Abstract
In the 1950s, when compiling what was possibly the first anthology of writings by Bhudev Chandra Mukhopadhyay (1825–94), Pramathanath Bishi, the well known Bengali literary critic, bemoaned the fact that even such a gifted thinker and writer as Bhudev had been all but forgotten in his own province. 1 Bishi’s attributed the relative unpopularity of the man to his social anachronism, as particularly found in his Paribarik Probondho (Essays on the Hindu family, 1882) and Achar Probondho (Essays on Hindu Domestic rites and customs, 1895). At a time when Reform Hinduism was strongly urging parents to raise the minimum age of marriages, Bhudev pressed for early betrothals and early marriages; on the subject of female education, he favoured only such education that would adequately prepare Hindu girls for domestic responsibilities; even after the state passed a law enabling widow marriages among Hindus, Bhudev strongly discouraged it; while a fellow educationist like Vidyasagar tried to propagate bourgeois virtues of thrift and self-help (yatna) in his school text books and modelled ideal characters on well known figures drawn from the West, Bhudev felt that such attempts were culturally and pedagogically flawed. Sadly, we do not know enough about what Bhudev’s contemporaries thought of his revitalized conservative rhetoric. When compared to Bankim, his life and works attracted far fewer biographers, critics or commentators. In Bishi’s introduction though, there is a brief reference to the comment made by the journalist–politician, Sisir Kumar Ghosh, who saw Bhudev as the last of the Brahmin scholars and law-givers brought up in the smarta tradition of Raghunath Shiromani and Raghunandan. Public disinterestedness did not discourage Bhudev from producing what may be labelled as the modern Grihya Sutras. It would also appear as though he had the courage and conviction to swim against the tide; to be called a conservative in an age when that word was fast becoming unsavoury.
Not everybody agreed with Bishi; in 1988, the historian Ashin Dasgupta, though also writing in a somewhat nostalgic vein (his essay was titled ‘Bismrita Brahman’, The Forgotten Brahmin) attributed the relative unpopularity of Bhudev to the fact that he pinned his faith on the innovative and yet culturally stabilising role that Brahmins traditionally played in Hindu society. At first sight, this appears to be an interesting thesis since especially after the 1830s, the defenders of Brahmanical culture were more men drawn from upper bracket castes like Baidyas and Kayasthas than Brahmins themselves. On the other hand, what Dasgupta overlooks is that in Bengal, social reform, initiatives had come mostly from Brahmins beginning with Rammohun. Judging by the life and works of Rammohun or Vidyasagar, it is the Brahmin that would appear to be the radical heretic. Arguably, such a paradox suggests subtle shifts in social leadership and latent social competition within Bengali upper bracket castes. In his treatise, Dharmatattwa (1888), Bankimchandra first admitted the Baidya Keshab Chandra to be ‘deservedly a Brahmin’ only to hurriedly withdrew that remark in the next edition of the work.
It is remarkable that scholarly interest in Bhudev did not immediately follow from Tapan Raychaudhuri’s seminal work of 1988; it had to await nearly another decade until new and exciting post-modernist, post colonialist debates around Orientalism retrieved, as it were, a colonized figure who could lay claim to have offered a counter-Orientalist discourse well before present day scholars. In 1995, Sudipta Kaviraj’s brilliant piece on the ‘reverse Orientalism’ of Bhudev Mukhopadhay set new standards in historical and cultural theorising, which has determined in some ways, the trajectories of current scholarship on the subject.
The work under review is by a sociologist and, understandably enough, leans heavily on heuristic tools borrowed from that discipline. The core of this work comprises three fairly long essays (Chapters 5 to 7) which seek to study ‘afresh’ the most important of Bhudev’s writings. Unlike Kaviraj though, it makes good use of the miscellaneous essays (Vividha Probondho) authored by Bhudev over a period of time. The importance of this work also follows from the wide varieties of sources used, mostly rare. In this work Bhattacharya brings out quite succinctly, the major theoretical arguments in Bhudev. She reveals a culturally smitten Bhudev who critically engages with western social theory, within the framework of the then emerging western discipline of sociology. She is equally able to establish the ways in which his discourse purposively supplants western categories of thought by the indigenous and to turn back, as it were, the western gaze upon itself. Particularly in the Samajik Prabandha (Essays on Society, 1892), she reveals how Bhudev formulates certain cultural technologies which are then used to counter those that the colonial state, or more generally Orientalism, had manipulatively created in relation to Indian society. The Samajik Probondho clearly establishes the ascendancy of the social collective (Samaj) over the Rashtra (the State or even the nation forged by mere political will). In Bhudev’s taxonomy, culture thus serves the dual purpose of defining and perpetuating the Indian self against such inept historical or sociological categories that hitherto ran it aground. Whether directly or indirectly, his writings dispute the totalising presence or functions of both history and the new nation-state; for Bhudev, history can be also read in many imaginative and instructive ways. In so arguing Samajik Probondho also makes the valuable point that unlike the west, Indian society does not necessarily look upon tradition and modernity as sequentially arranged in time or in collective cultural understanding. In India, the past is never wholly detached from the present in a way that the western discourses of reason and utility would make these out to be.
The work, one has to admit, quite admirably obtains its stated purpose which is essentially to examine the unfolding of Indian sociological thought. On the other hand, I have reason to believe that it would have also benefited from adopting a more historical frame of narration. The origins of an Indian sociology or situating Bhudev within it could have been better accomplished by some reference to earlier thinkers like Akshaykumar Dutta, the foundation of the Bengal Social Science Association (1867) or the anxiety expressed as early as 1870, by the Bengali paper Somprakash, to effect improvements in matters ‘social’. In recent times, young researchers like Swarupa Gupta have also brought to light, a wealth of Bengali literature pertaining to cultural tropes like ‘unity in diversity’ that precedes or runs contemporaneously with Bhudev. They contest no less than Bhudev, the claim that Indian nationalism was a ‘derivative’ discourse. In a work such as the present one, some discussion along these lines would have been useful. Bhattacharya’s work might also have been better organized stylistically and conceptually. Perhaps the discussion on Vividha Probondho deserved a separate chapter and when going through this work, I also wondered if a work on his ‘ideas’ could keep out (as seems to be the case here) some other important writings of Bhudev, particularly his Swapnalabdha Bharatvarsher Itihas (1895) and Pushpanjali (1876?) if not also his historical romances (Aitihasik Upanyas, 1857). When discussing Samajik Probondho, Bhattacharya gives us virtually a summary of the work, chapter by chapter. This could have been reasonably avoided. Ideally, the chapter titled ‘What others have said about Bhudev’ should have been integrated with the introduction. Finally, it would have been interesting to compare Bhudev’s writings on the domestic economy of the Hindus with comparable works from the period. How, for instance, does the work by the Brahmo Sibnath Sastri (Griha dharma) compare with that of the orthodox Bhudev?
I cannot imagine what constraints led Gayatri Bhattacharyya to publish with the University of Calcutta. University presses in India are evidently far less professionally managed than they are in the West. In this instance, while the price of the book remains very reasonable, this has come at the cost of poor production quality. Some valuable photographs which have been appended to this book are hardly visible. Also, a book running into over 500 pages cannot really be handled with a thin paper jacket. In my own case, the jacket came apart after only a month of handling.
On the whole, I would strongly recommend the present work to students and scholars of history and sociology. Specifically on the sociological thought of Bhudev, this is easily the most detailed and comprehensive work. It is also a work painstakingly compiled and which lends the reader some valuable leads and clues with which to better understand an important and intriguing chapter in our cultural history.