Thursday, November 20, 2008

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay



Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay



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Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
Born 27 June 1838(1838-06-27)
Naihati
Died 8 April 1894 (aged 55)
Kolkata
Occupation poet, novelist, essayist and journalist

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (27 June 1838 - 8 April 1894) (Bengali: বঙ্কিম চন্দ্র চট্টোপাধ্যায় Bôngkim Chôndro Chôţţopaddhae) ('Chattopadhyay' in the original Bengali; 'Chatterjee' as spelt by the British) was a Bengali poet, novelist, essayist and journalist, most famous as the author of Vande Mataram or Bande Mataram, that inspired the freedom fighters of India, and was later declared the National Song of India.







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[edit] Early life


Chattopadhyay was born in the village Kanthalpara in Naihati, the youngest of three brothers, to Yadav (or Jadab) Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Durgadebi. His family was orthodox, and his father, a government official who went on to become the Deputy Collector of Midnapur. One of his brothers, Sanjeeb Chandra Chatterjee, was also a novelist and his known for his famous book "Palamau".


He was educated at the Mohsin College in Hooghly[1] and later at the Presidency College, graduating with a degree in Arts in 1857. He was one of the first two graduates of the University of Calcutta .[2] He later obtained a degree in Law as well, in 1869.



[edit] Early career


He was appointed as Deputy Collector, just like his father, of Jessore, Chatterjee went on to become a Deputy Magistrate, retiring from government service in 1891. His years at work were peppered with incidents that brought him into conflict with the ruling British of the time. However, he was made a Companion, Order of the Indian Empire in 1894.



[edit] Literary career





































 
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Chatterjee, following the model of Ishwarchandra Gupta, began his literary career as a writer of verse. He soon realized, however, that his talents lay in other directions, and turned to fiction. His first attempt was a novel in Bengali submitted for a declared prize. He did not win the prize, and the novelette was never published. His first fiction to appear in print was Rajmohan's Wife. It was written in English and was probably a translation of the novelette submitted for the prize.[citation needed] Durgeshnondini, his first Bengali romance and the first ever novel in Bengali, was published in 1865.


Kapalkundala (1866) is Chatterjee's first major publication. The heroine of this novel, named after the mendicant woman in Bhavabhuti's Malatimadhava, is modelled partly after Kalidasa's Shakuntala and partly after Shakespeare's Miranda. He had chosen Dariapur in Contai Subdivision as the background of this famous novel.


His next romance, Mrinalini (1869), marks his first attempt to set his story against a larger historical context. This book marks the shift from Chatterjee's early career, in which he was strictly a writer of romances, to a later period in which he aimed to simulate the intellect of the Bengali speaking people and bring about a cultural revival through a campaign to improve Bengali literature. He started publishing a monthly literary magazine Bangodarshan in April 1872, the first edition of which was filled almost entirely with his own work. The magazine carried serialized novels, stories, humorous sketches, historical and miscellaneous essays, informative articles, religious discourses, literary criticisms and reviews. Vishabriksha (The Poison Tree, 1873) the first novel of Chatterjee's to appear serially in Bangodarshan.


Bangodarshan went out of circulation after 4 years. It was later revived by his brother, Sanjeeb Chandra Chatterjee.


Chatterjee's next major novel was Chandrasekhar (1877), which contains two largely unrelated parallel plots. Although the scene is once shifted back to eighteenth century, the novel is not historical. His next novel, Rajani(1877), followed the autobiographical technique of Wilkie Collins' "A Woman in White". The title role, a blind girl, was modelled after Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Nydia in "The Last Days of Pompeii". In Krishnakanter Uil (Krishnakanta's Will, 1878) Chatterjee produced the work of his that comes closest to resembling a western novel. The plot is somewhat akin to that of Poison Tree.


The only novel of Chatterjee's that can truly be considered historical fiction is Rajsimha (1881, rewritten and enlarged 1893). Anandamath (The mission house of Felicity, 1882) is a political novel which depicts a Sannyasi (Brahmin ascetic) army fighting Indian Muslims who are in the employ of the East India Company. The book calls for the rise of Brahmin/Hindu nationalism but, ironically, concludes with a character accepting British Empire as a necessity. The novel was also the source of the song Vande Mataram (I worship the Mother) which, set to music by Rabindranath Tagore, was taken up by many secular nationalists. The novel is loosely based on the time of the Sannyasi Rebellion, however in the actual rebellion, Hindus sannyasis and Muslim fakirs both rebelled against the British East India Company. The novel first appeared in serial form in Bangadarshan.


Chatterjee's next novel, Devi Chaudhurani, was published in 1884. His final novel, Sitaram (1886), tells the story of a Hindu chief rebelling against Muslim rule.


Chatterjee's humorous sketches are his best known works other than his novels. Kamalakanter Daptar (From the Desk of Kamalakanta, 1875; enlarged as Kamalakanta, 1885) contains half humorous and half serious sketches, somewhat on the model of De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.


Some critics, like Pramathnath Bishi, consider Chatterjee as the best novelist in Bangla literature. They believe that few writers in world literature have excelled in both philosophy and art as Bankim has done. They argue that in a colonised nation Bankim could not overlook politics. He was one of the first intellectuals who wrote in a British colony, accepting and rejecting the status at the same time. Bishi also rejects the division of Bankim in `Bankim the artist' and `Bankim the moralist' - for Bankim must be read as a whole. The artist in Bankim cannot be understood unless you understand him as a moralist and vice versa.



[edit] Personal life


He was married at a very young of age of eleven, his first wife died in 1859. He later married Rajalakshmi Devi. They had three daughters.



[edit] Trivia



  • Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Chatterjee were very good friends, and both enjoyed humour. Once, the former, playing on the meaning of Bankim (Either Bright Side of the Moon or A Little Bent), asked him what it was that had bent him. Chatterjee replied that it was the kick from the Englishman's shoe.
  • After the Vishabriksha (The Poison Tree) was published in 1873, The Times of London observed:






Have you read the Poison Tree
Of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee?




  • When Bipin Chandra Pal decided to start a patriotic journal in August 1906, he named it Bande Mataram, after Chatterjee's song. Lala Lajpat Rai also published a journal of the same name.


[edit] Bibliography


Fiction



  • Durgeshnondini (March 1865)
  • Kapalkundala (1866)
  • Mrinalini (1869)
  • Vishabriksha (The Poison Tree, 1873)
  • Indira (1873, revised 1893)
  • Jugalanguriya (1874)
  • Radharani (1876, enlarged 1893)
  • Chandrasekhar (1877)
  • Kamalakanter Daptar (From the Desk of Kamlakanta, 1875)
  • Rajni(1877)
  • Krishnakanter Uil (Krishnakanta's Will, 1878)
  • Rajsimha (1882)
  • Anandamath (1882)
  • Devi Chaudhurani (1884)
  • Kamalakanta (1885)
  • Sitaram (March 1887)
  • Muchiram Gurer Jivancharita (The Life of Muchiram Gur)

Religious Commentaries



  • Krishna Charitra (Life of Krishna, 1886)
  • Dharmatattva (Principles of Religion, 1888)
  • Devatattva (Principles of Divinity, Published Posthumously)
  • Srimadvagavat Gita, a Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita (1902 - Published Posthumously)

Poetry Collections



  • Lalita O Manas (1858)

Essays



  • Lok Rahasya (Essays on Society, 1874, enlarged 1888)
  • Bijnan Rahasya (Essays on Science, 1875)
  • Bichitra Prabandha (Assorted Essays), Vol 1 (1876) and Vol 2 (1892)
  • Samya (Equality, 1879)



      • This bibliography does not include any of his English works. Indeed his first novel was an English one and he also started writing his religious and philosophical essays in English.


[edit] References



  1. ^ His fight for freedom, A. DEVA RAJU, The Hindu, 2001-08-18.
  2. ^ Biography, from Banglapedia.


