When ‘Babu’ and ‘Da’ become national issues, the voice of a 22-year-old Aurobindo Ghosh from Baroda can still be heard above the political din in contemporary India. Writing a series of essays in 1893-94, the young Aurobindo Ghosh stated: “Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya, the creator and king of Bengali prose, was a high-caste Brahman and the son of a distinguished official in Lower Bengal. Born at Kantalpara on the 27th June 1838, dead at Calcutta on the 8th April 1894, his fifty-six years of laborious life were a parcel of the most splendid epoch in Bengali history; yet among its many noble names, his is the noblest. Very early men saw in him the three natural possessions of the cultured Bengali, a boundless intellect, a frail constitution, and a temper mild to the point of passivity.
And indeed, Bankim was not only our greatest; he was also our type and magnified pattern. He was the image of all that is most finely characteristic in the Bengali race.” Through the essays, Aurobindo Ghosh pens the portrait of Bankim Chandra with a flourish, tracing his life and times, commenting, and sharing with readers his insights. Aurobindo, fresh out of university in England, was working with Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III in Baroda. In Bankim Chandra’s early years he saw, “The first picture of his childhood is his mastering the alphabet at a single reading; and this is not only the initial picture but an image and prophecy of the rest. At Midnapur, the home of his childhood, the magnificence of his intellect came so early into view, that his name grew into a proverb. ‘You will soon be another Bankim’ ~ for a master to say that was the hyperbole of praise. He ascended school by leaps and bounds; so abnormal indeed was his swiftness that it put his masters in fear for him. They grew nervous lest they should spoil by over-instruction the delicate fibre of his originality, and with a wise caution they obstructed his entrance into the highest class.”
In college Bankim Chandra’s brilliance intensified: “At Hugly College, he conceived a passion for Sanskrit and read with great perseverance at a Pandit’s tol. In a single year he had gone through Mugdhabodh, Raghuvansa, Bhatti and the Meghaduta. Advancing at this pace he managed under four years to get a sense of mastery in the ancient tongue and a feeling for its literary secrets which gave him immense leverage in his work of creating a new prose. Not that there is the least touch of pedantry in his Bengali style: rather it was he and Madhu Sudan Dutt who broke the tyranny of Sanskrit tradition: but one feels how immensely his labour was simplified by a fine original use of his Sanskrit knowledge. At Presidency College he shaped his versatile intellect to the study of law.
He had then some project of qualifying as a High Court Pleader, but at the right moment for literature the Calcutta University came into being and Bankim took literary honours instead of legal. The Courts lost a distinguished pleader and India gained a great man.” Bengal of the 1850s was an extraordinary society that formed Bankim Chandra. Aurobindo Ghosh described, “a society electric with thought and loaded to the brim with passion, the theatre of a great intellectual awakening.” He traced the rise of Rammohun Roy, Rajnarain Bose and Debendranath Tagore, the two Dutts, Okhay Kumar and Michael Madhu Sudan and Vidyasagar: “an ardent and imaginative race, long bound down in the fetters of a single tradition, had had suddenly put into its hands the key to a new world thronged with the beautiful or profound creations of Art and Learning.
This is what happened and may yet happen in Bengal. The first impulse was gigantic in its proportions and produced men of an almost gigantic originality.” The young Aurobindo Ghosh questions the power of environment in the making of genius. “Genius it is true exists independently of environment and by much reading and observation may attain to self-expression but it is environment that makes self-expression easy and natural; that provides sureness, verve, stimulus. Here lies the importance to the mind in its early stage of self-culture of fine social surroundings ~ that sort of surroundings which our Universities do nothing and ought to have done everything to create.” The poet and the thinker are helpless in the affairs of the world, wrote Aurobindo Ghosh, because they choose to be helpless ~ “they sacrifice the practical impulse in their nature, that they may give full expression to imaginative or speculative impulse; they choose to burn the candle at one end and [not] at the other, but for all that the candle has two ends and not one.
Bankim, the greatest of novelists, had the versatility developed to its highest expression.” It is this versatility of Bankim Chandra which the young writer underlines: “Scholar, poet, essayist, novelist, philosopher, lawyer, critic, official, philologian and religious innovator ~ the whole world seemed to be shut up in his single brain. At first sight he looks like a bundle of contradictions. He had a genius for language and a gift for law; he could write good official papers and he could write a matchless prose; he could pass examinations and he could root out an organised tyranny; he could concern himself with the largest problems of metaphysics and with the smallest details of word-formation: he had a feeling for the sensuous facts of life and a feeling for the delicate spiritualities of religion: he could learn grammar and he could write poetry. His province was literature, prose literature, and he knew it.
His lyrics are enchanting; metaphysics he followed at the end of his life and law at the beginning; and he used scholarship and philology, simply as other great writers have used them, to give subtlety of suggestion and richness of word-colour to his literary style. Even in the province of prose literature, where he might have worked out his versatility to advantage, he preferred to specialise.” When Aurobindo traces the masterpieces of Bankim Chandra, there is pathos and empathy: “It was the Durgesh Nandini, a name ever memorable as the first-born child of the New Prose. At Baruipur he wrote also Kopal Kundala and Mrinalini and worked at the famous Poison-Tree. At Barhampur, his next station, he began editing the Bangadarshan, a magazine which made a profound impression and gave birth to Bharati, the literary organ of the cultured Tagore family.
Since then, Bankim has given us some very ripe and exquisite work, Chandrashekhar, Krishna Kanta’s Will, Debi Chaudhurani, Anandmath, Sitaram, Indira and Kamal Kanta. Amid his worst bodily sufferings, he was poring over the Bhagavadgita and the Vedas, striving to catch the deeper and sacred sense of those profound writings. To give that to his countrymen was the strenuous aim of his dying efforts. A Life of Krishna, a book on the Essence of Religion, a rendering of the Bhagavadgita and a version of the Vedas formed the staple of his literary prospects in his passage to the pyre. Death, in whose shadow he had so long dwelt, took the pen from his hand, before it could gather up the last gleanings of that royal intellect. But his ten masterpieces of fiction are enough. They would serve to immortalize ten reputations.”
Aurobindo Ghosh finds it easy to assign Bankim’s place in Bengali literature: “there is no prose-writer, and only one poet who can compete with him. More difficulties enter into any comparison of him with the best English novelists; yet I think he stands higher than any of them, except one; he bears a striking resemblance to the father of English fiction, Henry Fielding. Bankim had the eye of a poet and saw much deeper…He saw what was beautiful and sweet and gracious in Hindu life, and what was lovely and noble in Hindu woman, her deep heart of emotion, her steadfastness, tenderness, and lovableness, in fact, her woman’s soul; and all this we find burning in his pages and made diviner by the touch of a poet and an artist. Of Bankim’s style I shall hardly trust myself to speak. To describe its beauty, terseness, strength, and sweetness is too high a task for a pen like mine. I will remark this only that what marks Bankim above all, is his unfailing sense of beauty. This is indeed the note of Bengali literature and the one high thing it has gained from a close acquaintance with European models.
The hideous grotesques of old Hindu Art, the monkey-rabble of Ram and the ten heads of Ravan, are henceforth impossible to it. The Shakuntala itself is not governed by a more perfect graciousness of conception or suffused with a more human sweetness than Kopal Kundala and the Poison-Tree.” The Early Cultural Writings of Sri Aurobindo remain a guiding light for those raising high their consciousness, drawing inspiration from the greatest writers-philosophers.
(The writer is a researcher-auth or on history and heritage issues, and a former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya)