Shelley and the English poets. And last of all came
\nthe generation formed in the schools of Keshab Chandra Sen and Kristo Das Pal, with its religious shallowness, its literary sterility
\nand its madness in social reform. Servile imitators of the English, politicians without wisdom and scholars without learning, they
\nhave no pretensions to greatness or originality. Before they came the first mighty impulse had spent itself and Bengal lay fallow for a new. It rests with the new generation, the generation that
\nwill soon be sitting in the high places and judging the land, whether
\nthere shall be scope for any new impulse to work itself out. Two years ago it looked as if this mighty awakening would lose
\nitself, as the English sixteenth century lost itself, in Puritanism and middle-class politics.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\nBut when Bankim was a student, the traditions of the Hindu college were yet powerful, the Hindu college, that nursery of
\ngeniuses, where the brain of the New Age had worked most powerfully and the heart of the New Age had beat with the
\nmightiest vehemence. The men around Bankim were calmer, sedater, more temperate; but they walked in the same ways and
\nfollowed the same ideals. To that life of hard thinking and hard drinking Bankim was drawn not merely, as some were, by the
\npower of youthful imitativeness, but by sympathy of temperament. He had the novelist’s catholicity of taste and keen sense for
\nlife, and the artist’s repugnance to gloom and dreariness. Even when the thoughts turned to old faith, the clear sanity of the <\/span><\/p>\n
\nPage \u2013 96<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nman showed itself in his refusal to admit asceticism among the
\nessentials of religion. He never indulged in that habit of frightful and inveterate riot which has
\nkilled one or two of our second-rate talents, but it cannot quite be said that he never
\noverstepped the limits or always observed the
\nprinciple of “nothing in excess,” which is the only sure rule for a man’s conduct.
\nSome would like to see in this sensuous exuberance the secret of his
\nearly decay. It may be so; but speculation on this subject will remain a solemn farce, until it is taken up in a disinterested spirit. At present all our wise disquisitions proceed from
\nunchastened sentiment. Dr. Bhandarkar is a violent social reformer and wants to throw odium upon Hindu society; Mr. Ranade’s hobby is
\na Conservative Radicalism and the spirit moves him to churn the
\nocean of statistics in a sense more agreeable to his own turn of mind; a third authority, prejudiced against Western Culture,
\ntraces all premature deaths to pleasure and wine-bibbing. Each starts from his own sensations, each builds his web of argument in the spirit of a sophist. To this Dr. Bhandarkar brings his
\nmoral ardour and grave eloquence, Mr. Remade his trained reason and
\ndistinguished talent, the religionist his prejudices and cold precepts. Widely as they differ, they have this in common that they
\nhave not for their aim to speak usefully: they are simply trying to find reasons for their own likes and dislikes. Dealing with
\nsubjects of scientific interest in a spirit of this sort is only to invite
\nconfusion and exclude light. We in Bengal with our tendency to
\nthe sins of the blood are perhaps more apt than others to call to our aid the gloomy moralities of the Puritan; in censuring
\nBankim we are secretly fortifying ourselves against ourselves; but in this instance it is a false caution. The cultured Bengali
\nbegins life with a physical temperament already delicate and high-strung. He has the literary constitution with its femineity
\nand acute nervousness. Subject this to a cruel strain when it is tenderest and needs the most careful rearing, to the wicked and
\nwantonly cruel strain of instruction through a foreign tongue; put it under the very worst system of training; add enormous
\nacademical labour, immense official drudgery in an unhealthy climate and constant mental application; crown all with the <\/span><\/p>\n
\nPage \u2013 97<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nnervous expense of thought and fever of composition plus the
\nunfailing exhaustion that comes after; and we need not go to the momentary excesses of a generous blood to find the explanation of broken health and an early decline. The miracle of it is not
\nthat the victims die prematurely but that they live so long. Perhaps we might begin to enquire into the causes of that
\nphenomenon for a change. <\/span><\/p>\n
\nOne thing however is certain that whatever else Bankim
\nlost, he gained from his youthful surroundings much emotional
\nexperience and great flexibility of mind. There too he got his initial stimulus. Like Telang, and perhaps even more than Telang,
\nBankim was blessed or cursed with an universal talent. Everything he touched, shaped itself to his hand. It would have been easy for him to make disastrous mistakes, to miss his
\nvocation, waste himself in English and at the end to leave no enduring
\nmonument of his personality behind. What saved him? It was the initial stimulus and the cultured environment; it was that he
\nlived among men who could distinguish a talent when they saw it and once distinguished were bent on realizing it; among men in
\nfact who had some instinct for finding their way. With a limited creature like man, the power of the environment is immense.
\nGenius it is true exists independently of environment and by much reading and observation may attain to self-expression but it is environment that makes self-expression easy and
\nnatural; that provides sureness, verve, stimulus. Here lies the importance to the mind in its early stage of self-culture of fine social surroundings; -that sort of surroundings which our Universities do nothing and ought to have done everything to create.<\/span><\/p>\n
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