[edit] External links




[edit] Further reading



  • Ujjal Kumar Majumdar: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay: His Contribution to Indian Life and Culture. Calcutta : The Asiatic Society, 2000. ISBN 8172360983.
  • Walter Ruben: Indische Romane. Eine ideologische Untersuchung. Vol. 1: Einige Romane Bankim Chatterjees iund Ranbindranath Tagore. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1964. (German)


[edit] See also







 I am grateful to Vinay Lal of the Department of History in the University of California at Los Angeles, for a number of helpful suggestions.


2 According to the Indian census of 2001, over 80% of the 1.25 billion or so population were designated as Hindus, 13.4% as Muslims, 2.3% as Christians, and about 2% as Sikhs among the various religious traditions. In this context, the term ‘secular’ carries a predominantly negative connotation, viz. not granting privileged status. This is in direct contrast to the situation in nation-states which define themselves in terms of one or more religious traditions.


3 The title-words of the National Anthem are Jana Gana Mana (composed by Rabindranath Tagore), but the sense and context of this song are entirely different and, by comparison, largely uncontroversial; we shall return to the National Anthem in due course.


4 Some of which is factually disputable!


5 This is how the adoption of Vande Mtaram as the National Song by the Constituent Assembly on 24.1.1950 is reported to have taken place (the President of the Assembly, Rajendra Prasad, is speaking in session): ‘There is one matter which has been pending for discussion, namely the question of the national anthem .... [It] has been felt that, instead of taking a formal decision by means of a resolution [by the House], it is better if I make a statement with regard to the national anthem. Accordingly, I make this statement .... The composition consisting of the words and music known as "Jana Gana Mana" is the national anthem of India, subject to such alterations in the words as the Government may authorise as occasion arises, and the song "Vande Mataram", which has played a historic part in the struggle for Indian freedom, shall be honoured equally with "Jana Gana Mana" and shall have equal status with it. (Applause). I hope that will satisfy the Members’; see Julius Lipner, nandamah, or The Sacred Brotherhood by Bankimcandra Chatterji, ftnt. p. 81 (bibliographical details to follow). So it appears that both National Anthem and National Song were adopted not on the basis of a formal resolution, but on the basis of a statement it was ‘felt’ that the Chair should issue. As if to indicate the confusion underlying the choice of date for the centenary celebrations on 7 September 2006, The Times of India online, in an article entitled, ‘Vande Mataram not compulsory in W[est] B[engal]’, reported from Kolkata (6 September 2006) that ‘Congress officials said the party has lined up a series of programmes, including ... hoisting the Vande Mataram flag, the first national flag hoisted at the Parsi Bagan here in 1906’ – so was this incident, in the mind of the Kolkata Congress, the occasion for the centenary celebrations rather than that mentioned by Soni, the Culture Minister, in the extract quoted above?


6 Thus, ‘ "No Muslim can sing ‘Vande Mataram’ if he considers himself to be a true believer", said Maulana Mahmood Madani, general secretary of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, New Delhi, during his visit to the city [of Surat] on Tuesday [5 September 2006]’ <timesofindia.indiatimes.com> for 5 September 2006 (accessed 12 March 2007). ‘ "We are ready to say Jai Bharat Mata [Victory to Mother India], Jai Hind [Victory to India] and sing Jana Gana Mana but don’t force us to sing Vande Mataram", says noted Shia cleric and vice-president of the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board Maulana Kalbe Sadiq’; The Indian Express online <indianexpress.com/story/12096.html> (accessed 12 March 2007).


7 <timesofindia.indiatimes.com> for 5 September 2006 (accessed 12 March 2007). Apparently the SGPC then relented and permitted the singing of the Song (see article entitled ‘India sings Vande Mataram in unison’, in <timesofindia.indiatimes.com> for 8 September 2006; accessed 12 March 2007). As we shall point out, the title of this article was somewhat optimistic. ‘Communal/communalism’ is India-speak for ‘Sectarian/sectarianism’.


8 Translated with an extensive Introduction and Critical Apparatus by Julius J. Lipner, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.


9 It is this centenary edition that formed the basis of my English translation of the novel, and to which we shall refer in this essay.


10 The description has been taken from my translation in ASB; see Part I, chapt. 11 of the novel (p. 150).


11 ‘Alien’ because for Bankim, the Muslim rulers of greater Bengal and their civil-servant co-religionists, were, like the British, outsiders. As discussed in ASB, Bankim tends to distinguish between de Muslims – sons and daughters of the soil (most of whom came from convert stock) – and jabans, Muslims whose ancestry was foreign and who made no real effort to integrate with the people of the land. See ASB, pp. 63–7.


12 Taken from ASB, pp. 144–6. The hymn is annotated in the Critical Apparatus, pp. 242–5.


13 For a discussion of the derivative history of the hymn, both as to format and content, see ASB, pp. 86–91.


14 This last gave rise to divisive tendencies since the early nationalist movement in Bengal, to which nandamah contributed conspicuously, displayed a bias in favour of Hindu symbolism.


15 ‘To be a stotra ... a composition must conform to some purely formal properties of style. Incomparability of the deity to whom the stotra is offered is conveyed by the mannerisms of descriptive excess. Stotras also exhibit a usually circular, repetitive movement, coming back, after each cycle of excessive praise, to the signature phrase describing the essential attributes of the object of worship’; Kaviraj, S., 2000. ‘Laughter and subjectivity: the self-ironical tradition in Bengali literature’. Modern Asian Studies 34 (2), p. 389. Early forms of stotras to the Goddess occur in the Dev Mhtmya section of the Mrkaeya Pura and in some versions of parts of the Mahbhrata, i.e. several centuries before the beginning of the second millennium C.E; see Coburn, Thomas, B., 1984. Dev Mhtmya: The Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition, especially Part III. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. The fact that the hymn is in the style of a stotra lends credence to the view that Bankim may well have derived part of it from the liturgy of a Kl temple in Lalgola in Murshidabad district where he was staying for some time in 1873–74. See ASB, pp. 37–8, 90–1.


16 It is no accident that in some, especially Hindu fundamentalist, circles today, as a direct consequence of the traditional veneration for Sanskrit, there is a reluctance either to sing only a part of the hymn or to sing it in translation. Tanika Sarkar has recorded the ideology underlying this reluctance. ‘The song [Vande Mtaram] is chanted in full, at prescribed times, at all daily shakhas or training sessions of the RSS [a right-wing militant Hindu organisation, often associated with the BJP]. To the combine [the Sangh Parivar, a "family" (parivr) or "combine" of religiocultural bodies of the extreme right, including the RSS], this remains the real national anthem. Rabindranath’s song, Jana Gana Mana – the official anthem of the Indian state – is widely condemned [by the Parivar] as a paltry substitute .... The RSS thus restores [Vande Mtaram] to its old status as a sacred chant, not a word of which can be altered. Neither the Bengali nor the Sanskrit passages may be translated, since the original words are supposed to contain sacred energy. When I asked why the song is never abbreviated, members of the organisation told me that it is symbolic of the integrity of the Motherland. It is always displayed against a map of undivided India, expressing the organisation’s refusal to accept the partition [into India and Pakistan] of the subcontinent’: Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 273, 277–8. This ideological appropriation of a national symbol is to some extent politically analogous to the appropriation of the national flag and/or national anthem by right-wing organisations in other contexts, e.g. the British National Party in the UK. It remains to be seen whether these Parivar ideologues, with their veneration for the original language(s) of the National Song, especially Sanskrit, and the Song’s historical associations, could in due course abandon or substitute the present National Song for one in the official (national?) language of the Indian state, Hindi.


17 From the article, ‘Jai Bharat Mata is fine, but don’t force Vande Mataram’, The Indian Express online, Lucknow, 5 September 2006 <indianexpress.com/story/12096.html> (accessed 12 March 2007).


18 From ‘Furore over AP’s diktat on Vande Mataram’, The Times of India online, <timesofindia.indiatimes.com> for 5 September 2006 (accessed 12 March 2007).


