In October 1843, a European journal in Calcutta noticed a group of educated Bengalis, graduates of the city’s Hindu College, and savagely mocked them. They were “cutting their way through ham and beef, and wading to liberalism through tumblers of beer”.
The object of the magazine’s satire, Young Bengal, was a group that did, indeed, gain infamy for their hard drinking and a propensity to fling beefsteaks into the houses of orthodox Brahmins.
But, as Rosinka Chaudhuri notes in India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, there was much more to this group than their dietary and drinking habits. Young Bengal constituted the first generation of modern Indians, individuals who espoused liberty, equality, secularism, and a more representative form of government. They set a template for progressive reform that resonates in India even today.
In this episode of Past Imperfect, Chaudhuri provides a corrective to this maligned and misunderstood cohort. Members of Young Bengal entered the Hindu College in the late 1820s and were taken under the wing of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a masterful instructor who was only a few years older than them.
Under Derozio’s guidance, they pored over the works of John Locke and Thomas Paine, recited the verses of Milton and Byron, and began questioning everything in the world around them. Derozio died tragically young, at the age of 22, but his students kept alive his love of liberty and a penchant for heterodox ideas.
Parents were not so pleased about this. As Chaudhuri tells us, many irate fathers, horrified at their sons’ rejection of caste and Hindu rites, went so far as to drug and abduct them, hoping to cast them as far away as possible from the gates of the Hindu College. Such tactics, however, did not quite go to plan.
By the early 1830s, Young Bengal was establishing newspapers which broadcast their reformist ethos. Members were busy laying the foundations for a much bigger movement which included schools, a learned society, and what Chaudhuri believes is India’s first political party. The very name Young Bengal, applied retrospectively to the group, reflected their modern, cosmopolitan outlook: it was a nod to Young Italy and Young Ireland, idealistic nationalist groupings in Europe.
They certainly gained international attention. An American bookseller, learning of their interest in Thomas Paine, arranged for shipments of his works to be dispatched to Calcutta, where students offered five times the market rate for copies. But Young Bengal’s most notable international project was helping convince George Thompson, a celebrated British campaigner for abolition and Indian political reform, to visit Calcutta. In 1843, Thompson worked with Young Bengal to establish the Bengal British India Society, a political body committed to “extend the just rights and advance the interest of all classes” in India.
In fora like the Bengal British India Society, these Bengalis did not simply pontificate about things like free speech and equality. They prized a very public demonstration of these ideals. Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee delivered a speech which was so condemnatory of British colonial rule that the Hindu College’s principal cut him off and publicly accused him of treason (members of Young Bengal, in turn, condemned the principal for his behavior). Radhanath Sikdar, a mathematical genius and the first man to ascertain that Mount Everest was the highest point on earth, filed a case against the white magistrate of Dehra Dun for mistreating coolies.
As could be expected, these confrontations triggered deep resentment and opposition. Sikdar was hounded by colleagues at his place of employment, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. These colleagues subsequently scrubbed Sikdar’s name from the story of how the highest mountain in the world gained its title.
A resentful Sikdar chose early retirement, deliberately relocating beyond the frontiers of the British Raj to the French enclave of Chandernagore. Aside from irate parents, many other Indians took umbrage at how the group flouted the norms of traditional Hindu society. Observers as far away as Bombay and Madras surveyed their activities with a mix of incredulity, outrage, and admiration.
And, beyond the beer and beef, one other thing stuck to Young Bengal: the notion that they were a failure. What did they accomplish, after all? Radical open-mindedness did not quite take off beyond their small circle. The Bengal British India Society went bust in a few years. By the late 19th century, even other educated Bengalis, men like Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, were heaping scorn on the group, criticizing their overtly Westernised manners and mocking their excesses.
Chaudhuri regrets this turn against Young Bengal, but acknowledges that it had a very long influence. To this day, historians have been wary of studying the cohort, seeing it as somewhat of an embarrassment. A book like India’s First Radicals, therefore, is long overdue, a much-needed chapter in the longer story of modern India’s genesis. While that chapter included its share of alcohol and red meat, it was also marked by courage, a love of truth and a burning desire to make India a better society.
Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.
Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.
