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The Calcutta School-Book Society was an organisation based in Kolkata during the British Raj. It was established in 1817, with the aim of publishing text books and supplying them to schools and madrasas in India.
In 1814, four years before the establishment of the Calcutta School Society and three years before the formation of the Calcutta School-Book Society, the London Missionary Society, under the supervision of Robert May, set up 36 elementary schools in Chinsurah, West Bengal, India (now Chunchura). [1]
Fort William College was created in 1800 by Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General at the time. A growing eagerness and enthusiasm towards education led to the translation and printing of the Bible in Sanskrit, Bengali, Assamese and Oriya. Scholars like Mrityunjay Vidyalankar and Ramram Basu did the work with foreign language experts and alongside, the Ramayana , Mahabharata and other Indian epics were skilfully translated into different languages. The Calcutta School-Book Society followed a similar path and helped Bengali prose writers achieve national and international acclaim. As a result of rise of widespread higher education, journalism became a major component of British society, with magazines like the Magazine for Indian Youth and newspapers like the Samachar Darpan (The News Mirror) becoming a widespread phenomenon. Mass education, however, came much later in 1885 with the Hunter Education Commission, which ended James Long's and other missionary organisations' zealous ideas of dissipating education among the masses, in an expression of the continuing battle for superiority of the British over the natives.
To strengthen their political colonisation of India, the British strategised emotional and intellectual colonisation and, in the Charter of 1833, announced English as the official language of British India. This ideology had at its fulcrum, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s assertion of the British ideology that Western learning was superior to Oriental languages and indigenous Sanskrit and other vernacular knowledge. The setting up of several colleges in Calcutta, India, namely the Hindu College in 1816 and the Sanskrit College in 1824, portrays this shift of emphasis from the study of Oriental languages in Fort William College to the establishment of the English language, ensuring that all Indian students studying in these new colleges and schools, which were developed under the Calcutta School Society (1818), had to learn English whether they liked it or not.
In the shadow of this shift in cultural paradigm, the Calcutta School-Book Society also known as the Calcutta Book Society, was instituted on 4 July 1817, in Calcutta (now known as Kolkata), the then capital of the British Empire. The society was set up under the patronage of Lord Marquess of Hastings who was Governor-General at that point of time. The School-Book Society was set up with the coming of Western methods in education to India and henceforth, the rising demand for textbooks and dictionaries. The society also encouraged the establishment of new elementary schools. The Calcutta School Society, an educational institution independent from the School-Book Society was set up on 1 September 1818. The government established it with a sole aim 'to endorse education beyond the curriculum' and to introduce similar teaching techniques at different schools and to develop, build or reconstruct old and new schools. The Calcutta School-Book Society on the other hand aimed at publishing textbooks for these new schools and other institutions of higher learning.
The Calcutta School-Book Society in the years after being set up in 1817, constituted of a managing committee of sixteen Europeans members and eight Indians. Some eminent people included amongst others were Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Tarini Charan Mitra, Radhakanta Deb, Ram Comul Sen and Moulvi Aminullah. Mrityunjay and Tarini Charan, who was also one of the secretaries along with Mr. F. Irving, were teachers at the Fort William College and Radhakanta Deb was a philanthropist from Calcutta. These few people shaped what would be the beginning of the "Bengal Renaissance".
Mrityunjay Vidyalankar (c. 1762 – 1819) was a pundit and scholar, born in Midnapore district and studied initially in Natore district, [2] now in Bangladesh and also in Calcutta. He was fluent in both Sanskrit and Bengali and after being recommended by Sir William Carey, one of the foremost Protestant missionaries to have come to India in the early 19th century, joined the Department of Bengali at Fort William College as the head pundit. He was appointed professor of Sanskrit in 1805, four years after he joined the college. In 1813 he resigned from his job and signed himself under Justice Sir Francis Mackonton as a judge pundit. He was a committee member that was constituted to formulate the rules for the Hindu College in 1816 before becoming the member of the governing body of the Calcutta School-Book Society in 1817.
Tarini Charan Mitra (c. 1772 – 1837) was a famous Bengali prose writer and the head munshi at the Department of Hindoostanee Language at Fort William College. Tarinicharan taught in Fort William College from 1801 to 1830. He was fluent in several languages like Persian, English, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic and Bengali. He was the secretary and a managing committee member of the Calcutta School Book Society. Tarinicharan Mitra worked against the anti-Sati movement for a conservative organisation called Dharma Sabha (1830). He wrote favourably about the Sati Pratha. Radhakanta Deb and Ram Comul Sen collaborated with him to produce a translation of Aesop’s fables, titled Nitikatha, into Bengali.