19 Prahlda uvca: ravaa krtana vio smaraa pdasevanam/ arcana vandana dsya sakhyam tmanivedanam// iti pusrpit viau bhakti cennavalaka ... BhPu. 7.5.23–4.


20 For example, there are a number of instances in the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahbhrata. Thus, in his address to Duryodhana, the Kaurava Kara says, ‘You are greeted, O king, by the twice-born (Brahmins), and revered by kings ... (vandyamno dvijai rjan pjyamna ca rjabhi)’, 3.226.9 of the critical edition.


21 The bowdlerised translation of the hymn given in Basanta Koomar Roy’s rendering of the novel, first published as Dawn Over India with an eye to India’s freedom movement (and re-published much later as Bankim Chandra Chatterji: Anandamath, Translated and Adapted from Original Bengali (sic), by Vision Books, New Delhi, 1992), seeks to sidestep the problem by unabashedly omitting all specific Hindu references in the song, including those referring to the Goddess as Mother. Here, for example, is how verses 6 and 7 are translated by Roy (p. 39):


Thou as strength in arms of men,
Thou as faith in hearts dost reign (vr.6).


Himalaya-crested one, rivalless,


Radiant in thy spotlessness,


Thou whose fruits and waters bless,


Mother, hail! (vr.7).



I append my own translation of these two verses with the original Bengali/Sanskrit, for comparison:


Mother you’re our strength of arm (bhute tumi m akti)
And in our hearts the loving balm (hdaye tumi m bhakti)


Yours the form we shape in every shrine! (tomri pratim gai mandire mandire).


For you are Durga, bearer of the tenfold power (tva hi durg daapraharaadhri)


And wealth’s Goddess, dallying on the lotus flower (kamal kamaladalavihri)


You are Speech, to you I bow


To us wisdom you endow (v vidydyin nammi tvm).



I have annotated these two verses, justifying my translation, in ASB, p. 245. The reader will note that Roy has omitted the last line of verse 6 which speaks of worship in shrines/temples (mandir), and has expurgated specifically Hindu connotations and names in verse 7. In fact, his translation of verse 7 has little if any bearing on the original text! This reductive attempt has failed signally to mollify either Hindus or Muslims.


22 See ASB, p. 86–91. Here I have also considered the possibility, raised by some commentators, as to whether part or all of the hymn was already in existence in some form which Bankim took over and adapted or completed for inclusion in the novel. This possibility has recently been discussed again in the pages of the Bengali paper, nanda Bjr Patrik: see article by Amitrasudan Bhattacarja in the issue of 7 November 2006, and subsequent letters to the editor for 22 and 23 November. However, whether the hymn was wholly or partially composed by Bankim is not strictly relevant for our purposes. We are mainly interested in that part of the hymn which became India’s National Song after it started its career in nandamah.


23 See ASB, p. 74.


24 Das, S.K., 1984. The Artist in Chains: The Life of Bankimchandra Chatterji. New Delhi: New Statesman Publishing, p. 215.


25 See p. 106, note 1 of Bhattacharya, S., 2003. Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song. New Delhi: Penguin Books (abbr. VMBS). But this date is contested by Chakrabarti, A., 1996. Gner Bhely Bel Abely. Kolkata: Primer Publications, p. 29, who says that Tagore’s performance was at the Congress session in Calcutta six years earlier.


26 S. K. Das, op.cit., p. 215.


27 The Bengali form of the title-words (since Bengali has no v sound).


28 Mukherjee, H., Mukherjee, U., 1958. The Swadeshi Movement (1905–06). Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, p. 148.


29 Heehs Peter, 1993. The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India, 1900–10, Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 106.


30 ‘In the same year [1907], an anonymous Bengali pamphlet, printed on lurid red paper, began to circulate among Muslims exhorting them: "Not a single Muhammadan should join the perverted Swadeshi agitation of the Hindus .... Oh Muhammadans, sing not Bande Mataram!" ’, VMBS, p. 25.


31 ‘In the 1920s what is new is a critique of Bankim and his works in ideological terms from the Muslim point of view (26) .... The opinion in the Muslim press was that Bankim "was a Muslim-hater to the innermost core" (1918), that "he forever alienated a large community" by displaying "intense communal hatred" (1920), and that his works "had unjustly stigmatised the Muslims" (1925). These typical examples of the evaluation of Bankim in Bengali Muslim literary journals naturally influenced the attitude to his most celebrated creation, Vande Mataram’, VMBS, p. 29.


32 Ram Gopal, 1959. Indian Muslims: A Political History (1858–1947), London: Asia Publishing House, pp. 256–7.


33 Geeti Sen, 2002–03. ‘Iconising the nation: political agendas’, IIC Quarterly 29.3–4 (Winter–Spring), 160.


34 Quoted from VMBS, pp. 33–4.


35 In ASB pp. 99–100, I show how the personification of the land (bhmi) as female and as spouse of the king and thus mother of his subjects is rooted in Hindu tradition.


36 Similarly, even Gandhi, in his weekly paper The Harijan (1 July 1939), could write rather naively: ‘As a lad when I knew nothing of Ananda Math or even Bankim, Vande Mataram gripped me. I associated the purest national spirit with it. It never occurred to me it was a Hindu song or meant only for Hindus. Unfortunately, now we have fallen on evil days. All that was pure gold before has become base metal today’ (quoted from India Today, international edition, 1 September 1997, p. 55). But here, by contrast, is a typical Muslim view of the cultural blindness governing those Hindu Indians who could accept as unobjectionable the description of the land as ‘Mother’ of a song whose first two verses Tagore regarded as only ‘accidentally associated’ with the story in which it occurs: ‘The context of the story entirely excludes the idea of the "Mother" being interpreted as the common motherland of all Indians, Hindus, Muslims, and others. She symbolises the motherland only as representing the culture, religion, and political history of Hindus exclusively .... It is a typical illustration of the psychology of a very large majority of Congress leaders in India that, when they address a public meeting about the necessity of separating religion from politics, they open the proceedings with this song’; quoted from The Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 12 October 1937, in W. Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 231. It may be of interest to note that, to the best of my knowledge, Indian Christians, currently numbering about 2.3% of the population (some twenty five millions), and belonging to a variety of denominations, have never protested officially or en masse against the adoption or singing of the song. I suggest that an important reason for this may be grounded in Christian theology of Incarnation.


37 Certainly there is no call to say, on the basis of a reading of nandamah, as Professor Tanika Sarkar unfortunately does in her contribution to the jointly-authored polemic, The Vedas, Hinduism, Hindutva (Ebong Alap, 2005, p. 123) that ‘The goddess demands the blood of Muslims’ (this is nowhere justified by text), or even that ‘the mantra [viz. the song Vande Mtaram] is first heard in the aftermath of a battle between British-led troops of the nawab and the santans, who lead a mob of villagers’, as if the song is introduced in a context that encourages and legitimates violence, which is extendable to Muslims; cf. her book Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation cited earlier, p. 178. From my translation of the hymn’s introduction in the novel referred to earlier, the reader will note that the hymn is sung by the santan-leader Bhabananda in a non-martial context. Overcome by the beauty and tranquillity of the moonlit landscape, he is ‘no longer ... the skilled, valiant figure of the battlefield’ as he sings the hymn. In a footnote in the original, Bankim points out that the hymn is to be sung in the musical mode mallr, a non-martial mode (see my annotation of this mode in ASB, pp. 243–4).


38 Quoted in VMBS, pp. 35–6.


39 It is a common practice among analysts of Indian politics to avert their eyes from the religious dimensions of the issues they discuss and adopt a reductive approach, seeking to give a full account of their subject in non-religious terms. Such attempts at analysis misrepresent their subject and have little or no bearing on the realities they profess to clarify. From earliest times in the nationalist movement, Indian politics have been steeped in theological and religious issues. These must be fully acknowledged if proper discussion is to take place.
http://jhs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/1/1-2/26


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Encyclopedia > Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee ('Chattopadhyay' in the original Bengali; 'Chatterjee' as spelt by the British) was an Indian poet and author, most famous as the composer of Vande Mataram.



