CONVERSION AND VERSE IN BENGAL

Four Intellectuals who embraced Christianity

 Proselytism didn't get many takers among high castes in India.Bengal the capital of British India,was not a virgin soil.People like Rajaram Mohan Roy(1772-1833),Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar(1820-1891) and Keshub Chandra Sen(1838-1884)had sown the seeds of renaissance.Hindus were taught to assimilate new ideas.Conversion had lost its charm.Christians in Bengal are just 0.6% of the population,and mostly belonging to one clan like Das and Hansde.But then,there was a reverse process.Self enquiry or an intellectual search made a few embrace Christianity.They with their moorings in the Indian culture made Indian society rich.While I am going to speak about a few men/women of letters,I remember the first printing press brought to India by William Carey to Kolkata.Indian literature flourished where the mission failed.

William Carey

William Carey(1761-1834),known as the Father of modern missions,was the first English Baptist Missionary in India.Born into a family of weavers,at 14,his father sent him to a cobbler as apprentice.Carey,who wanted to make a different kind of shoe,gave final shape to his missionary manifesto in 1792:An Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens.He formed the Baptist Mission Society with Andrew Fuller,John Ryland and John Sutcliffe as charter members.He met Dr John Thomas a medical missionary who was in Kolkata,then in England and decided to accompany him to India.His mission didn't have the blessings of English East India Company.He had to leave the ship midway and  board a Danish ship.He reached Kolkata in 1793 november and John Thomas made him manage a Midnapore Indigo factory for six years.He then moved to the Serampore Danish colony where a second hand printing press was installed.From there he printed The Bible in 44 languages.His favorite quote in his sermons was from Isaiah,54:2-3:Expect great things from God;Attempt great things for God.

Krishnapal

Carey's first convert was Krishna Pal ,a sudra,in 1802.Same year,Krishnapal's daughter married a Brahmin.This proved that his Church repudiated caste distinctions.With generous contribution from the  Governor General Richard Wellesley,the Serampore College was built;Carey became Bengali Professor.He had to sever his ties with the mission he founded towards the end of his life and he lived in the campus.

Krishna Mohan Banerjee(1813-1885) became a Christian two years before Carey's death.He was never under Carey's influence.He imbibed the essence of Bengal Renaissance and attempted to rethink Hindu philosophy,religion and ethics in response to the stimulus of Christian ideas.

His conversion took Bengal by storm.He lost his job and his wife for a while.
He was born in Syampur,in the house of his maternal grandfather Ramjay Vidyabhushan,who was court pundit of Santiram Singha of Jarasanko.He was the son of Jibankrishna Banerjee and Sreemoti Devi.In 1819 he joined School Society Institution of David Hare(1775-1842) which became Hare's School later.Hare was a Scottish watchmaker with no faith commitments.Banerjee attended the Hindu College(now  Presidency University) in 1831 where his English play,The Persecuted was staged.He became a member of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio's Young Bengal group.Derozio,poet,radical thinker and Principal of Hindu College died of cholera the year Banerjee joined the college.Banerjee attended the lectures of the Scottish missionary,Alexander Duff,who came to India in 1830.He came under Duff's sway and embraced Christianity in 1832.He lost his job in Hare's School.His wife Bindhyobashini was forced to flee to her father's house.She joined him in later life.He converted her,his brother Kalicharan and Gnanendra Mohan Tagore,son of Prasannakumar Tagore.Gnanendra Mohan married Banerjee's daughter Kamalmani and became the first Asian to qualify as a Barrister in 1862.

Banerjee

Gnanendra Mohan (1826-1890) belonged to the Pathuriaghata branch of the Tagore family and his father Prasannakumar was one of the founders of the Hindu College. His classmates there included Rajnarain Bose,writer and grandfather of Aurobindo and Gobinda Chandra Dutt,father of the poetess Toru Dutt.The syllabus of Hindu College was highly secular and many students became Christians.Gnanendra was converted in 1851.He was disowned by his father and deprived of his inheritance.His share in the vast estate of his father was given to his father's nephew,Maharaja Bahadur Sir Jatindra Mohan Tagore.Gnanendra was Professor of Hindu Law in University of London and was Judge in Kolkata High Court later.

Duff

Krishna Mohan Banerjee was the first Indian to be ordained as a priest of the Anglican Church,in 1839.He made the 13 volume Bengali adaptation of Encyclopedia Britannica and wrote two remarkable books:Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy(1861)and The Relation between Christianity and Hinduism(1881).Though he began as an apologist for Hinduism,after 1865 he began to argue Christianity was fulfilment of Hinduism.Sacrifice was the most important ritual according to vedic texts.Prajapati sacrificed himself to redeem humanity and was reborn as a mere mortal.Half man,half divine.All this,Banerjee argued,prefigured the incarnation of Jesus.Of course,there is the alternate argument from the view point of Vedanta,propounded by scholars like Vivekananda and Ranganathananda.Holgar Kresten,in his book,Jesus Lived in India,has shown that Jesus had his philosophical foundation in India,filling his missing years.Banerjee was instrumental in the conversion of Michael Madhususdan  Dutt and Lal Behari Dey to Christianity.

Michael Madhusudan Dutt

Michael Madhusudan Dutt(1824-1873)is one of the greatest poets of Bengal and father of the Bengali sonnet.He pioneered Blank Verse.Meghnad Bodh Kavya of him is a tragic epic.He,according to Aurobindo,expressed all the stormiest passions of man's soul in gigantic language.
He was the son of eminent lawyer, Rajnarayan Dutt and Jahnabi Devi of Sargordari,now in Bangladesh.From his early age on he wanted to be like an English man and converted to Christianity in 1843 at the Church of Fort William to the ire of his family.He came under the spell of his teacher in Hindu College,Captain D L Richardson who was a supporter of Thomas Babington Macaulay.Dutt adopted it.His intellectual inquiry told him that he was born in the wrong side of the planet and wrote his early works in English.He adored Lord Byron and like him was Bohemian and romantic.

