Henry Meredith Parker was a New Zealand historian and public servant. He was born in England and went to India in 1813, where he worked as a writer for the Bengal Civil Service. He retired in 1842.
Henry Meredith Parker (1796–1868) was a British writer who lived in Calcutta, India, worked in the Bengal Civil Service, and wrote poems and essays. He contributed a lot to local Indian periodicals such as the Calcutta Review. [1] A major work was his two-volume Bole Ponjis ("Punch Bowl"). Along with Theodore Dickens, Ashutosh Dey, and others, he established the Union Bank of Calcutta in 1829.
Parker's mother was a famous Covent Garden Theatre dancer. In his youth, he played violin at the playhouse. He started work for Lord Moira at the Tower of London, followed by a clerkship in the Commissariat. He served in the Peninsular War and became a writer for the Bengal Civil Service in 1813. He worked as an assistant to the Superintendent of the Western Salt Chaukis, as an assistant Salt Agent in Chittagong, and then in the Customs department. He retired in 1842 with an entertaining farewell performance that he gave at the Sans Souci Theatre in Park Street. In his spare time, he wrote farcical plays for the Calcutta theatre, many of which were drawn from French sources. He supported James Silk Buckingham and the publication of his Calcutta Journal. [2] He was known for supporting cultural integration between Indians and Europeans. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio wrote a Sonnet to Henry Meredith Parker. [3] [4] Kasiprasad Ghosh wrote a poem to Parker. [5]
In his Indian War Song, published in 1824, he foresaw the 1857 rebellion. This was written under the initials "C.J.," but he also wrote under other pseudonyms, including Bernard Wycliffe. [6]
Horace Hayman Wilson was an English orientalist who was elected the first Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University.
The Young Bengal was a group of Bengali free thinkers emerging from Hindu College, Calcutta. They were also known as Derozians, after their firebrand teacher at Hindu College, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio.
Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
David Hare was a Scottish watchmaker, philanthropist, and educationist in Bengal, India. He founded many educational institutions in Calcutta, such as the Hindu School, and Hare School and helped in founding Presidency College.
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was an Indian poet and assistant headmaster of Hindu College, Kolkata. He was a radical thinker of his time and one of the first Indian educators to disseminate Western learning and science among the young men of Bengal.
Tarulatta Datta, popularly known as Toru Dutt was an Indian Bengali poet and translator from British India, who wrote in English and French. She is among the founding figures of Indo-Anglian literature, alongside Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), Manmohan Ghose (1869–1924), and Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949). She is known for her volumes of poetry in English, Sita, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876) and Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882), and for a novel in French, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d'Arvers (1879). Her poems explore themes of loneliness, longing, patriotism and nostalgia. Dutt died at the age of 21 of tuberculosis.
Krishna Mohan Banerjee was a 19th-century Indian thinker who attempted to rethink Hindu philosophy, religion and ethics in response to the stimulus of Christian ideas. He himself became a Christian, and was the first president of the Bengal Christian Association, which was administered and financed by Indians. He was a prominent member of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio's (1808–1831) Young Bengal group, educationist, linguist and Christian missionary.
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.
Rai Bahadur Hara Chandra Ghosh was one of the prominent leaders of the Young Bengal group. He was the first Bengali to be a judge of the Calcutta Small Causes Court from 1854 to 1868. H.E.A. Cotton says, "In his youth, he was a favourite pupil, as the Rev. K.M.Banerjee had been of David Hare and Derozio: but unlike others he maintained his Hinduism." He earned fame as a judge and was not involved in religion and social reform.
Henry Piddington was an English sea captain who sailed in East India and China and later settled in Bengal where he worked as a curator of a geological museum and worked on scientific problems, and is particularly well known for his pioneering studies in meteorology of tropical storms and hurricanes. He noted the circular winds around a calm centre recorded by ships caught in storms and coined the name cyclone in 1848.
James Atkinson was a surgeon, artist and Persian scholar — "a Renaissance man among Anglo-Indians".
South Park Street Cemetery, formerly known as the 'Great Christian Burial Ground', was one of the earliest non-church cemeteries in the world. The cemetery houses numerous graves and monuments belonging to British soldiers, administrators, and their families. It is also the final resting place of several prominent personalities, including Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Sir William Jones. It is located on Mother Teresa Sarani, Central Kolkata, India.
Francis Bradley Bradley-Birt was a British diplomat and writer.
Kashiprasad Ghosh was a Bengali poet and the editor of the Hindu Intelligencer, an English-language journal that was published in Calcutta and voiced the opinion of the bhadralok community. Ghosh's wife was a maternal aunt of Bhaktivinoda Thakur (1838-1914), a leading spiritual reformer and philosopher of Gaudiya Vaisnavism.
Howrah Zilla School, abbreviated as HZS, is a Governmental, Bengali medium, higher secondary school located in Howrah in the state of West Bengal, India. It is the only government high school of Howrah. It is affiliated with West Bengal Board of Secondary Education and West Bengal Council of Higher Secondary Education.
The Private Subscription Theatre more commonly known as the Chowringhee Theatre, was an historic theatre in Calcutta in India, founded in 1813 and closed in 1838.
Binoy Ghosh was a journalist, sociologist, writer, literary critic and researcher. His Paschim Banger Sanskriti won the Rabindra Puraskar in 1959.
Ramgopal Ghosh was a leader of the Young Bengal Group, a successful businessman, orator and social reformer. He is called the 'Demosthenes of India'. Ghosh was one of the personalities who helped John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune establish a girls' school in Calcutta.