Bankim was educated at the Hooghly College and belonged to an orthodox family. He did for Bengali fiction what Michael Madhusudan Dutt had done for Bengali poetry, that is, he brought in imagination. Chatterjee was more fortunate than Dutt as he did not have to set up his own diction from the very start. The prose style was already standardized; what Chatterjee did was to break its monotony, shear off its ponderous verbosity and give it a twist of informality and intimacy. Chatterjee's own style grew up as he went on writing.



Chatterjee, following the discipline of Isvarchandra Gupta, began his literary career as a writer of verse. Fortunately he was not slow to feel that poetry was not his metier. He then turned to fiction. His first attempt was a novel in Bengali submitted for a declared prize. The prize did not come to him and the novelette was never published. His first fiction to appear in print was Rajmohan's Wife. It was written in English and was probably a translation of the novelette submitted for the prize. Durgeshnandini, his first Bengali romance, was published in 1865. The next novel Kapalkundala (1866) is one of the best romances written by Chatterjee. The theme is lyrical and gripping and, in spite of the melodrama and the dual story, the execution is skillful. the heroine, named after the mendicant woman in Bhavabhuti's Malatimadhava, is modelled partly after Kalidasa's Shakuntala and partly after Shakespeare's Miranda.



The next romance Mrinalini (1869) indicates an amateurishness and a definite falling off from the standard. It is a love romance against a historical background sadly neglected and confused. After this Chatterjee was not content to continue only as a writer of prose romances, but appeared also as a writer with the definite mission of simulating the intellect of the Bengali speaking people through literary campaign and of bringing about a cultural revival thereby. With this end in view he brought out monthly Bangadarshan in 1872. In the pages of this magazine all his writings except the very last two works first came out. These writings include novels, stories, humorous sketches, historical and miscellaneous essays, informative articles, religious discourses, literary criticisms and reviews. Vishbriksha (The Poison Tree, 1873) was his first novel to appear serially in Bangadarshan.



The Times Literary Supplement had marked the occasion thus:



"Have you read the Poison Tree/ Of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee?"



Chandrasekhar (1877) suffers markedly from the impact of two parallel plots which have little common ground. The scene is once shifted back to eighteenth century. But the novel is not historical. The plot has suffered from the author's weakness for the occult. The next novel Rajani(1877) followed the autobiographical technique of Wilkie Collins' A Woman in White. The title role was modelled after Bulwar Lytton's Nydia in Last Days of Pompeii. In this romance of a blind girl, Chatterjee is at his best as a literary artist. In Krishnakanter Uil (Krishnakanta's Will, 1878) Chatterjee added some amount of feeling to imagination, and as a result it approaches nearest to the western novel. The plot is somewhat akin to that of Poison Tree.



The only novel of Chatterjee's that can claim full recognition as historical fiction is Rajsimha (1881, rewritten and enlarged 1893). Anandamath (The mission house of the Anandas, 1882) is a political novel without a sufficient plot. It definitely marks the decline of Chatterjee's power as a novelist. The plot of the meagre story is based on the Sannyasi rebellion that occurred in North Bengal in 1773. As fiction it can not be called an outstanding work. But as the book that interpreted and illustrated the gospel of patriotism and gave Bengal the song "Bande mataram" (I worship mother) which became the mantra of nationalism and the national song. Incidentally it gave tremendous impetus to the various patriotic and national activities culminating in the nationalist movement initiated in Bengal in the first decade of the twentieth century.



Devi Chaudhurani by Chatterjee was published in 1884. The story is romantic and interesting and delightfully told, no doubt. Chatterjee's last novel Sitaram (1886) has for its theme the insurgence of a Hindu chief of lower central Bengal against the impotent Muslim rule. The central figure is well delineated but the other figures are either too idealistic or impalpable.



After the novels, the humorous sketches are the outstanding productions of Chatterjee. Kamalakanter Daptar (The Scribbling of Kamalakanta, 1875; enlarged as Kamalakanta, 1885) contains half humorous and half serious sketches somewhat after De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-eater. It shows the writer at his best.



Bankim Chatterjee was superb story-teller, and a master of romance. He is also a great novelist in spite of the fact that his outlook on life was neither deep nor critical, nor was his canvas wide. But he was something more than a great novelist. He was a path finder and a path maker. Chatterjee represented the English-educated Bengalee with a tolerably peaceful home life, sufficient wherewithal and some prestige, as the bearer of the torch of western enlightment. No Bengali writer before or since has enjoyed such spontaneous and universal popularity as Chatterjee. His novels have been translated in almost all the major languages of India, and have helped to stimulate literary impulses in those languages.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Bankim-Chandra-Chatterjee


 


Sannyasi Rebellion



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The Sannyasi Rebellion or Sannyasi Revolt (Bengali: সন্ন্যাসী বিদ্রোহ, The Monk's Rebellion) is a term used to describe activities of sannyasis and fakirs, or Hindu and Muslim ascetics respectively, in Bengal, India in the late eighteenth century. It is also known as the Fakir-Sannyasi Rebellion (ফকির-সন্ন্যাসী বিদ্রোহ). Historians have not only debated what events constitute the rebellion, but have also varied on the significance of the rebellion in Indian history. While some refer to it as an early war for India's independence from foreign rule, since the right to collect tax had been given to the British East India Company after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, others categorize it as random acts of violent banditry following the depopulation of the province, post the Bengal famine of 1770.[1]







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[edit] Early events


At least three separate events are called the Sannyasi Rebellion. One refers to a large body of ascetics both Hindu sannyasis and Muslim madaris, religious fakirs that travelled from North India to different parts of Bengal to visit shrines. On route to the shrines, it was customary for many of these holy men to exact a religious tax from the headmen and zamindars or regional landlords. In times of prosperity, the headmen and zamindars generally obliged. However, since the East India Company received the diwani or right to collect tax, many of the tax demands increased and the local landlords and headmen were unable to pay both the ascetics and the English. Crop failures, and famine, which killed ten million people or an estimated one-third of the population of Bengal compounded the problems since much of the arable land lay fallow.[1]


In 1771, 150 fakirs were put to death, apparently for no reason. This was one of the reasons that caused distress leading to violence, especially in Natore in Rangpur, now in modern Bangladesh. However, some modern historians argue that the movement never gained popular support.[1]


The other two movements involved a sect of Hindu ascetics, the Dasnami naga sannyasis who likewise visited Bengal on pilgrimage mixed with moneylending opportunities.[1] To the British, both the Hindu and Muslim ascetics were looters to be stopped from collecting money that belonged to the Company and possibly from even entering the province. It was felt that a large body of people on the move was a possible threat.[2]



[edit] Clashes between the Company and ascetics


When the Company's forces tried to prevent the sannyasis and fakirs from entering the province or from collecting their money in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, fierce clashes often ensued, with the Company's forces not always victorious. Most of the clashes were recorded in the years following the famine but they continued, albeit with a lesser frequency, up until 1802. The reason that even with superior training and forces, the Company was not able to suppress sporadic clashes with migrating ascetics was that the control of the Company's forces in the far-removed hilly and jungle covered districts like Birbhum and Midnapore on local events was weak.[2]



[edit] Legacy


The Sannyasi rebellion was the first of a series of revolts and rebellions in the Western districts of the province including (but not restricted to) the Chuar Revolt of 1799 and the Santal Revolt of 1831–32.[2] What effect the Sannyasi Rebellion had on rebellions that followed is debatable. Perhaps, the best reminder of the Rebellion is in literature, in the Bengali novel Anandamath, written by India's first modern novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, from which the song Vande Mataram was taken and declared to be India's National Song (not to be confused with the Indian National Anthem).



[edit] References




  1. ^ a b c d Lorenzen, D.N. (1978). "Warrior Ascetics in Indian History.". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 98 (1): 617–75. doi:10.2307/600151. 
  2. ^ a b c Marshall, P.J. (1987). Bengal: the British Bridgehead. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 96. 

