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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/enduring-relevance-liberal-arts-india-henry-derozio-bengal-renaissance/"></div>In 1852, the Indian mathematician <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/indian-mathematician-radhanath-sikdar-first-to-identify-everest-as-highest-mountain-peak/articleshow/47496440.cms">Radhanath Sikdar</a> became the first person to accurately measure Mount Everest, known until then as Peak XV, which the British had been trying — and failing — to do for decades. Two years later, Harachandra Ghosh, Sikdar’s friend from college, was elected judge in the Small Causes Court, the first Indian to hold the position in Calcutta (now Kolkata) under British rule. Around the same time, a third contemporary from their undergraduate years, Ramgopal Ghose, was earning a fortune overseeing the first “indigenous” import/export business of its size, trading in, among other things, Burmese rice.
These three men — a mathematician, a lawyer, and a businessman — were among the luminaries who gave rise to the <a href="https://www.epw.in/tags/bengal-renaissance">Bengal Renaissance</a>. A century of intellectual, political, and social transformation, the Bengal Renaissance also sparked some of the earliest flickers of what would become the Indian Independence movement.
Most interesting to me about these three men, though, is the professor they once shared. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809 – 1831) was just 17 when he began teaching literature and history to Bengali undergraduates in 1826, at what was then Hindu College, now Presidency University. The son of an Indian father and a British mother (who died when Derozio was little), he proudly considered himself “native.” After initially gaining recognition as an adolescent poet prodigy, publishing sonnets in English in local newspapers, Derozio came to be known as something of an enfant terrible among the 19th-century Calcutta intelligentsia.
Two hundred years later, his place in Indian history remains controversial. But it is in the future of higher education that Derozio’s impact strikes me as salient — not because he ushered “Western” thought into a Bengali context, but rather because he taught from a confluence of traditions. Opening his students up to different ways of thinking, Derozio emboldened them to question what was in order to reimagine what may be.
I was first introduced to Derozio while on a research fellowship in Kolkata in 2019, where I was also teaching a writing class at Presidency. As an American educator, I have long operated under the belief that the liberal arts nourished democracy. As philosopher <a href="https://www.colgate.edu/news/stories/commencement-address-martha-c-nussbaum">Martha C. Nussbaum</a> has crystallized, interdisciplinary study can foster self-reflection, elucidate global citizenship, and help students develop a “narrative imagination,” by which we all might learn to recognize, across history and around the world, our shared humanity.
And yet, in my American classroom, I struggled. Semester after semester, the majority of my own students seemed, increasingly, to echo back the larger culture of consumption in which they’d been raised, at once skeptical of and baffled by the charge to think outside of profit or product. Since the 2008 financial crisis, in particular, dramatic drops in enrollment in English and History departments nationwide both reflected and accelerated the misperception — from students and administration alike — that an undergraduate education was something to acquire rather than something to earn. And that anyone who said otherwise, namely professors, did so out of a misguided, liberal “agenda.”
So it was that I arrived in Kolkata looking to fortify myself, to reignite my understanding of the possibilities and responsibilities of higher education. Presidency University’s long list of notable alumni includes filmmaker Satyajit Ray, literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and two Nobel prize winning economists, Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee, among many others. But the institution’s dynamic character goes back to its inception — to Derozio’s time. As literary scholar <a href="http://0318da2.netsolhost.com/newseagullbooks/index.php?p=book_details&amp;book_id=ODg=">Rosinka Chaudhuri</a> explains, the college was founded in 1817, as Bengalis demanded a “government-recognized institution that would not merely give them the rudiments of English grammar, which was easily available in the open market, but the same standard of English education that liberal gentlemen in England received.” Ever since, much like Kolkata itself, Presidency has thrived as a cosmopolitan locus of ideas, empowerment, and resistance.
And it was here, along the arched, open corridors, that I first came across Derozio’s name and portrait, on a tiny plaque that described him as a “poet, patriot, and free-thinker.” Yet he was forced to resign after only a few years of teaching. Intrigued, I couldn’t help but imagine a 19th-century precursor to RateMyProfessor.com, the demoralizing Yelp of higher ed. Like so many American college instructors, I’d been worn down by my untenured vulnerability, by the fear that doing my job — challenging my students — could also cost me my job. Despite or likely because of Derozio’s unpopularity, his students went on to change the course of history. And I wondered what Derozio might teach me, two hundred years later, about the significance of the liberal arts.
As a boy, Derozio had been educated by David Drummond, a progressive Scottish educator, whose Calcutta school was briefly open to European and Indian children alike and where the curriculum emphasized the Scottish Enlightenment. As a result, Derozio grew up versed in the philosophy of David Hume, who championed skepticism. Thomas Paine’s <a href="https://www.ushistory.org/Paine/rights/">The Rights of Man</a> would also prove an instrumental text for him, a defense of the French Revolution, addressed to George Washington, denouncing aristocracy and slavery.
