Swami Vivekananda had once said: “The best thermometer of the progress of a nation is its treatment of its women.” A personality from the pages of history who strove relentlessly towards empowering girls and women during the 19th century was Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar.
Despite facing a defiant orthodox traditional society in Bengal, he continued to hold his ground, challenging and reforming age-old customs and traditions inimical to the social fabric of Bengal. Throughout his living years this great educationist and social reformer lived his life for the cause of uplifting and advancing the marginalised sections of society.
Among the many luminaries in India, Vidyasagar’s name stands out like a bright shiny star that illuminated the path of reform in the Indian society of that period, freeing it from many of the social tribulations prevalent then. The Bengal Renaissance was in-fact ushered in by the tireless efforts of two sons of the soil – Raja Rammohun Roy and Vidyasagar. Both played a pivotal role in the reform movement by eradicating the restrictive traditions that bogged down the lives of the people, especially of women. If Roy relentlessly campaigned against the evil practice of Sati, Vidyasagar ushered in the process of change for the cause of remarriage of child widows, ending polygamy, introducing female education and improving the condition of the down-trodden in society, particularly women.
Vidyasagar can best be described as one of the pillars of Bengal renaissance who managed to continue the social reforms movement that was started by Roy in the early 1800s. Vidyasagar’s greatness also lies to the fact that he worked relentlessly towards eradicating several ills prevalent in the society despite facing severe displeasure towards his reform measures from an orthodox caste-based patriarchal society of Bengal of the period.
Born in Birsingha village of Midnapore district in Bengal on September 26, 1820, Vidyasagar received much of his values from his pious parents, father Thakurdas Bandyopadhyay and mother Bhagavati Devi.
Despite his upbringing in poverty, he proved to be a disciplined student who excelled in studies. There are many interesting stories regarding his brilliance and dedication as a student. It is said that Vidyasagar as a child learnt English numerals by following the milestones on his way to Calcutta. It is also said that he used to help with the household chores after school hours, and at night would study under the street lamps to save oil for cooking the next day! Besides Sanskrit, he helped himself learn the Vedanta, Vyakarana, literature, rhetoric, Smriti and ethics at Sanskrit College from 1829 to 1841. His meritorious bent of mind earned him regular scholarships and later, he took up a teaching position in a school in Bengal’s Jorasanko to support his family.
It was in 1839 that he earned the title of ‘Vidyasagar’ meaning ‘Ocean of Knowledge’ after he excelled in a Sanskrit testing competition. The same year, Vidyasagar cleared his law examination. In 1841 at 21 years, he joined the Fort William College as the head pandit in the Sanskrit department. Soon he became proficient in both English and Hindi. After five years, in 1946, Vidyasagar left Fort William College and joined the Sanskrit College as an assistant secretary. By 1851, he rose to become the Principal of Sanskrit College and by 1855, he assumed the responsibilities as a special inspector of schools with additional charges and during this tenure he travelled to remote villages of Bengal to oversee the quality of education and realised the lack of quality education especially among girls and women, which he believed were the root causes of the perpetuation of several societal evils.
Vidyasagar thoroughly remodelled the medieval scholastic system prevailing in Sanskrit College and brought about modern insights into the education system. The first change he made when he returned to the Sanskrit College as a professor was to include English and Bengali as the medium of learning besides Sanskrit. He introduced courses of European history, philosophy and science alongside Vedic scriptures. He encouraged students to pursue these subjects and imbibe the best from both worlds. He also altered the rules of admission for students in Sanskrit College allowing non-privileged students to enrol in an institution where admission of non-Brahmin students was considered a taboo.
To ease the learning system of the time, Vidyasagar even wrote two books Upakramonika and Byakaran Koumudi, interpreting complex notions of Sanskrit grammar in easy legible Bengali. He set up training schools for teachers, enabling uniformity in teaching methodology.
Vidyasagar was far ahead of his times when it came to the question of empowering women and for them to have the rightful place in society. At a time when women’s place and position were strictly demarcated to domestic roles within the four walls of the house, he realised that if society was to be freed from orthodoxy and rigidity, it has to be through the tool of education and learning. He rightly viewed education as the crucial way for women to achieve emancipation from all the societal oppression. He exercised his power and lobbied hard for opening of schools for girls and even outlined suitable curriculum that not only educated them, but stressed on skill development to make them self-reliant through the inclusion of vocations like needlecraft, etc.