 

Bengal famine of 1770



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The Bengal famine of 1770 (Bengali: ৭৬-এর মন্বন্তর, Chhiattōrer monnōntór; lit The Famine of '76) was a catastrophic famine between 1769 and 1773 (1176 to 1180 in the Bengali calendar) that affected the lower Gangetic plain of India. The famine is estimated to have caused the deaths of 15 million people (one out of three, reducing the population to thirty million in Bengal, which included Bihar and most of Orissa). The Bengali names derives from its origins in the Bengali calendar year 1176. ("Chhiattōr"- "76"; "monnōntór"- "famine" in Bengali).[1]







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[edit] Background


The famine occurred in the territory which was called Bengal, then ruled by the British East India Company. This territory included modern West Bengal, Bangladesh, and parts of Assam, Orissa, Bihar, and Jharkhand. It was originally a province of the Mughal empire from the 16th century and was ruled by a Nawab, or governor. The Nawab had become effectively independent by the beginning of the 18th century, though in theory was still a tributary power of the Great Mughal in Delhi.


In the 17th century the British East India Company had been given a grant on the town of Calcutta by the Mughal emperor Akbar. At this time the Company was effectively another tributary power of the Mughal. During the following century the company obtained sole trading rights for the province, and went on to become the dominant power in Bengal. In 1757, at the battle of Plassey, the British defeated the-then Nawab Siraj Ud Daulah and plundered the Bengali treasury. In 1764 their military control was reaffirmed at Buxar. The subsequent treaty gained them the Diwani, that is, taxation rights: the Company thereby became the de facto ruler of Bengal.



[edit] The famine


About ten million people, approximately one-third of the population of the affected area, are estimated to have died in the famine. The regions in which the famine occurred included especially the modern Indian states of Bihar and West Bengal, but the famine also extended into Orissa and Jharkhand as well as modern Bangladesh. Among the worst affected areas were Birbhum and Murshidabad in Bengal, and Tirhut, Champaran and Bettiah in Bihar.


A partial shortfall in crops, considered nothing out of the ordinary, occurred in 1768 and was followed in late 1769 by more severe conditions. By September 1769 there was a severe drought, and alarming reports were coming in of rural distress. These were, however, ignored by company officers.


By early 1770 there was starvation, and by mid-1770 deaths from starvation were occurring on a large scale. There were also reports of the living feeding on the bodies of the dead in the middle of that year. Smallpox and other diseases further took their toll of the population. Later in 1770 good rainfall resulted in a good harvest and the famine abated. However, other shortfalls occurred in the following years, raising the total death toll.


As a result of the famine large areas were depopulated and returned to jungle for decades to come, as the survivors migrated in mass in a search for food. Many cultivated lands were abandoned—much of Birbhum, for instance, returned to jungle and was virtually impassable for decades afterwards. From 1772 on, bands of bandits and thugs became an established feature of Bengal, and were only brought under control by punitive actions in the 1780s.



[edit] East India Company responsibilities


Fault for the famine is now often ascribed to the British East India Company's policies in Bengal. According to others, however, the famine was not a direct fault of the British regime, but was only exacerbated by its policies (Simon Schama, A History of Britain, Volume II, page 504).


As a trading body, the first remit of the company was to maximise its profits and with taxation rights the profits to be obtained from Bengal came from land tax as well as trade tariffs. As lands came under company control, the land tax was typically raised fivefold what it had been – from 10% to up to 50% of the value of the agricultural produce.[citation needed] In the first years of the rule of the British East India Company, the total land tax income was doubled and most of this revenue flowed out of the country.[2] As the famine approached its height in April of 1770, the Company announced that the land tax for the following year was to be increased by a further 10%.


It is claimed that the destruction of food crops in Bengal to make way for poppy cultivation for export reduced food availability and contributed to the famine.[3] However, the charge that intensive poppy cultivation led to famine has been disputed on the grounds that the total area under poppy cultivation in the Bengal region constituted less than two percent of all the land.


The company is also criticised for forbidding the "hoarding" of rice. This prevented traders and dealers from laying in reserves that in other times would have tided the population over lean periods, as well as ordering the farmers to plant indigo instead of rice.


By the time of the famine, monopolies in grain trading had been established by the company and its agents. The company had no plan for dealing with the grain shortage, and actions were only taken insofar as they affected the mercantile and trading classes. Land revenue decreased by 14% during the affected year, but recovered rapidly (Kumkum Chatterjee). According to McLane, the first governor-general of British India, Warren Hastings, acknowledged "violent" tax collecting after 1771: revenues earned by the Company were higher in 1771 than in 1768. [4] Globally, the profit of the company increased from fifteen million rupees in 1765 to thirty million in 1777.



[edit] See also




[edit] References




[edit] Notes




  1. ^ Mazumdar, Kedarnath, Moymonshingher Itihash O Moymonsingher Biboron, 2005, (Bengali), pp. 46-53, Anandadhara, 34/8 Banglabazar, Dhaka. ISBN 984 802 05 X
  2. ^ Romesh Dutt The Economic History of India under early British Rule (1906)
  3. ^ Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal
  4. ^ BANGLAPEDIA: Famine


[edit] External links




. THE FAMINE OF 1770 IN BENGAL.[30]

[30] The Annals of Rural Bengal. By W. W. Hunter. Vol. I. The Ethnical Frontier of Lower Bengal, with the Ancient Principalities of Beerbhoom and Bishenpore. Second Edition. New York: Leypoldt and Holt. 1868. 8vo., pp. xvi., 475.


No intelligent reader can advance fifty pages in this volume without becoming aware that he has got hold of a very remarkable book. Mr. Hunter’s style, to begin with, is such as is written only by men of large calibre and high culture. No words are wasted. The narrative flows calmly and powerfully along, like a geometrical demonstration, omitting nothing which is significant, admitting nothing which is irrelevant, glowing with all the warmth of rich imagination and sympathetic genius, yet never allowing any overt manifestation of feeling, ever concealing the author’s personality beneath the unswerving exposition of the subject-matter. That highest art, which conceals art, Mr. Hunter appears to have learned well. With him, the curtain is the picture.


Such a style as this would suffice to make any book interesting, in spite of the remoteness of the subject. But the “Annals of Rural Bengal” do not concern us so remotely as one might at first imagine. The phenomena of the moral and industrial growth or stagnation of a highly-endowed people must ever possess the interest of fascination for those who take heed of the maxim that “history is philosophy teaching by example.” National prosperity depends upon circumstances sufficiently general to make the experience of one country of great value to another, though ignorant Bourbon dynasties and Rump Congresses refuse to learn the lesson. It is of the intimate every-day life of rural Bengal that Mr. Hunter treats. He does not, like old historians, try our patience with a bead-roll of names that have earned no just title to remembrance, or dazzle us with a bountiful display of “barbaric pearls and gold,” or lead us in the gondolas of Buddhist kings down sacred rivers, amid “a summer fanned with spice”; but he describes the labours and the sufferings, the mishaps and the good fortune, of thirty millions of people, who, however dusky may be their hue, tanned by the tropical suns of fifty centuries, are nevertheless members of the imperial Aryan race, descended from the cool highlands eastward of the Caspian, where, long before the beginning of recorded history, their ancestors and those of the Anglo-American were indistinguishably united in the same primitive community.


The narrative portion of the present volume is concerned mainly with the social and economical disorganization wrought by the great famine of 1770, and with the attempts of the English government to remedy the same. The remainder of the book is occupied with inquiries into the ethnic character of the population of Bengal, and particularly with an exposition of the peculiarities of the language, religion, customs, and institutions of the Santals, or hill-tribes of Beerbhoom. A few remarks on the first of these topics may not be uninteresting.


