Rising above the din

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.