Henry Derozio, the Eurasian, poet, teacher, and journalist/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
THE HINDU COLLEGE.
IN the March of 1828, Derozio was appointed master of English Literature and History in the second and third classes of the Hindoo College. This appointment, seemingly so insignificant, marks the early development of one of the most important movements in the intellectual history of the native-born subjects of this land. No teacher ever taught with greater zeal, with more enthusiasm, with more loving intercourse between master and pupil than marked the short term of Derozio's connection with the Hindoo College.
Neither before, nor since his day, has any teacher, within the walls of any native educational establishment in India, ever exercised such an influence over his pupils. It was not alone in the class-rooms and during the hours of teaching that the genial manner, the buoyant spirit, the ready humour, the wide reading, the readiness to impart knowledge, and the patience and courtesy of Derozio won the hearts and the high reverence of his pupils. In the intervals of teaching he was ever ready in conversation to aid his pupils in their studies, to draw them out to give free and full expression to their opinions, on topics naturally arising from the course of their work in the class-rooms; and before the hour at which the usual work of his classes began, and sometimes after the hour for closing the day's duties, Derozio, in addition to the work of the class, in order to broaden and deepen the knowledge of his pupils in the thought and literature of England, gave readings in English literature to as many students of the Hindoo College as cared to take advantage of his self-imposed work. In consort with his pupils, he established the Academic Association which met in a garden-house belonging to the Singh family in Manicktollah, where night after night, under the presidency of Derozio, and with Omachurn Bose as Secretary, the lads of the Hindoo College read their papers, discussed, debated and wrangled; and acquired for themselves the facility of expressing their thoughts in words and the power of ready reply and argument. To these meetings there frequently came the unassuming large-hearted philanthropist, David Hare, in "white jacket and old-fashioned gaiters" or "blue coat," with large brass buttons, the dress-coat of his youth; and occasionally Sir Edward Ryan, and Colonel Benson, Private Secretary to Lord William Bentinck, Colonel Beatson, afterwards Adjutant-General, and Dr. Mill, the Principal of Bishop's College, visited the meetings. Poetry and Philosophy were the chief themes discussed, Derozio's attainments in philosophy were as wide and varied as his acquaintance with the poets and dramatists. Indeed, his innate gift of song, which entitles him to rank as an English poet of no inconsiderable eminence, was but the outcome of his vigorous intellect, which sought in verse an outlet for the restless mental activity that marks superior minds. No doubt, in the meetings of the Academic Association and in the social circle that gathered round his hospitable table in the old house in Circular Road, subjects were broached and discussed with freedom, which could not have been approached in the class-room. Free-will, fore-ordination, fate, faith, the sacredness of truth, the high duty of cultivating virtue, and the meanness of vice, the nobility of patriotism, the attributes of God, and the arguments for and against the existence of deity as these have been set forth by Hume on the one side, and Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brown on the other; the hollowness of idolatry, and the shams of the priesthood, were subjects which stirred to their very depths the young, fearless, hopeful hearts of the leading Hindoo youths of Calcutta; but that either Derozio or his pupils revelled, as has been asserted, in the "more licentious plays of the Restoration, and the minor pieces of Tom Paine, born of the filth of the worst period of the French Revolution," or that lawless lust and western vice entered into some, with the secularism and anti-theism of the Hindoo College, that Derozio taught "the non-existence of God," that he admitted it, and that he was "an atheistic and immoral poet," are all of them unproved assertions, and baseless calumnies, which Dr. George Smith, the Biographer of Duff, should have been at some pains to sift, before branding with infamy the memory of the dead. We venture to affirm that, whatever books and plays were read and studied by Derozio and his pupils, whatever topics were broached in discussion and in conversation, either in the class-room, the Academic Association, or in the friendly circle under his own roof-tree, the license of thought and the field of thinking were no greater and no more reprehensible than those over which must traverse the mind of every man who thinks out for himself the realities of nature, humanity and God. Anger, reprobation and foul names, heaped on seekers after truth are the standard weapons of more timid men; and in too many cases the consequence of their use is that minds naturally open to the reception of truth and a love of its pursuit, bear with them through life contempt of the well-meaning fanatics who would gauge the universe