Page:A General Biography of Bengal Celebrities Vol 1.djvu/64

HIS BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 55 LIFE OF HURISU CHANDRA MUKHERJEE OF THE HINDOO PATRIOT. CHAPTER I. HIS BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. More than 28 years have elapsed since the death of this Indian patriot ; but within this long interval, no one has yet attempted to write a regular history of his life. It was in 1863, Mr. Framji Bomanji a Parsee gentleman of the Elphinstone College, Bombay, wrote a book entitled the " Lights and shades of the East, or a study of the Life of Babu Hurish Chandra Mukherjee, and passing thoughts on India, and its people, their present and future" published from the. Alliance Press of that city. The book was dedicated to the late Sir Henry Edward Bartle Frere k. c. b., the then Governor of Bombay. The book we have care- fully perused, but it contains very little of the details of the life of this renowned man. We therefore attempt- ed a short sketch of his life in our biography of the late lamented Hon'ble K. D. Pal, published in Decem- ber, 1886. Since then, in October of the year fol- lowing, we brought out a separate work on his life, in Bengali, with the pecuniary assistance of His Highness the Maharajah of Joydebpur in Dacca. Saying this much, we now proceed to the narration of the leading events and characteristics of the life of this great man. Hurish Chandra was born in the year 1824 in the month of Bysak > (April) in the suburban town of Bhowanipur, near Calcutta, in the house of his maternal uncles Babus Beerashur and Debnarain Chatterjees, His father Babu Ram Dhun was a high caste Coolin Brahmin, who was, to quote the famous expression of Hurish Chandra himself, in retort to a slandering term applied to him by the famous Mis-