To avoid persecution,he escaped to Madras.There he taught English in two schools.Worked in the Editorial section of Madras Circulator,General Chronicle,Aethenium,Daily Spectator.He was Joint Editor of Spectator and Chief Editor of Hindu Chronicle.After father's death,he became depressed and returned to Kolkata in 1856.He worked as Head clerk in Police Court and was Interpreter during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.In the 1860s  he went to Versailles where he lived in abject poverty.Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's timely intervention saved him from imprisonment and he returned home.He married twice.In Madras,Rebecca Mactavys;in Kolkata,Henrietta Sophia White.He divorced Rebecca.He had four children from Rebecca and two,Napoleon and Sharmishta from Henrietta.Tennis player,Leander Paes is his great grandson.His epitaph,a verse of his own,reads:
Stop a while traveller!
Should Mother Bengal claim thee for her son.
As a child takes repose on his mother's Elysian lap,
Even so here in the Long Home,
On the bosom of the earth,
Enjoys the sweet eternal sleep
Poet Madhusudan of the Duttas.
Lal Behari Dey(1824-1892) too was a student of Alexander Duff.Dey wrote a paper,The Falsity of Hindu Religion before his conversion in 1843.He wrote a novel,Govindasamanta which became Bengal Peasant Life in English.Charles Darwin read it and sent a letter of appreciation.Dey also wrote Folktales of Bengal and was Editor of Arunoday,Indian Reformer,Friday Review and Bengal Magazine.

Toru Dutt

The first  poetess in Indian English,Toru Dutt(1856-1877) was different:she didn't become a Christian  by her own will.In 1862,while she was a six year old,her father Gobinda Chandra Dutt became a Christian.He belonged to the illustrious Dutt family of Rambagan;the family of R C Dutt.Romesh Chandra Dutt (1848-1909) was the second Indian after Satyendranath Tagore to get into ICS.He was the first Indian to attain the Divisional Commisioner rank.He left ICS at 49,went to London and later bacame Dewan of Baroda.He wrote Economic History of India ,abridged Mahabaratha and Ramayana to Bengali.

Gobinda Chandra Dutt's conversion strained his relationship with his wife,Kshethtramoni Devi;She reconciled later,became Christian and translated Blood of Jesus to Bengali.
Toru was the youngest of Dutt's three children.Her brother Abju's early death was a staggering blow.Toru and sister repeatedly read Milton's Paradise Lost.Dutt took the melancholic children to a tour of Europe.They settled in France and had education there.Then Italy and  Cambridge.While at Cambridge,Toru became friends with Mary Martin,daughter of Rev John Martin of Sydney Sussex College.It became a lifelong bond.The Dutt family returned to Kolkata in 1873.Toru lived for only  21 years and her poetry,though meager,was brilliant.She translated around 100 poems from the French to form the anthology,A Sheaf Gleaned In French Fields.She retold Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan.The manuscripts of her novels,Bianca or the Young Spanish Maiden and Le Journal de Mademoiselle d' Arvers were found posthumously and published.She died of TB, among books.She spoke of her creativity in Jogadhya Uma:
Absurd maybe the tale I tell
Ill suited to the marching times,
I loved the lips from which it fell,
So let it stand among my rhymes.

R C Dutt

The Bengal renaissance made even outsiders expressive.Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922)got the Pandita title from Kolkata University in 1878.She was on a lecture tour to Bengal with brother  after the death of their parents in the 1877 famine.

Ramabai

Ramabai was born in Gangamoola,Karnataka to Anant Shastri,a Brahmin scholar and to his second wife,Lakshmi Bai.he had married her while she was just 9 and his decision the further educate her,ostracized him from his community.He and his family fled to the forest first and searched for new pastures.Ramabai at 12,memorised 18000 verses.After the death of her parents,she began giving lectures on women's education and against child marriage.Her fame reached Kolkata.After her brother's death in 1880,she married a Bengali sudra,lawyer Bipin Behari Medhvi.He died two years later.They had a daughter Mano.From there,Ramabai shifted to Bombay and then to Pune where she became famous.Since women were supposed to be treated by only women,she pressed for women's entry into medical colleges.This demand reached Queen Victoria and thus began Lady Dufferin's Women's Medical Movement.Ramabai was given a scholarship to England in 1883 to be trained as a teacher.There she became a Christian and joined the Anglican Church.It is clear from historical accounts that Queen Victoria funded a project to convert high caste Hindus to Christianity.Ramabai went to the US to seek funds for her institution in India,lectured for three years and raised $30,000.Her book,High Caste Hindu Women sold 10,000 copies.She dedicated the book to Dr Anandibai Joshi,the first Indian woman to study western medicine.On return she founded Mukti Sadan,Krupa Sadan and Sharada Sadan.She translated the Bible to Marathi.Her daughter Manorama preceded her in death.

Reference:
Pioneers of Indigenous Christianity/K Baago,1969
Pandita Ramabai:The Story of her Life/Helen S Dyer,1900
The Life and Letters of Toru Dutt/Harihar Das/OUP,1921
Extravagant Genius:Michael Madhusudan Dutt and his Oeuvre/Indian Poetry in English:Critical Essays/Ed.Z Mitra/Prentice Hall,2012
Life of Lal Behari day/Gerardine Macpherson/T & T Clark,1900

See my blog,KRUPA,BRAHMIN,CHRISTIAN AND NOVELIST