and measure out the love of God by the standard of their own narrow theological dogmatism. According to Dr. Smith[] such was the notoriety of the Hindoo College that the fame of its infidelity reached even America, and an enterprising publisher "issued a cheap octavo edition of a thousand copies and shipped the whole to the Calcutta market These were all bought at once at two shillings a copy; and such was the continued demand for the worst of the treatises that eight rupees (sixteen shillings) were vainly offered for it." In this connexion, a reference is given to the Calcutta Christian Observer for August 1832. On turning to the Christian Observer all we find is the following note: "Hume's works were then read with avidity; also Tom Paine's 'Age of Reason,' for a copy of which 8 Rs. were offered by some of the pupils — Ed." We venture to rehearse the story of the introduction of Tom Paine's works to Calcutta as told in the columns of the Sumachar Durpun for July 1832. It may be interesting to state, that the Durpun was a bi-weekly journal, published in English and Bengalee, and was the most useful of all the native papers then published. It was issued from the Mission Press of Serampore, and edited by Dr. Marshman. While interfering little in religious discussions, it nevertheless opposed Hindoo bigotry and intolerance. Its articles were distinguished by good temper and discretion. In the pages of the Durpun "the cheap edition of a thousand copies," which Dr. Smith sells off at two shillings a copy in his life of Duff, as noted above, stands at something less than a hundred. Here is the statement made by the Sumachar Durpun:— "We understand that some time since a large number of the works of Tom Paine, not far short of a hundred, were sent for sale to Calcutta from America; and that one of the native booksellers, despairing of a sale, fixed the price of each copy at a rupee; a few were sold at this price, which falling into the hands of some young men educated in English, the anxiety to purchase the work became great. The vendor immediately raised the price to five rupees a copy, but even at that price we hear that his whole stock was sold among the natives in a few days. Some one soon after took the trouble to translate some part of Paine's 'Age of Reason' into Bengalee, and to publish it in the Prubhakar, calling upon the missionaries and upon one venerable character by name to reply to it. We at the same time received several letters from some of the most respectable natives in Calcutta, subscribers of the Durpun, but staunch Hindoos, entreating us not to notice the challenge, or to make the pages of this journal the area for theological disputations."
Whoever gave way to "lawless lust and western vice," and comforted themselves with cold secularism and immorality, it was not Derozio, nor was it the immediate circle of lads whom he most powerfully influenced. The moral teaching of Derozio was as high and pure as his own life was blameless; and issued in as good results as ever follow in the wake of an earnest striving after truth. That he shook the citadel of higher Hindooism to its very foundation, in a fashion that no man, teacher or preacher, has ever done before or since his day. is an undoubted fact, which has been overshadowed by the odium theologicum heaped on his religious opinions, the splendid rhetoric of Duff, and that measure of success which the Scottish Missionary accomplished, by taking up the work of Derozio when his hands were paralyzed, first by calumny, opprobrium and the bigotry of higher class Hindoos and others, and then by death. Before ever Duff set foot in India, the theistic schism in Hindooism, which exists in strong vitality to-day as the Brahmo Somaj, and which is likely to increase in strength, and work out for the people of India a system of religious thought totally unlike the dogmatic formula of the various sections either of the Western or the Eastern Church, had been effected by Ram Mohun Roy. The question of English education had been discussed, and partly settled as early as 1816, in the founding of the School Book Society and the Hindoo School. Ram Mohun Roy had himself protested against the founding of a Sanscrit College, though himself a Sanscrit scholar; and in a letter addressed to His Excellency Lord Amherst in 1823, he declared, that the teaching of Sanscrit would completely defeat the object of the Government, and waste the sum set apart for the instruction of the natives of India. A seminary of this sort, he says, "can only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions, of little or no use to their possessors or to society. The pupils will acquire what was known two thousand years ago, with the addition of vain and empty subtleties since then produced by speculative men. The Sanscrit system of education would be the best calculated to keep this country in darkness, but as the improvement of the native population is the object of the Government, it should consequently promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy, with other useful sciences, which may be accomplished with the sums proposed, by employing a few gentlemen of talents and learning educated in Europe, and providing a college furnished with necessary books, instruments, and other apparatus."