Throughout the entire course of recorded European history, from the remote times of which the Homeric poems preserve the dim tradition down to the present moment, there has occurred no calamity at once so sudden and of such appalling magnitude as the famine which in the spring and summer of 1770 nearly exterminated the ancient civilization of Bengal. It presents that aspect of preternatural vastness which characterizes the continent of Asia and all that concerns it. The Black Death of the fourteenth century was, perhaps, the most fearful visitation which has ever afflicted the Western world. But in the concentrated misery which it occasioned the Bengal famine surpassed it, even as the Himalayas dwarf by comparison the highest peaks of Switzerland. It is, moreover, the key to the history of Bengal during the next forty years; and as such, merits, from an economical point of view, closer attention than it has hitherto received.


Lower Bengal gathers in three harvests each year; in the spring, in the early autumn, and in December, the last being the great rice-crop, the harvest on which the sustenance of the people depends. Through the year 1769 there was great scarcity, owing to the partial failure of the crops of 1768, but the spring rains appeared to promise relief, and in spite of the warning appeals of provincial officers, the government was slow to take alarm, and continued rigorously to enforce the land-tax. But in September the rains suddenly ceased. Throughout the autumn there ruled a parching drought; and the rice-fields, according to the description of a native superintendent of Bishenpore, “became like fields of dried straw.” Nevertheless, the government at Calcutta made—with one lamentable exception, hereafter to be noticed—no legislative attempt to meet the consequences of this dangerous condition of things. The administration of local affairs was still, at that date, intrusted to native officials. The whole internal regulation was in the hands of the famous Muhamad Reza Ehan. Hindu or Mussulman assessors pried into every barn and shrewdly estimated the probable dimensions of the crops on every field; and the courts, as well as the police, were still in native hands. “These men,” says our author, “knew the country, its capabilities, its average yield, and its average requirements, with an accuracy that the most painstaking English official can seldom hope to attain to. They had a strong interest in representing things to be worse than they were; for the more intense the scarcity, the greater the merit in collecting the land-tax. Every consultation is filled with their apprehensions and highly-coloured accounts of the public distress; but it does not appear that the conviction entered the minds of the Council during the previous winter months, that the question was not so much one of revenue as of depopulation.” In fact, the local officers had cried “Wolf!” too often. Government was slow to believe them, and announced that nothing better could be expected than the adoption of a generous policy toward those landholders whom the loss of harvest had rendered unable to pay their land-tax. But very few indulgences were granted, and the tax was not diminished, but on the contrary was, in the month of April, 1770, increased by ten per cent for the following year. The character of the Bengali people must also be taken into the account in explaining this strange action on the part of the government.


“From the first appearance of Lower Bengal in history, its inhabitants have been reticent, self-contained, distrustful of foreign observation, in a degree without parallel among other equally civilized nations. The cause of this taciturnity will afterwards be clearly explained; but no one who is acquainted either with the past experiences or the present condition of the people can be ignorant of its results. Local officials may write alarming reports, but their apprehensions seem to be contradicted by the apparent quiet that prevails. Outward, palpable proofs of suffering are often wholly wanting; and even when, as in 1770, such proofs abound, there is generally no lack of evidence on the other side. The Bengali bears existence with a composure that neither accident nor chance can ruffle. He becomes silently rich or uncomplainingly poor. The emotional part of his nature is in strict subjection, his resentment enduring but unspoken, his gratitude of the sort that silently descends from generation to generation. The. passion for privacy reaches its climax in the domestic relations. An outer apartment, in even the humblest households, is set apart for strangers and the transaction of business, but everything behind it is a mystery. The most intimate friend does not venture to make those commonplace kindly inquiries about a neighbour’s wife or daughter which European courtesy demands from mere acquaintances. This family privacy is maintained at any price. During the famine of 1866 it was found impossible to render public charity available to the female members of the respectable classes, and many a rural household starved slowly to death without uttering a complaint or making a sign.


“All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field; and in June, 1770, the Resident at the Durbar affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead. Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches poured into the great cities. At an early period of the year pestilence had broken out. In March we find small-pox at Moorshedabad, where it glided through the vice-regal mutes, and cut off the Prince Syfut in his palace. The streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead. Interment could not do its work quick enough; even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens..... In 1770, the rainy season brought relief, and before the end of September the province reaped an abundant harvest. But the relief came too late to avert depopulation. Starving and shelterless crowds crawled despairingly from one deserted village to another in a vain search for food, or a resting-place in which to hide themselves from the rain. The epidemics incident to the season were thus spread over the whole country; and, until the close of the year, disease continued so prevalent as to form a subject of communication from the government in Bengal to the Court of Directors. Millions of famished wretches died in the struggle to live through the few intervening weeks that separated them from the harvest, their last gaze being probably fixed on the densely-covered fields that would ripen only a little too late for them..... Three months later, another bountiful harvest, the great rice-crop of the year, was gathered in. Abundance returned to Bengal as suddenly as famine had swooped down upon it, and in reading some of the manuscript records of December it is difficult to realize that the scenes of the preceding ten months have not been hideous phantasmagoria or a long, troubled dream. On Christmas eve, the Council in Calcutta wrote home to the Court of Directors that the scarcity had entirely ceased, and, incredible as it may seem, that unusual plenty had returned..... So generous had been the harvest that the government proposed at once to lay in its military stores for the ensuing year, and expected to obtain them at a very cheap rate.”


Such sudden transitions from the depths of misery to the most exuberant plenty are by no means rare in the history of Asia, where the various centres of civilization are, in an economical sense, so isolated from each other that the welfare of the population is nearly always absolutely dependent on the irregular: and apparently capricious bounty of nature. For the three years following the dreadful misery above described, harvests of unprecedented abundance were gathered in. Yet how inadequate they were to repair the fearful damage wrought by six months of starvation, the history of the next quarter of a century too plainly reveals. “Plenty had indeed returned,” says our annalist, “but it had returned to a silent and deserted province.” The extent of the depopulation is to our Western imaginations almost incredible. During those six months of horror, more than TEN MILLIONS of people had perished! It was as if the entire population of our three or four largest States—man, woman, and child—were to be utterly swept away between now and next August, leaving the region between the Hudson and Lake Michigan as quiet and deathlike as the buried streets of Pompeii. Yet the estimate is based upon most accurate and trustworthy official returns; and Mr. Hunter may well say that “it represents an aggregate of individual suffering which no European nation has been called upon to contemplate within historic times.”


This unparalleled calamity struck down impartially the rich and the poor. The old, aristocratic families of Lower Bengal were irretrievably ruined. The Rajah of Burdwan, whose possessions were so vast that, travel as far as he would, he always slept under a roof of his own and within his own jurisdiction, died in such indigence that his son had to melt down the family plate and beg a loan from the government in order to discharge his father’s funeral expenses. And our author gives other similar instances. The wealthy natives who were appointed to assess and collect the internal revenue, being unable to raise the sums required by the government, were in many cases imprisoned, or their estates were confiscated and re-let in order to discharge the debt.


For fifteen years the depopulation went on increasing. The children in a community, requiring most nourishment to sustain their activity, are those who soonest succumb to famine. “Until 1785,” says our author, “the old died off without there being any rising generation to step into their places.” From lack of cultivators, one third of the surface of Bengal fell out of tillage and became waste land. The landed proprietors began each “to entice away the tenants of his neighbour, by offering protection against judicial proceedings, and farms at very low rents.” The disputes and deadly feuds which arose from this practice were, perhaps, the least fatal of the evil results which flowed from it. For the competition went on until, the tenants obtaining their holdings at half-rates, the resident cultivators—who had once been the wealthiest farmers in the country—were no longer able to complete on such terms. They began to sell, lease, or desert their property, migrating to less afflicted regions, or flying to the hills on the frontier to adopt a savage life. But, in a climate like that of Northeastern India, it takes but little time to transform a tract of untilled land into formidable wilderness. When the functions of society are impeded, nature is swift to assert its claims. And accordingly, in 1789, “Lord Cornwallis after three years’ vigilant inquiry, pronounced one third of the company’s territories in Bengal to be a jungle, inhabited only by wild beasts.”