Ram Comul Sen (1783–1844) was born in Hooghly district and was the son of a Persian scholar. Famous as a scholar, writer and lexicographer, Ram Comul Sen worked in Dr William Hunter’s Hindustanee Printing Press as a compositor in 1804 before becoming its manager in 1811. He was also an accountant at both the Asiatic Society and the Sanskrit College. Ram Comul became the secretary of the Asiatic Society and also held the post of superintendent of the Sanskrit College in 1835. Amongst his other illustrious posts, he was the principal of the Hindu College in 1821 and a dewan at the Royal Calcutta Mint in 1828. He was one of the founders of the Calcutta Medical College, the only Bengali on the committee and he was the president and founding father of the Zamindar Sabha in 1838. With the permission of Dr William Carey, Ram Comul set up the Agricultural and Horticultural Centre and was influential in setting up the Calcutta Museum with the help of Dr Wallich, a Danish botanist. Apart from these, Ram Comul Sen was instrumental in the systematic eradication of social traditions like drowning dying people in the Ganges and impaling others during Chadak. He made significant contributions to the Bengali language with his compilation of a dictionary from English to Bengali working for over one and a half decades on its two volumes. His grandson, Keshav Chandra Sen, was one of the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj.
Radhakanta Deb (1784–1867) was the grandson of Maharaja Nabakrishna Deb, who was a trusted munshi to the East India Company and had received the decoration of the Knight Commander of the Star of India and his title of 'Raj Bahadur', based on merit for his service under Sir Warren Hastings and Robert Clive. Radhakanta was an accomplished scholar, and like his father Gopimohan Deb, was one of the foremost leaders of the Calcutta Hindu society. Radhakanta was fluent in Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit and also developed a good knowledge of English. He published an eight-volume dictionary of the Sanskrit language called Shabdakalpadruma, between 1822 and 1856, which met the needs of educational institutions, the court of law and students learning Sanskrit. He was also the recipient of several international awards including honours from the Royal Asiatic Society, London. Radhakanta Deb also had a keen interest in promoting elementary education and was involved as director of the Calcutta Hindu College, 1817. He was involved in establishing the Calcutta School-Book Society in 1817 and Calcutta School Society in 1818. He worked towards improving and reforming primary schools. In 1851, he was appointed the President of the British Indian Association. Radhakanta Deb was also founded the Dharma Sabha (Association in Defence of Hindu Culture), a social conservatism body that opposed Lord Bentinck’s abolishing of Sati by a government law in 1829. Radhakanta’s attitudes toward culture and intellectual development are reflected best in his publications for the Calcutta School-Book Society. [3]
Moulvi Aminullah was a madrasa instructor at the Calcutta Madrasa which was renamed Aliyah Madrasa (or Aliah University), founded by Sir Warren Hastings in 1780.
The Calcutta School-Book Society was open to all people and the payment of a minor subscription fee was all that was needed to be a member. It had around 225 subscribers, a majority being European and a minority of them being Hindu. This lack of enthusiasm in the subscribers to the Society meant the publishing and writing of textbooks for the growing college and school market was funded by the government. By 1821, the Calcutta School-Book Society had published as many as 1,26,464 books and pamphlets in several languages which included Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit and English. In 1862, the society was merged with the Vernacular Literature Society where the Muslim members were assigned books and pamphlets to be written in Persian, Urdu or Arabic and Hindus were assigned Bengali and Sanskrit works. The boundaries of the Calcutta School-Book Society were however limited to the confines of the city itself.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian reformer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a social-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He was given the title of Raja by Akbar II, the Mughal emperor. His influence was apparent in the fields of politics, public administration, education and religion. He was known for his efforts to abolish the practices of sati and child marriage. Roy is considered to be the "Father of Indian Renaissance" by many historians.
Presidency University, Kolkata is a public state university located in College Street, Kolkata. It was among the best colleges in the country when the institute was affiliated to University of Calcutta. The institution was elevated to university status in 2010 after functioning as a constituent college of the University of Calcutta for about 193 years. Currently, it continues to rank among the top universities in India.
The Asiatic Society is a Government of India organisation founded during the Company rule in India to enhance and further the cause of "Oriental research". It was founded by the philologist William Jones on 15 January 1784 in a meeting presided over by Justice Robert Chambers in Calcutta, the then-capital of the Presidency of Fort William.
The Bengal Presidency, officially the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal and later Bengal Province, was a province of British India and the largest of all the three Presidencies. At the height of its territorial jurisdiction, it covered large parts of what is now South Asia and Southeast Asia. Bengal proper covered the ethno-linguistic region of Bengal. Calcutta, the city which grew around Fort William, was the capital of the Bengal Presidency. For many years, the Governor of Bengal was concurrently the Governor-General of India and Calcutta was the capital of India until 1911.