The unremitting devotion and energy of David Hare, backed by the leaders of Hindoo Society, had secured the possibility of an English education, and demonstrated its success, some years before Duff opened his school for Hindoo boys under the patronage of Ram Mohun Roy in the July of 1830. In 1824 Dr. James Bryce, Minister of the Scottish Kirk, Senior Chaplain on the Bengal Establishment, editor of the John Bull, and Clerk of Stationery, presented a petition and memorial to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, proposing plans for the conduct of Indian missions, which he declared* are now (1834) being "so successfully carried out." This scheme bore with it the recommendation of Ram Mohun Roy. Duff's biographer, however, asserts that "Dr. Bryce's scheme was one for almost everything that Duff's was not." Bryce's book was published in England during Duff's residence there, after his first five years' work in India, and must have been well known to him. Duff never questioned the general identity of plan between his own work and the proposal of Bryce; and certainly Bryce believed them to be identical. The institution of the Academic Association by Derozio in 1828 had been followed by numerous imitations among the native Hindoos. Native society was in a perfect ferment, and the full consequence of the impact of European thought and speculation on Eastern ideas and systems had been fairly realised, and partly demonstrated by the teaching of Derozio, before Duff reached India. The great truths and wide speculations opened out by the study of moral philosophy had been unfolded in a series of lectures to which crowded hundreds of English-speaking Hindoo youths, delivered by Derozio at the invitation of David Hare,— all this, before Duff's voice was heard addressing a native English-speaking assembly. It is a curious distortion of fact to assert as Dr. George Smith in his life of Duff does, that the college watched over and fostered by David Hare, and in which Derozio, as a teacher, effected so much, was a college which Ram Mohun Roy was ashamed to patronize." Ram Mohun Roy and David Hare lived through life in the greatest amity and mutual respect. It was David Hare's niece who nursed the Rajah in his last illness; and Bedford Square, the home of Hare's two brothers, was the home of Ram Mohun Roy during his stay in England; while one of them accompanied him to France on the occasion of his visit to Paris. It was the persuasion of David Hare backed by the influence of Sir Edward Hyde East, and the strong common sense of Ram Mohun Roy, which made him withdraw from a movement, the earlier stages of which he had fostered, being fully persuaded, that if his name appeared on the committee of management the objects of the Institution would be frustrated. The large and wealthy section of orthodox Hindoos with whom Ram Mohun Roy had been long at feud, would have altogether withdrawn from the establishment of a college with which he was in any way connected.
The lectures on philosophy which Derozio delivered to crowded audiences of educated Hindoo youths, if even notes of them ever existed, as in all probability they did, have been lost. Not only so, but a critique of Derozio's on the philosophy of Kant is also seemingly lost to this generation, or stowed away in the lumber of forgotten libraries. Of this critique of Derozio's, Dr. Mill, the distinguished Sanscrit scholar, and one of the most learned and able Principals of the now defunct Bishop's (Middleton) College, declared before a large public assembly "that the objections which Derozio published to the philosophy of Kant, were perfectly original, and displayed powers of reasoning and observation which would not disgrace even gifted philosophers." Derozio's native friends have been even more eulogistic, and in their admiration of his clear, subtle power of thinking, as evidenced in this critique, have mentioned his name in the same breath with that of the greatest of modern Scottish scholars and philosophers, Sir William Hamilton. No true estimate of Derozio as a philosopher and thinker can, be arrived at so long as this critique remains unknown. The establishment of the Academic Association and the full and free discussion nightly carried on at its meetings was followed within a few months by the establishment of between twelve and fourteen newspapers chiefly conducted by natives, advocating views of all sorts, from orthodox Hindooism to Materialism, and carrying on in print the discussion of questions raised in the Academic Association and in the numerous debating societies which sprung up as offshoots and auxiliaries of the parent society. Duff's lectures on the evidences of Christianity, as well as the rise of about a dozen native schools supported by Hindoos, all these were but the outcome of the training of the Hindoo school, and the influence and teaching of Derozio.