On the Western frontier of Beerbhoom the state of affairs was, perhaps, most calamitous. In 1776, four acres out of every seven remained untilled. Though in earlier times this district had been a favourite highway for armies, by the year 1780 it had become an almost impassable jungle. A small company of Sepoys, which in that year by heroic exertions forced its way through, was obliged to traverse 120 miles of trackless forest, swarming with tigers and black shaggy bears. In 1789 this jungle “continued so dense as to shut off all communication between the two most important towns, and to cause the mails to be carried by a circuit of fifty miles through another district.”


Such a state of things it is difficult for us to realize; but the monotonous tale of disaster and suffering is not yet complete. Beerbhoom was, to all intents and purposes, given over to tigers. “A belt of jungle, filled with wild beasts, formed round each village.” At nightfall the hungry animals made their dreaded incursions carrying away cattle, and even women and children, and devouring them. “The official records frequently speak of the mail-bag being carried off by wild beasts.” So great was the damage done by these depredations, that “the company offered a reward for each tiger’s head, sufficient to maintain a peasant’s family in comfort for three months; an item of expenditure it deemed so necessary, that, when under extraordinary pressure it had to suspend all payments, the tiger-money and diet allowance for prisoners were the sole exceptions to the rule.” Still more formidable foes were found in the herds of wild elephants, which came trooping along in the rear of the devastation caused by the famine. In the course of a few years fifty-six villages were reported as destroyed by elephants, and as having lapsed into jungle in consequence; “and an official return states that forty market-towns throughout the district had been deserted from the same cause. In many parts of the country the peasantry did not dare to sleep in their houses, lest they should be buried beneath them during the night.” These terrible beasts continued to infest the province as late as 1810.


But society during these dark days had even worse enemies than tigers and elephants. The barbarous highlanders, of a lower type of mankind, nourishing for forty centuries a hatred of their Hindu supplanters, like that which the Apache bears against the white frontiersman, seized the occasion to renew their inroads upon the lowland country. Year by year they descended from their mountain fastnesses, plundering and burning. Many noble Hindu families, ousted by the tax-collectors from their estates, began to seek subsistence from robbery. Others, consulting their selfish interests amid the general distress, “found it more profitable to shelter banditti on their estates, levying blackmail from the surrounding villages as the price of immunity from depredation, and sharing in the plunder of such as would not come to terms. Their country houses were robber strongholds, and the early English administrators of Bengal have left it on record that a gang-robbery never occurred without a landed proprietor being at the bottom of it.” The peasants were not slow to follow suit, and those who were robbed of their winter’s store had no alternative left but to become robbers themselves. The thieveries of the Fakeers, or religious mendicants, and the bold, though stealthy attacks of Thugs and Dacoits—members of Masonic brotherhoods, which at all times have lived by robbery and assassination—added to the general turmoil. In the cold weather of 1772 the province was ravaged far and wide by bands of armed freebooters, fifty thousand strong; and to such a pass did things arrive that the regular forces sent by Warren Hastings to preserve order were twice disastrously routed; while, in Mr. Hunter’s graphic language, “villages high up the Ganges lived by housebreaking in Calcutta.” In English mansions “it was the invariable practice for the porter to shut the outer door at the commencement of each meal, and not to open it till the butler brought him word that the plate was safely locked up.” And for a long time nearly all traffic ceased upon the imperial roads.


This state of things, which amounted to chronic civil war, induced Lord Cornwallis in 1788 to place the province under the direct military control of an English officer. The administration of Mr. Keating—the first hardy gentleman to whom this arduous office was assigned—is minutely described by our author. For our present purpose it is enough to note that two years of severe campaigning, attended and followed by relentless punishment of all transgressors, was required to put an end to the disorders.


Such was the appalling misery, throughout a community of thirty million persons, occasioned by the failure of the winter rice-crop in 1769. In abridging Mr. Hunter’s account we have adhered as closely to our original as possible, but he who would obtain adequate knowledge of this tale of woe must seek it in the ever memorable description of the historian himself. The first question which naturally occurs to the reader—though, as Mr. Hunter observes, it would have been one of the last to occur to the Oriental mind—is, Who was to blame? To what culpable negligence was it due that such a dire calamity was not foreseen, and at least partially warded off? We shall find reason to believe that it could not have been adequately foreseen, and that no legislative measures could in that state of society have entirely prevented it. Yet it will appear that the government, with the best of intentions, did all in its power to make matters worse; and that to its blundering ignorance the distress which followed is largely due.


The first duty incumbent upon the government in a case like that of the failure of the winter rice-crop of 1769, was to do away with all hindrance to the importation of food into the province. One chief cause of the far-reaching distress wrought by great Asiatic famines has been the almost complete commercial isolation of Asiatic communities. In the Middle Ages the European communities were also, though to a far less extent, isolated from each other, and in those days periods of famine were comparatively frequent and severe. And one of the chief causes which now render the occurrence of a famine on a great scale almost impossible in any part of the civilized world is the increased commercial solidarity of civilized nations. Increased facility of distribution has operated no less effectively than improved methods of production.


Now, in 1770 the province of Lower Bengal was in a state of almost complete commercial isolation from other communities. Importation of food on an adequate scale was hardly possible. “A single fact speaks volumes as to the isolation of each district. An abundant harvest, we are repeatedly told, was as disastrous to the revenues as a bad one; for, when a large quantity of grain had to be carried to market, the cost of carriage swallowed up the price obtained. Indeed, even if the means of intercommunication and transport had rendered importation practicable, the province had at that time no money to give in exchange for food. Not only had its various divisions a separate currency which would pass nowhere else except at a ruinous exchange, but in that unfortunate year Bengal seems to have been utterly drained of its specie..... The absence of the means of importation was the more to be deplored, as the neighbouring districts could easily have supplied grain. In the southeast a fair harvest had been reaped, except, in circumscribed spots; and we are assured that, during the famine, this part of Bengal was enabled to export without having to complain of any deficiency in consequence..... INDEED, NO MATTER HOW LOCAL A FAMINE MIGHT BE IN THE LAST CENTURY, THE EFFECTS WERE EQUALLY DISASTROUS. Sylhet, a district in the northeast of Bengal, had reaped unusually plentiful harvests in 1780 and 1781, but the next crop was destroyed by a local inundation, and, notwithstanding the facilities for importation afforded by water-carriage, one third of the people died.”


Here we have a vivid representation of the economic condition of a society which, however highly civilized in many important respects, still retained, at the epoch treated of, its aboriginal type of organization. Here we see each community brought face to face with the impossible task of supplying, unaided, the deficiencies of nature. We see one petty district a prey to the most frightful destitution, even while profuse plenty reigns in the districts round about it. We find an almost complete absence of the commercial machinery which, by enabling the starving region to be fed out of the surplus of more favoured localities, has in the most advanced countries rendered a great famine practically impossible.


Now this state of things the government of 1770 was indeed powerless to remedy. Legislative power and wisdom could not anticipate the invention of railroads; nor could it introduce throughout the length and breadth of Bengal a system of coaches, canals, and caravans; nor could it all at once do away with the time-honoured brigandage, which increased the cost of transport by decreasing the security of it; nor could it in a trice remove the curse of a heterogeneous coinage. None, save those uninstructed agitators who believe that governments can make water run up-hill, would be disposed to find fault with the authorities in Bengal for failing to cope with these difficulties. But what we are to blame them for—though it was an error of the judgment and not of the intentions—is their mischievous interference with the natural course of trade, by which, instead of helping matters, they but added another to the many powerful causes which were conspiring to bring about the economic ruin of Bengal. We refer to the act which in 1770 prohibited under penalties all speculation in rice.


This disastrous piece of legislation was due to the universal prevalence of a prejudice from which so-called enlightened communities are not yet wholly free. It is even now customary to heap abuse upon those persons who in a season of scarcity, when prices are rapidly rising, buy up the “necessaries of life,” thereby still increasing for a time the cost of living. Such persons are commonly assailed with specious generalities to the effect that they are enemies of society. People whose only ideas are “moral ideas” regard them as heartless sharpers who fatten upon the misery of their fellow-creatures. And it is sometimes hinted that such “practices” ought to be stopped by legislation.