Ishwar Chandra Bandyopadhyay CIE, popularly known as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, was an Indian educator and social reformer of the nineteenth century. His efforts to simplify and modernise Bengali prose were significant. He also rationalised and simplified the Bengali alphabet and type, which had remained unchanged since Charles Wilkins and Panchanan Karmakar had cut the first (wooden) Bengali type in 1780.
The Bengal Renaissance, also known as the Bengali Renaissance, was a cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj, from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. Historians have traced the beginnings of the movement to the victory of the British East India Company at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, as well as the works of reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, considered the "Father of the Bengal Renaissance," born in 1772. Nitish Sengupta stated that the movement "can be said to have … ended with Rabindranath Tagore," Asia's first Nobel laureate.
Sukumar Sen was an Indian linguist and historian of the Bengali literature, who was also well versed in Pāli, Prakrit and Sanskrit.
David Hare (1775–1842) was a Scottish watchmaker and philanthropist in Bengal, India. He founded many educational institutions in Calcutta, such as the Hindu School, and Hare School and helped in founding Presidency College.
Fort William College was an academy of oriental studies and a centre of learning, founded on 18 August 1800 by Lord Wellesley, then Governor-General of British India, located within the Fort William complex in Calcutta. Wellesley started the Fort William College to train the European administrators. He backdated the statute of foundation to 4 May 1800, to commemorate the first anniversary of his victory over Tipu Sultan at Seringapatam. Thousands of books were translated from Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu into English at this institution.
Hindu School is a state government-administered school in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest modern educational institution in Asia.
Peary Chand Mitra was an Indian writer, journalist, cultural activist and entrepreneur. His pseudonym was Tek Chand Thakur. He was a member of Henry Derozio's Young Bengal group, who played a leading role in the Bengal renaissance with the introduction of simple Bengali prose. His Alaler Gharer Dulal pioneered the novel in the Bengali language, leading to a tradition taken up by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and others. Mitra died on 23 November 1883 in Kolkata.
Gangadhar Bhattacharya was an Indian editor and printer, and pioneer of Bengali print and journalism. He was born in Bahar village, near Serampore, Bengal. He started his career as a compositor at the Serampore Mission Press, later moving to Calcutta, where he first worked at the Ferris and Company Press before setting up his own, the Bengali Printing Press, along with his business partner, Harishchandra Ray.
Bhudev Mukhopadhyay (1827–1894) was a writer and intellectual in 19th century Bengal. His works were considered ardent displays of nationalism and philosophy in the period of the Bengal renaissance. His novel Anguriya Binimoy (1857) was the first historical novel written in Bengal.
Raja Rajendralal Mitra was among the first Indian cultural researchers and historians writing in English. A polymath and the first Indian president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, he was a pioneering figure in the Bengali Renaissance. Mitra belonged to a respected family of Bengal writers. After studying by himself, he was hired in 1846 as a librarian in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, for which he then worked throughout his life as second secretary, vice president, and finally the first native president in 1885. Mitra published a number of Sanskrit and English texts in the Bibliotheca Indica series, as well as major scholarly works including The antiquities of Orissa, Bodh Gaya (1878), Indo-Aryans and more.
Ramkamal Sen (1783–1844) was the Diwan of the Treasury, Treasurer of the Bank of Bengal and Secretary of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta.
Pandit Madhusudan Gupta was a Bengali Baidya Brahmin translator and Ayurvedic practitioner who was also trained in Western medicine and is credited with having performed India's first human dissection at Calcutta Medical College (CMC) in 1836, almost 3,000 years after Susruta.
Raja Sir Radhakanta Deb Bahadur KCSI was a scholar and a leader of the Calcutta conservative Hindu society, son of Gopimohan Deb of Shovabazar Raj who was the adopted son and heir of Maharaja Nabakrishna Deb of Shovabazar Raj.
In the last quarter of the 18th century, Calcutta grew into the first major centre of commercial and government printing. For the first time in the context of South Asia it becomes possible to talk of a nascent book trade which was full-fledged and included the operations of printers, binders, subscription publishing and libraries.
Bhabani Charan Bandyopadhyay was a noted Indian journalist, author and an orator. He was a conservative Hindu, who opposed Ram Mohan Roy in the abolition of Sati System. He was the founder of the Dharma Sabha. After his death, a work on his life and history (Jeebancharit) was published in 1849 under the custody of his son, Raj Krishna Bandyopadhyay, the then Secretary of the Dharma Sabha.
Rasamay Dutt or Russomoy Dutt was a notable Bengali educationist of British India during the Bengali Renaissance. He was the co-founder of Hindu School, Kolkata. Bengali poet Toru Dutt was his granddaughter.
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