Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar- Story of His Life and Work (An Old and Rare Book)

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Vidyasagar will always fill a unique place in Indian history. Raja Ram Mohan Roy represented the new aspirations and the earnest of the first generation of his countrymen in the nineteenth century; Pandit Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar reflected their arduous endeavours in the second English rule and English education were powerful and far-reaching influences which called forth new ideas and new efforts from the people. Ram Mohan responded to these influences in the commencement of the century; Isvar Chandra, during the next thirty years.

Subal Chandra Mitra's Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar is an earnest endeavour to present the life of Vidyasagar in all its totality. Encompassing all the dimensions of the person's unmitigated integrity and collecting materials from all the sources possible, Mitra has interpreted his man from a point of view radically forever.

The socio-cultural Renaissance of the 19th century finds a new interpretation with Vidyasagar in this book.

Rabindra Nath Tagore, paying homage to his illustrious predecessor, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, once publicly admitted that he did not know how a person of such totally unmitigated integrity was ever born in a land accustomed to humiliation and servitude.' Tagore was, of course, right in stressing the uniqueness of Iswar Chandra's personality and in contrasting it with the familiar docility of the Bengali character. Didn't he lament elsewhere, Oh mother Bengal, you have let your seven crore children remain as "Bengalis" and not taught them to grow up as "men"! Obviously, at this stage, in Tagore's estimate manliness was conspicuous by its absence in the average Bengali character.

What Tagore, however, did not note then but would fully recognise later, was that a highly promising cultural revolution had already begun in Bengal the starting point of which went beyond Iswar Chandra's birth in 1820.2 Not only missionaries, traders and free booters, but also seeds of the European renaissance had begun to reach Bengal creating the possibility of a fecund interface. The founding of the Asiatick Society by Sir William Jones (1746-94), an outstanding representative of the European Aufklarung (Enlightenment), was a major landmark. So too was the founding of the vernacular printing press in Bengal by Charles Wilkins (1750-1836)."

**Contents and Sample Pages**