Now, so far is this prejudice, which is a very old one, from being justified by facts, that, instead of being an evil, speculation in breadstuffs and other necessaries is one of the chief agencies by which in modern times and civilized countries a real famine is rendered almost impossible. This natural monopoly operates in two ways. In the first place, by raising prices, it checks consumption, putting every one on shorter allowance until the season of scarcity is over, and thus prevents the scarcity from growing into famine. In the second place, by raising prices, it stimulates importation from those localities where abundance reigns and prices are low. It thus in the long run does much to equalize the pressure of a time of dearth and diminish those extreme oscillations of prices which interfere with the even, healthy course of trade. A government which, in a season of high prices, does anything to check such speculation, acts about as sagely as the skipper of a wrecked vessel who should refuse to put his crew upon half rations.


The turning-point of the great Dutch Revolution, so far as it concerned the provinces which now constitute Belgium, was the famous siege and capture of Antwerp by Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. The siege was a long one, and the resistance obstinate, and the city would probably not have been captured if famine had not come to the assistance of the besiegers. It is interesting, therefore, to inquire what steps the civic authorities had taken to prevent such a calamity. They knew that the struggle before them was likely to be the life-and-death struggle of the Southern Netherlands; they knew that there was risk of their being surrounded so that relief from without would be impossible; they knew that their assailant was one of the most astute and unconquerable of men, by far the greatest general of the sixteenth century. Therefore they proceeded to do just what our Republican Congress, under such circumstances, would probably have done, and just what the New York Tribune, if it had existed in those days, would have advised them to do. Finding that sundry speculators were accumulating and hoarding up provisions in anticipation of a season of high prices, they hastily decided, first of all to put a stop to such “selfish iniquity.” In their eyes the great thing to be done was to make things cheap. They therefore affixed a very low maximum price to everything which could be eaten, and prescribed severe penalties for all who should attempt to take more than the sum by law decreed. If a baker refused to sell his bread for a price which would have been adequate only in a time of great plenty, his shop was to be broken open, and his loaves distributed among the populace. The consequences of this idiotic policy were twofold.


In the first place, the enforced lowness of prices prevented any breadstuffs or other provisions from being brought into the city. It was a long time before Farnese succeeded in so blockading the Scheldt as to prevent ships laden with eatables from coming in below. Corn and preserved meats might have been hurried by thousands of tons into the beleaguered city. Friendly Dutch vessels, freighted with abundance, were waiting at the mouth of the river. But all to no purpose. No merchant would expose his valuable ship, with its cargo, to the risk of being sunk by Farnese’s batteries, merely for the sake of finding a market no better than a hundred others which could be entered without incurring danger. No doubt if the merchants of Holland had followed out the maxim Vivre pour autrui, they would have braved ruin and destruction rather than behold their neighbours of Antwerp enslaved. No doubt if they could have risen to a broad philosophic view of the future interests of the Netherlands, they would have seen that Antwerp must be saved, no matter if some of them were to lose money by it. But men do not yet sacrifice themselves for their fellows, nor do they as a rule look far beyond the present moment and its emergencies. And the business of government is to legislate for men as they are, not as it is supposed they ought to be. If provisions had brought a high price in Antwerp, they would have been carried thither. As it was, the city, by its own stupidity, blockaded itself far more effectually than Farnese could have done it.


In the second place, the enforced lowness of prices prevented any general retrenchment on the part of the citizens. Nobody felt it necessary to economize. Every one bought as much bread, and ate it as freely, as if the government by insuring its cheapness had insured its abundance. So the city lived in high spirits and in gleeful defiance of its besiegers, until all at once provisions gave out, and the government had to step in again to palliate the distress which it had wrought. It constituted itself quartermaster-general to the community, and doled out stinted rations alike to rich and poor, with that stern democratic impartiality peculiar to times of mortal peril. But this served only, like most artificial palliatives, to lengthen out the misery. At the time of the surrender, not a loaf of bread could be obtained for love or money.


In this way a bungling act of legislation helped to decide for the worse a campaign which involved the territorial integrity and future welfare of what might have become a great nation performing a valuable function in the system of European communities.


The striking character of this instructive example must be our excuse for presenting it at such length. At the beginning of the famine in Bengal the authorities legislated in very much the same spirit as the burghers who had to defend Antwerp against Parma.


“By interdicting what it was pleased to term the monopoly of grain, it prevented prices from rising at once to their natural rates. The Province had a certain amount of food in it, and this food had to last about nine months. Private enterprise if left to itself would have stored up the general supply at the harvest, with a view to realizing a larger profit at a later period in the scarcity. Prices would in consequence have immediately risen, compelling the population to reduce their consumption from the very beginning of the dearth. The general stock would thus have been husbanded, and the pressure equally spread over the whole nine months, instead of being concentrated upon the last six. The price of grain, in place of promptly rising to three half-pence a pound as in 1865-66, continued at three farthings during the earlier months of the famine. During the latter ones it advanced to twopence, and in certain localities reached fourpence.”


The course taken by the great famine of 1866 well illustrates the above views. This famine, also, was caused by the total failure of the December rice-crop, and it was brought to a close by an abundant harvest in the succeeding year.


“Even as regards the maximum price reached, the analogy holds good, in each case rice having risen in general to nearly twopence, and in particular places to fourpence, a pound; and in each the quoted rates being for a brief period in several isolated localities merely nominal, no food existing in the market, and money altogether losing its interchangeable value. In both the people endured silently to the end, with a fortitude that casual observers of a different temperament and widely dissimilar race may easily mistake for apathy, but which those who lived among the sufferers are unable to distinguish from qualities that generally pass under a more honourable name. During 1866, when the famine was severest, I superintended public instruction throughout the southwestern division of Lower Bengal, including Orissa. The subordinate native officers, about eight hundred in number, behaved with a steadiness, and when called upon, with a self-abnegation, beyond praise. Many of them ruined their health. The touching scenes of self-sacrifice and humble heroism which I witnessed among the poor villagers on my tours of inspection will remain in my memory till my latest day.”


But to meet the famine of 1866 Bengal was equipped with railroads and canals, and better than all, with an intelligent government. Far from trying to check speculation, as in 1770, the government did all in its power to stimulate it. In the earlier famine one could hardly engage in the grain trade without becoming amenable to the law. “In 1866 respectable men in vast numbers went into the trade; for government, by publishing weekly returns of the rates in every district, rendered the traffic both easy and safe. Every one knew where to buy grain cheapest, and where to sell it dearest, and food was accordingly brought from the districts that could best spare it, and carried to those which most urgently needed it. Not only were prices equalized so far as possible throughout the stricken parts, but the publicity given to the high rates in Lower Bengal induced large shipments from the upper provinces, and the chief seat of the trade became unable to afford accommodation for landing the vast stores of grain brought down the river. Rice poured into the affected districts from all parts,—railways, canals, and roads vigorously doing their duty.”


The result of this wise policy was that scarcity was heightened into famine only in one remote corner of Bengal. Orissa was commercially isolated in 1866, as the whole country had been in 1770. “As far back as the records extend, Orissa has produced more grain than it can use. It is an exporting, not an importing province, sending away its surplus grain by sea, and neither requiring nor seeking any communication with Lower Bengal by land.” Long after the rest of the province had begun to prepare for a year of famine, Orissa kept on exporting. In March, when the alarm was first raised, the southwest monsoon had set in, rendering the harbours inaccessible. Thus the district was isolated. It was no longer possible to apply the wholesome policy which was operating throughout the rest of the country. The doomed population of Orissa, like passengers in a ship without provisions, were called upon to suffer the extremities of famine; and in the course of the spring and summer of 1866, some seven hundred thousand people perished.


January, 1869.
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/f/fiske/john/f54u/chapter9.html

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