“Do you know who I found strolling on the Strand yesterday?”
“No Babamoshai…who was it?”
“He was Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar himself & I’m going to take you to see him this evening!”
Jogendra Kumar was at a loss for words…the very Vidyasagar whose Barna Parichay, Bodhoday, Kathamala had taught him the basics of his mother tongue, the Bengali language…the very Vidyasagar whose Vyakaran Koumudi, Riju Path had initiated in him the love for Sanskrit literature…the very Vidyasagar who had fought to pass the act on Hindu Widow Remarriage & established innumerable girls’ schools…he was going to meet him in person? Here in Chandernagore?

Vidyasagar spent nearly a year in Chandernagore, around 1890, in the hope of recuperating his failing health. Jogendra Kumar Chattopadhyay grew up to be a journalist of considerable repute & in his memoir entitled ‘Smritite Sekal’ (The Memory of Those Days) gives a vivid first-hand account of Vidyasagar’s days in Chandernagore & a personal aspect of the great man, we know so little about. Vidyasagar had rented two houses at the southern end of the Strand. One of the houses still stand – it is the famous Patal Bari (the underground house), whose ground floor lies below the level of water of the Hugli river & is occasionally flooded. What is visible from the Strand is actually the first floor. The members of the entourage following Vidyasagar lived in this house, while he himself lived in the house adjacent to it – the River View. Nothing remains of that house now, except the vacant plot. In Vidyasagar’s time (& when the Tagore family had lived in it), it was a large double-storied spacious mansion beside the river, so popular with the distinguished visitors who decided to visit the French colony on extended holidays. When Jogendra Kumar met Vidyasagar for the first time, he was surprised to find a short statured unimpressive man, with a bare torso & a short dhoti, a hookah in his hand. Jogendra Kumar has mentioned that if somebody was not told beforehand, it would be impossible to imagine that this diminutive old man was really Vidyasagar, the man who had helmed the Bengal Renaissance. As days went by, a deep friendship developed between the young boy & the old man & Jogendra Kumar noticed quite a lot of things – Vidyasagar loved people, especially children & he always had a ready stock of Sandesh & Rosogollas (popular Bengali sweets), neatly arranged in earthen pots beneath his bed, to feed them. Jogendra Kumar & his friends were regular visitors to this amicable old man & he even went searching for them if they didn’t turn up for a single day. He was extremely worried about how he would use the western styled toilet in his rented house in ‘sahib para’ or the ‘ville blanche’, the neighbourhood of the Europeans in Chandernagore. Hence Jogendra Kumar & his friends were sent in search of local masons & carpenters to build an Indian styled toilet for him. He also noticed that Vidyasagar was exceptionally finicky about cleanliness & his house & its rooms always bore a sparkling appearance. Vidyasagar also had another habit – he never leaned on a chair & always sat ramrod straight, even if he happened to sit on the ground. When asked the reason for it, he had answered, “Men tend to become lazy if they lean. So, I neither lean backward nor forward.” The deep connection which Vidyasagar developed with the people of Chandernagore lasted till the end of his life, which sadly ended only a year after he had left the town, at his house in Kolkata.

People tend to have the idea that Vidyasagar only visited Chandernagore once towards the end of his life. But, Jogendra Kumar had come to know that Vidyasagar had come once before, when he was about forty years old. At that time, he had been entangled with the administration against an injustice meted out to an innocent civilian by a French policeman. Vidyasagar had complained to the Administrator against this policeman & made sure that he received punishment. Of course, to get matters through, he had to incur a considerable amount of expense. This was of course only one example among numerous others, throughout his life, of his fight against injustice of all sorts.

It is hard to imagine Vidyasagar, as we find him in the last leg of his life, as the mightiest polymath of the Bengal Renaissance, fighting a mighty battle for passing the act on Hindu widow remarriage in 1856 (Act XV, 1856, enacted on 26 July, 1856, legalizing the remarriage of Hindu widows in all jurisdictions of India under the East India Company rule; drafted by Lord Dalhousie & passed by Lord Canning, just before the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857). By this, he had managed to breach the ultra-orthodox Brahmin society into which he was born into, as Iswar Chandra Bandyopadhyay, on 26 September, 1820, in the remote village of Birsingha in the erstwhile Hooghly district (presently Midnapore district), to poor parents. He was later granted the honorific title ‘Vidyasagar’ (the ocean of knowledge) as a student of the Sanskrit College, for his proficiency in Sanskrit & Philosophy. It is highly surprising, with his orthodox background, that Vidyasagar emerged as the greatest champion of women’s rights. His struggle to educate girls & bring them to schools, is monumental to say the least. He set up thirty-five girls’ schools throughout Bengal in the capacity of Assistant Inspector of Schools, reconstructed the Bengali language, was the Principal of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta (1851-1858). He is considered as the father of modern Bengali prose for his work in modernizing the Bengali language, introducing punctuations, simplifying the alphabets & changing the types, which had remained unchanged since Charles Wilkins & Panchanan Karmakar had cut the first wooden type in Bengali in 1780.

Vidyasagar was an extremely sensitive man for all his tough exterior. In 1891, after his death, Rabindranath wrote, ‘One wonders how God, in the process of producing forty million Bengalis, produced a man.” Indeed, he gave a new lease of life to the countless innocent child widows, who were left at the mercy of their parents, brothers, in-laws or distant relatives & often substituted for servants. Jogendra Kumar mentions an incident in Chandernagore, when Vidyasagar happened to meet a friend of his father’s who had a widowed thirteen year old daughter. The girl in question had been married at nine & had been widowed at eleven.
Vidyasagar asked the man, “Why don’t you get your girl remarried?”
The man answered, “I would love to…but nobody wants to marry her.”
Tears welled up in Vidyasagar’s eyes, “Then go to hell!”
It is to men like Vidyasagar that the women of today are absolutely indebted to - ‘modern’ men like Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, who possessed the guts to send the conservative parochial views of society to hell & pave the way for the women of future to thrive in their own right.