Listen to this article:

Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar was born on this day, September 26, in 1820.

Sumit Sarkar’s essay titled ‘Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society’ from his 1997 book, Writing Social History, begins on what Sarkar himself acknowledges could sound like a somewhat curious note: with a brief recap of a meeting between Vidyasagar and Ramakrishna that didn’t seem to go down very well with either man. That meeting, arranged at Ramakrishna’s instance at Vidyasagar’s place on August 5, 1882, was, indeed, their only meeting ever. Vidyasagar never returned the visit. The two men, stalwarts in their own right, seemed to agree on precious little except that no one could really hope to know or describe what divinity was. 

“But from there their paths diverged radically once more. For Vidyasagar…the unknowability of the supramundane makes it our supreme duty to try to do everything possible to improve this-worldly life. For Ramakrishna, in total contrast, ignorance becomes the premise for faith and devotion, and it is folly and arrogance for men to think of improving the world. The universe inevitably consists (so Ramakrishna believed) of big and small, some with more powers and others with less: it is beautiful because it is structured with hierarchical inequality.”

This comment seemed to provoke a retort from Vidyasagar that implicitly asserted that inequality was not natural but social, and hence ‘open to human remedial action’. ‘The retort clearly rankled with Ramakrishna’, for on a couple of later occasions he is known to have ascribed that response to Vidyasagar’s ‘folly’. He was convinced that the work (‘karma’) Vidyasagar was doing was very good, but believed when that work was to be buttressed by devotion (‘bhakti’) and love for ‘Him’, Vidyasagar’s work-load would ‘lessen’, with God relieving him of much of his burden. When parsed, that really meant that Vidyasagar, in his celebrated contemporary’s view, was overreaching himself. 

Writing Social History, Sumit Sarkar.

Sarkar soon tells us why this episode was his essay’s point of departure. Despite their very different outlooks on the world, these two contempoaray Bengali stalwarts had emerged from very similar social backgrounds. Their origins lay in poor – indeed, very poor – rural Brahmin families located in the same geography in 19th century Bengal, with their native villages separated by a mere 20 miles.

Again, both their communities drew their moral-intellectual sustenance from the same traditions of centuries-old Brahmanical learning. Besides, for both Vidyasagar and Ramakrishna, it was the move away from the extreme genteel poverty of their village life to urban Kolkata that proved to be the watershed in their lives. But then their individual paths to influence and fame had nothing in common. Those two utterly dissimilar trajectories were both shaped by their lives in the city and in turn shaped large swathes of the culture of the Bengali middle class in significantly different ways.

In two remarkable essays from his book Writing Social History – the one on Ramakrishna titled ‘Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times’ – Sumit Sarkar examines with stunning acuity and sensitivity to detail the dialectics of the processes underlying those profound transformations: in their personal lives as well as in the life of 19th century Bengal. His interventions in debates around how Bengali culture evolved in that period are many and widely acknowledged as stellar. But it’s hardly an exaggeration that, had he written nothing else on that evolution beyond two essays, he would still be recognised as one of the most brilliant minds to have problematised the processes of that evolution and then gone on to decode those processes. Here we take a brief look at the salience of his method in the context, for now, of the essay on Vidyasagar while intending to visit the Ramakrishna essay at a later point. 

How Vidyasagar’s many biographies tell us more about their biographers than their........

© The Wire