Similarly influenced by the poetic forms of the Romantic era, Derozio wrote in English but evoked notions of India’s former “glory.” As Chaudhuri argues in her 2002 book <a href="http://0318da2.netsolhost.com/newseagullbooks/index.php?p=book_details&amp;book_id=ODg=">Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal</a>: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project, “This minor poetic tradition was a site, however unlikely, for the emergence of a modern Indian identity.” Derozio’s sonnet “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_India_-_My_Native_Land">To India, My Native Land</a>,” for instance, remains celebrated in India for its opposition to being “chained down,” inferring the injustice of colonialism. In the early 19th century, this imagery and its implied Indian unity, in contrast to British rule, created new facets not only of poetry, but of dialogue and debate.
These ideals, of critical inquiry and opposition to tyranny, also drove Derozio’s classroom teaching. But this study of literature and history was not, as Dr. Swapan Chakraborty, a recently retired Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Presidency and formerly the Director General of the National Library of India, explained to me in his office one blistering April afternoon, a “withdrawal into the self,” as the study of the Humanities is often perceived in the US today, “but rather an opening out.”
“We had a concept of jati, of ‘race and caste,’” Chakraborty continued. “But in Derozio’s time, there was not yet the concept of jatirashtra, the nation-state. He taught the history of French Revolution so his students could get the idea to reclaim nationhood.”
In the late 1820, what unfolded under Derozio’s guidance remains both scandalous and remarkable.
Several of Derozio’s students, including Sikdar, Ghosh, and Ghose, formed the “Academic Association,” a debate club in which they argued over the very questions raised in their literature and history classes, questions of equality, morality, and human rights. The Academic Association published journals as well, in English and Bengali, which encouraged public discourse and began to challenge some aspects of colonial rule, such as forced labor, and to advocate for freedom of the press.
But the Derozians (as they became known) also began to challenge the inequity within their own culture. Among wealthy, upper caste Bengalis of that era, arranged marriage for pre-adolescent girls was common, as was caste discrimination against “untouchables.” In bold defiance of such practices, the Academic Association shared meals with people of other religions and castes and agitated for the education of women. Most notoriously, some members ate beef in defiance of strict Hindu orthodoxy, which then, as now, remains taboo.
Bengali high society was outraged, and Derozio was blamed. Fearing for the fate of their enrollment, the Hindu College administration denounced Derozio, who resigned in April of 1831 and succumbed to cholera later that year. Deemed an apostate, Derozio was denied a grave at the South Park Street Cemetery, where his headstone still sits outside the front gates.
Derozio died before he was able to see what his students went on to achieve. But I have been galvanized by their story, not least of all for the light it may shine on recent American conversations about what does or does not constitute a patriotic education.
In September of 2020, then-President Trump, blamed the summer’s social justice uprisings, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, squarely on the shoulders of academia. “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/17/us/politics/trump-patriotic-education.html">Left-wing rioting and mayhem</a> are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools,” he said. Though despotic attacks on academics and writers are nothing new, Trump’s speech reflects a broader conservative distrust of all education, particularly at the college level. According to the <a href="https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/essay/the-growing-partisan-divide-in-views-of-higher-education/">Pew Research Center</a>, in 2019, 59% of Republicans believed that colleges and universities were having a &#8220;negative effect&#8221; on our country, up from 37% in 2015.
Fortunately, Trump’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/trump-1776-commission-report.html?action=click&amp;module=Top%20Stories&amp;pgtype=Homepage">1776 Commission</a>, has already gone the way of his Twitter account. But after decades of defunding and devaluing American education, at every level, restoring both access to college and American confidence in why higher education matters will require a much broader effort. An effort in which critical and interdisciplinary study is not dismissed as frivolous but valued as essential.
Radhanath Sikdar did not develop new dimensions of geometry, trigonometry, and our understanding of the planet’s physical terrain simply because he’d studied David Hume. Ramgopal Ghose did not become a successful businessman and a champion of girls’ education only because he’d read Shakespeare. Harachandra Ghosh did not help create a more efficient and accessible judicial system just because he’d debated the ideals of equality that drove the French revolution.
And yet, it is difficult to believe these men would have made these same accomplishments without Derozio’s teaching. “He has been the cause and the sole cause of that spirit of inquiry after truth, and that contempt of vice — which cannot but be beneficial to India,” Radhanath Sikdar <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Bengal_Renaissance_and_Other_Essays.html?id=GygLAQAAIAAJ">once wrote</a> of his former teacher.
Derozio encouraged his students to ask pointed, uncomfortable questions of themselves, each other, and the very history of which they were then part. In the process, his students came to see one another as citizens of a country that did not yet exist. More than anything, Derozio reminded me of the long view educators (and education) must take of their students, in which advocating for a more just future provides, arguably, the most patriotic education of all.
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Top image: Commemorative stamp of Derozio issued in 2009.
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The Enduring Relevance of Liberal Arts in India: Henry Derozio and the Bengal Renaissance