Further, to convince parents about the vital need of educating the girl child, he is said to have visited door-to-door, requesting them to allow their daughters to be enrolled in schools. He opened 35 schools exclusively for women throughout Bengal and was successful in enrolling almost 1,300 students.
At a time when the birth of a girl child was considered a burden, Vidyasagar singlehandedly spearheaded the daunting task of educating girls and women. He even initiated Nari Siksha Bhandar, an exclusive fund to lend support towards this cause. He impressed John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune, the then President of the Council of Education in British India to establish the first permanent girls’ school in India.
The Bethune School was established on May 7, 1849, with an initial enrolment of 21 girls, which rose to 80 girls the following year. In order to disseminate his ideals to a wider audience, Vidyasagar contributed regular articles to periodicals and newspapers. He continued to write a number of books to educate the masses on the Bengali culture. His lasting legacy remains with Borno Porichoy, an elementary level book for learning Bengali alphabets, where he reconstructed Bengali alphabets and reformed it into typography of 12 vowels and 40 consonants. He also established the Sanskrit Press with an aim to produce printed books at affordable prices.
Apart from his reforms in the field of education, Vidyasagar was always vocal about the oppression that society inflicted on women. He was very close to his mother, a woman of great character, and encouraged him to alleviate the pain and helplessness of Hindu widows, who were forced to live a life of misery and abnegation. The widows were not only denied basic pleasures of life but were marginalised in society and often exploited unfairly and treated as a burden by their family.
Vidyasagar’s compassionate heart made him take up the miserable plight of the widows and soon he made it his mission to improve the quality of life for these vulnerable women. The going was not easy for he faced raging opposition from the orthodox elements of society. He challenged the Brahmanical traditional ideologies and to convince then to stop this evil practice, he even laid bare before them the sanction of widow remarriage as enshrined in the Vedic scriptures.
But he realised that age-old traditional practices can only be broken if there would be a law against it. He took this issue to the British authorities and after strong arguments for it, the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act, 1856 or Act XV, 1856, was passed on July 26, 1856. Such was his personality that he even set personal examples when in 1870 he got his own son Narayan Chandra married to an adolescent widow. Thereafter, the deplorable and pitiful status of widows was ameliorated to a significant extent. He was a man with exceptional strength of character and his unwavering courage made him stand his ground towards ridding the Bengali society of many evil practices resolutely despite facing backlash. It was Michael Madhusudan Dutt who in deep appreciation and gratitude gave the epithet ‘Daya Sagar’ (ocean of generosity) to Vidyasagar for his selfless altruism. After decades of relentless struggle towards reforming his own society, the great scholar, academician and reformer breathed his last on July 29, 1891, at the age of 70.
Today, Vidyasagar’s ideals and philosophies are still upheld and revered by individuals, educational institutions and organisations. One such educational institution in Northeast India that has been following his footsteps is Women’s College, Shillong.
Apart from other programmes, the annual Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar Endowment Lecture is organised at this college since 2009 by the Internal Quality Assurance Cell to uphold and espouse the ideals of this scholar par excellence to students, academicians and the citizens at large. This lecture was held this year on September 25, coinciding with the bi-centenary of Vidyasagar’s birth anniversary, in a hybrid mode in the college auditorium and the virtual platform.
Prominent academician Sugata Bose, Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University virtually delivered a lecture on “A few Pearls from an Ocean of Learning”. Prof Bose highlighted the role Vidyasagar played and called him “a champion of women’s education who broke the inertia that plagued the Bengali language and filled it with progressive momentum”. He said Vidyasagar believed in the blending of eastern and western concepts of education and in that manner was rightfully a reformist who broke the rigid code of Bengali society by inculcating the essential elements of western learning.
As a befitting tribute to the great educationist, a bronze bust of Vidyasagar sculpted by Amiya Nimai Dhara was inaugurated on the college premises the same day. This is the great social reformer’s first bust in the Northeast.
Very few born from humble background can rise to the stature of Vidyasagar, to reform, transform and leave their indelible contribution that even after 200 years is remembered with pride, admiration and gratitude. His pathbreaking efforts as a torch-bearer of women’s education and their empowerment are indeed worth emulating and can guide our present-day women-centric policies and plans towards achieving a more gender sensitive and gender equal modern society.
Such was the aura of Vidyasagar that after his death, Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore wrote: “One wonders how God, in the process of producing forty million Bengalis, produced a man!”
