Bengal's Modernity and Nationalism 1880-1910
From regional cultural politics to international impact
Nineteenth-century Bengal with Calcutta as the imperial metropolis of British India was the birthplace of Indian modernity. During the nineteenth century this modernity, largely the product of Hindu urban intellectuals, was disseminated in Bengali and English through the printing press. In order to communicate the paraphernalia of modernity, the Bengali language had to be moulded into an appropriate vehicle. The Bengali printing industry began to produce magazines, newspapers, and books for popular consumption. Bengali literature was read and appreciated especially in the women's quarters of the Bengali middle and upper-middle class homes. English was being used as the language of contact with the British ruling class and increasingly also as the language of communication with the world outside Bengal.
By VICTOR A. VAN BIJLERT
Bengali/Indian modernity was a composite phenomenon: European science, economy, and political theory were intricately mixed up with Indian thought and a forward-looking Hindu ethos. It was the latter, however, that led to Indian radical nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Bengali modernity expressed itself almost exclusively in Hindu religious reform. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century the Bengali language and its idiom were being adjusted to modern literary forms in accordance with the new tastes of the urban reading public. Western literary genres such as the novel and the sonnet were tried out in Bengali. Bengali belles-lettres gained wide public recognition in the latter half of the nineteenth century when form and content were thought to be able to compete with the best in European literature. Michael Madhusudan Dutta (1824-1873) in poetry, Dinabandhu Mitra (1830-1873) in drama, and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) in novels and essays had fundamentally changed the landscape of Bengali literature.All through the nineteenth century Indians expected (and were often instructed to expect) that British rule was necessary and would last for a long time to come and that it was impossible even to imagine its end. All that was left to indigenous intellectuals was to express themselves in cultural production. They were never expected to put forward hard political demands. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards Bengali print capitalism acted as a leaven even for the other linguistic areas in the Indian empire. Looking at the example set by Bengal, they developed their own forms of print capitalism. Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, the national impact of Bengali modernity was primarily cultural and eminently literary.
The first imaginings of Indian independence or resistance in the form of a war of liberation were not stimulated so much by the study of history, political science, or sociology, as by literature. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's later writings, especially his novel Anandamath (1882), accomplished this feat. During his lifetime Bankim had been regarded only as a talented innovator of Bengali prose. Less than ten years after his death he began to be revered as the rishi, the 'seer' and prophet, of Indian national liberation. The last decade of the nineteenth century saw the meteoric international career of another cultural hero of Bengal: Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902). He propagated a highly modernized brand of Vedanta philosophy as an ideology of national empowerment in India and spiritual renewal for the rest of the world. Vivekananda's contribution to Bengali literature is very small as his writings were published mainly in English. However, his influence on Bengali and Indian self-respect and national pride was tremendous. During the 1890s Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) rose to prominence as the most prominent Bengali poet, novelist and dramatist after Bankim. But as far as nationalism was concerned, Bankim still reigned supreme.
National outrage
When the Government of India implemented an administrative partition of Bengal in 1905, it unintentionally gave a major boost to Indian anticolonial nationalism. This partition provoked mass protest among the Bengalis who were joined in their indignation by nationalists in the other provinces. The size of the public outrage opened the eyes of Indian opinion to the possibility of all-out resistance to British rule. Utilizing this wave of national outrage, the radical Bengali journalist and political thinker Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) revived and expanded Bankim's nationalist symbolism and Vivekananda's Vedantic empowerment into a consistent ideology of Indian nationalism based on the total overthrow of British rule.
Between 1906 and 1908 Aurobindo poured out his radical Indian nationalism in English in the newspaper Bande Mataram founded by Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932). Revolution was openly preached in the Yugantar, a Bengali paper with which Aurobindo was secretly but deeply involved. The highly seditious pieces that appeared in Yugantar were written by different authors, foremost among whom was Abinash Chandra Bhattacharya (1882-1962) whose articles were collected in two booklets which were considered seditious by the Government. In the same period, Rabindranath took the lead in the mass protests against the partition of Bengal and wrote numerous patriotic songs celebrating Mother Bengal. He quickly distanced himself from the protest movement when its violent revolutionary aspects began to come to the fore.
Between 1905 and 1908 revolutionary underground propaganda by word in seditious magazines and propaganda of the deed increased exponentially, not only in Bengal proper, but it was also spreading in the Punjab and the Bombay Presidency. One of the most notorious cases was the so-called Alipore bomb case (1909), in which Aurobindo and his younger brother, Barindra (1880-1959), were among the principal accused. In the British perception this case marked an important turning-point. The Government now regarded much of the Indian nationalist discourse disseminated through the printing press with the utmost suspicion and it began seriously to prosecute those vernacular newspapers that it regarded as preaching sedition. By 1910, armed revolution was not only being propagated in India itself, but also through Indian nationalist magazines produced abroad such as the Ghadr, 'Mutiny' published in Urdu from San Francisco by Har Dayal (1884-1939), who explicitly based himself on the Calcutta Yugantar; or the Bande Mataram published in English from Geneva by Madame Bhikhaiji Rustom Cama (1861-1936). Bengali political radicalism had begun to make its impact felt on a global scale and it had accomplished this almost solely through utilizing the potential of the printing press. Bengali modernity had successfully accomplished the transition from cultural theory to political practice. *
Dr Victor A. van Bijlert is researcher of Bengali literature and history and connected to Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is editor of the Bengal Studies page in the IIAS Newsletter, publishes on Bengali literature and the history of Indian nationalism and has also translated works of Rabindranath Tagore into Dutch.