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/books-people/"></div>For Those Afraid Print is Dead, Look No Further than the Kolkata Book Fair
Suranjan Roy, 67, was sitting under a temporarily quiet loudspeaker on the first night of the 43rd International Kolkata Book Fair, trying — and failing — to convince me that he’s “very middle-brow.” But Roy, who was wearing narrow black-framed glasses and a navy blue jacket in the evening winter chill, conceded that he’s always “surrounded by books.”
By his own estimates, Roy owns more than 1,500. “I tell my wife I won’t be able to read them all in my lifetime.” A retired banker-turned-editor, he wasn’t sure, yet, if was going to buy more books this year or not. But it was only the first night.
Founded in 1976, the boimela, as it’s known in Bengali, is still overseen by the Publishers and Booksellers Guild that originally formed to launch the event. Unlike the Frankfurt Book Fair on which it was modeled, however, the IKBF is open to the public. Based on “footfall,” with over 2.2 million visitors in 2018 and similar projections for this year’s throng, the Kolkata book fair is the largest in the world. Spanning twelve days, it celebrates not just books but also the everyday people who read them.
Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, has long been considered the literary heart of India.  Presidency College, the first “modern” university in Asia, was founded here in 1817. The Calcutta Public Library was among the first in the world. Daily newspapers in both English and Bengali have been widely circulated across Kolkata for two hundred years. And from the early 19th through the early 20th century, the city gave rise to the Bengal Renaissance, an era of tremendous social and intellectual upheaval and progress that eventually dovetailed with the Indian independence movement. Rabindranath Tagore, 1913 Nobel Laureate for Literature, is unambiguously heralded as the city’s patron saint.
This almost mythic reverence for reading and education remains undeniable to Kolkata’s history. But as a foreigner newly arrived to this teeming city of over fourteen million people, I’d been eager to see how that tradition was upheld. Sure, murals of Tagore’s drawings line the walls at my local Metro station, but in the age of global distraction and selfies, part of me wondered how much anyone still actually read.
From the outset at least, the boimela appears not unlike a very crowded American county fair: an annual event that attracts young and old and requires wandering around several acres in dusty shoes and eating greasy food. But instead of 4-H goats and a demolition derby, there are books, books, fried fish, and more books.
Byapti Naskar, 13, with short hair and dimples, was the proud owner of several new volumes of Feluda Samagra, detective stories written by Satyajit Ray, on which he also based two movies. For generations of Bengalis, reading Feluda has remained an adolescent rite of passage. Naskar was with her dad, who, speaking through a translator, said he’s been coming to the book fair since 1987. Even though he works in Jammu and Kashmir, he tries to return to West Bengal this time of year to bring his daughter to the fair.
Nandini Ghosh-Choudhury is a medical researcher who has been living in San Antonio, Texas for over thirty years. In town to visit her mother, Ghosh-Choudhury explained that though she’s lived abroad for a long time, she’s “always reading books in Bengali.”
I stopped Naskar and Ghosh-Choudhury within minutes of one another, outside the Bengali publishing house Ananda, where I also spoke with Mohammad Rafique, a sixtysomething poet in a brown fez who taught for many years at a madrassa and has a new self-published book of poetry coming out this week. His eleventh.
Despite almost every other demographic difference, all of them shared what I was quickly realizing was a love of reading as palpable in the atmosphere as the hazy winter pollution.
On the first night of the fair, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee assured visitors that just as “water was essential” to life, so too were books. Banerjee argued that despite the evolving forces of technology, books would remain part of our lives. With a likely unnecessary reminder, she announced that every festival in Kolkata was big. “Like Durga Puja,” she said, which is celebrated with particular fervor in Kolkata. The book fair, Banerjee promised, would be no less intense. And she was right.
Across the fairgrounds, various publishers set up shop in hundreds of individual stalls and three enormous tents. From global houses, like Penguin and Oxford, to independent Indian firms, such as Aleph and Rupa, to Kolkata icons that publish books exclusively in Bengali, like Ananda and Dey, some stalls held little more than a few shelves, while others appeared like an entire small town library.
