THE FIRST glimmerings of the Modern Indian Renaissance can be traced back to the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But the new spirit gathered strength and momentum only in the first half of the next. Bengal was its pioneer. Under the powerful impact of Western education and culture, it was the first Indian province to break away from the shackles of the dead past. With a freedom of mind reminiscent of the Upani shadic age and the early period of Buddhism, the intellectuals of Bengal questioned every dogma, examined every belief, probed every custom and tradition. Boldly rejecting everything irrational, retrograde and decadent in the national heritage, they welcomed from the Western world whetever they found to be rational, scientific, liberal and progressive. In their zeal, some of them did, no doubt, indulge in such excesses as drink ing bouts and the throwing of beef into the homes of orthodox Hindus. In spite of their stray aberrations, they were the heralds of a new dawn.
The Modern Renaissance took a pretty long time to travel from Bengal to Andhra Pradesh. But once it arrived there in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it found a doughty champion in Kandukuri Veeresalingam. To make up for lost time, he had to take up not only the work of Raja Rammohun Roy but that of other great religious reformers like Debendra nath Tagore, Keshub Chandra Sen and Shivanath Sastri.
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