Though some critics scoffed at the number of things to buy other than books — mango lime pickle, life insurance, bridal jewelry, and tutoring services to help with overseas college applications, for instance — I was pretty spellbound, both by how many miles of books there were and by how many people were so steadfast in their consideration of them.
Just how jam-packed everything was is hard to overstate. Outside Ananda, the line wrapped around the building. “On the weekends,” I was warned more than once, “you won’t be able to move.”
But over several different (weekday) visits, I browsed everything from, yes, innumerable volumes of Tagore, to Shakespeare and other British classics, to novels of beloved contemporary Indian writers like Amitav Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri, to Stormy Daniels’ Full Disclosure. And like Kolkata itself, the boimela struck me as both overwhelming and intimate, larger than life as well as almost familial.
For Riddhi Maitra, who is in her late 20s, this was her second book fair in her role as the managing editor at Bee Books, an Indian publisher. Like many Kolkatans, Maitra grew up attending the fair and finds it “surreal” to now work there. But the chance to make personal recommendations has become Maitra’s favorite part. “You may not always buy a book,” she told me, “but you should always know a good book.”
Although the IKBF primarily showcases books in Bengali and English, books in various other Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, and Santali are available as well.
The fair is also something of an international crossroads, with countries like Russia, Japan, the US, and Vietnam hosting their own stalls. Since 1997, the fair has included an annual “theme country,” with this year’s emphasis on Guatemala. Unfortunately, the books by Guatemalan writers were “on display,” rather than available for purchase, but that didn’t appear to keep anyone from considering the large picture of Miguel Angel Asturias.
Sabyasachi Ghosh, a thirty-year-old law student, was leaving the fair with a book on Vedanta, Orthodox Hindu philosophy, and the writings of Maa Sarada, a late 19th century religious leader known as “The Mother.” Ghosh said that when he was little, the book fair introduced him to literature from around the world. This year was the first time he was buying exclusively spiritual texts. “As I’m getting older,” he explained, “I’m searching for something else in life.”
Like many people, Suranjan Roy, the former banker and editor, remembers the first book fair in 1976, when he bought a Roget’s Thesaurus he still uses. The fair then was held in the Maidan, a large stretch of park in central Kolkata.
“We had no idea it would still be running in 2019,” he said grinning. But Roy was also concerned. Given the preference most middle and upper class families have for their children to receive an English education, Roy thinks young people today can be “snooty” toward their mother tongue. He wonders if the Bengali language is neglected “by Bengalis themselves.”
But the book fair seemed to offer over 2.2 million reasons to take heart, both in the health and well-being of Bengali literature and the future of reading in general.
Anish De Sarkar, 23, a graduate student in microbiology, was having a coffee behind a fried fish cart after buying the collected works of Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray’s father, in the original Bengali. Even though Sarkar attended English-medium schools, he was still taught Bengali literature. But since doing his undergraduate and now his graduate degrees exclusively in English, he makes an effort to read Bengali in his free time. “I keep reading story books to maintain the connection,” he said.
His friend and fellow grad student Shreya Mukerjee, 22, was holding Arundhati Roy’s 2009 Listening to Grasshoppers, in English, but was emphatic that she, too, “loves, loves, loves” reading in Bengali. “Reading in English,” she said, “is something else. Reading in Bengali is like going home.”
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Books for the People! A Day at the Kolkata Book Fair

To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism

Liesl Schwabe served as a 2018-19 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Kolkata, India. Her essays have appeared in&nbsp;The New York Times, The Washington Post, LitHub, and Words Without Borders, among other publications. She currently directs the Writing Program at Yeshiva College.

Liesl Schwabe

A Portrait and a Mirror: On “To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism”

"For a long time now I haven't been I."
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Around the World

The Passion Book

The Motion of the Pestle

"You always admire what you really don't understand."
— Blaise Pascal