Rosinka Chaudhuri - Freedom and Beef Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture

Freedom and Beef Steaks

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Freedom and Beef Steaks
Colonial Calcutta Culture

Rosinka Chaudhuri

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For Ma and Baba
Sreelata and Shiva Ranjan Khastgir,

and

to the memory of
Thakurma and Dadu
Anila and Satis Ranjan Khastgir,

Bari-amma
Shovarani Ghosh,

and

beloved Mejothakurma
Miss Manorama Bose.

Contents

Young India: A Bengal Eclogue;
or Meat-eating, Race, and Reform in a Colonial Poem

The Construction of Colonial/Communal
Stereotypes in the Poems of Henry Derozio

Indias First Modern Literary Society, Calcutta, 1825

Calcutta, 17521859

A Possible Genealogy of the Indian Drawing Room

Madhusudan and the Modernist Discourse of Reading

The Flute, Gerontion, and Subalternist
Misreadings of Tagore

Publishers Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 in this volume, Young India: A Bengal Eclogue: Or Meat-eating, Race and Reform in a Colonial Poem, originally published in Interventions 2, no. 3 (2000): 42441. Reprinted with permission of Taylor and Francis, UK, http://www.tandfonline.com.

Chapter 2 in this volume, An Ideology of Indianness: The Construction of Colonial/Communal Stereotypes in the Poems of Henry Derozio, originally published in Studies in History, Vol. 20, No. 2, Copyright Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.

Chapter 3 in this volume, The Politics of Naming: Indias First Modern Literary Society, Calcutta, 1825, originally published as The Politics of Naming: Derozio in Two Formative Moments of Literary and Political Discourse, Calcutta, 182531, Modern Asian Studies, Cambridge University Press 44, no. 4 (2010): 85785. Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Chapter 4 in this volume, Three Poets in Search of History: Calcutta, 17521859, was presented at the Workshop on Intellectual histories of historical teleology in the late Enlightenment and its aftermath, at the Finnish Institute, Berlin, 1112 June, 2010.

A version of Chapter 5 in this volume, Modernity at Home: A Possible Genealogy of the Indian Drawing Room, was published in Malashri Lal and Sukrita P. Kumar (eds), Interpreting Homes: South Asian Literature (New Delhi: Pearson Education, 2007), 22141.

Chapter 6 in this volume, Refashioning Milton: Madhusudan and the Modernist Discourse of Reading, was presented earlier as a paper Refashioning Milton: Madhusudan and the Shaping of the National Modern at an international conference, Inhabiting this Hour: John Milton, his Bequest, 16082010 organised by the Department of English, University of Delhi, 1719 February, 2010.

Chapter 7 in this volume, The Flute, Gerontion, and Subalternist Misreadings of Tagore, originally published in Social Text 78 (Duke University Press), 22, no. 1 (2004). Reproduced with permission of Duke University Press, UK.

Extracts from the translation of Rabindranath Tagores Banshi by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Chapter 7 of the volume were originally published in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Nation and Imagination, in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (New York: Princeton University Press, 2000). Reproduced with the permission of the Princeton University Press, New York and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Copyright Dipesh Chakrabarty.

Extracts from translation of Rabindranath Tagores Sahityer Aitihashikata by Ranajit Guha in Chapter 7 of the volume, originally published in Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Reproduced with the permission of the Columbia University Press, New York.

Figures 5.2 and 5.3 of the Marble Palace of the Jorashanko Mullicks, Kolkata, reproduced with the permission of Mr Brotindro Mullick.

Figure 5.4 in the volume titled Ramayan-gan, colour engraving, in Solvyns, Les Hindous I (1808); reproduced with the permission of the Victoria Memorial, Kolkata.

Figures 5.6, Rabindranath Tagore as a young man in a library. Portrait of Tagore, Kurseong, 1895; figure 5.7, Samarendranath Tagore and Satyaprasad Ganguly, 1890s; figure 5.10, Afternoon siesta in the drawing room at the Tagores, Jorasanko (1890s), reproduced with the permission of the CSSSC Archives, Kolkata.

Figures 5.8 and 5.9, stills from the film Udayer Pathey (1944); reproduced with the permission of Rinki Roy Bhattacharya.

Figure 5.11, Draped rooms (1917). Reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Umrao Singh Sher-Gil. Figures 5.12 and 5.13 of the Drawing room of Udayan, Santiniketan; and figure 5.14, Drawing room of Konarak House, Santiniketan, reproduced with the permission of Rabindra Bhavan Museum Collection, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan.

Introduction

On 23 August, 1831, yet another scandal erupted in the already tumultuous social sphere of the city of Calcutta. Four months after the infamous twenty-two-year-old Derozio had been sacked from the Hindu College by a managing committee openly biased against him, his students were embroiled in an outrage perpetrated upon the respectable classes in a manner unacceptable not only to the orthodox but to any ordinary Hindu of the time. A group of Derozios students, who used to gather regularly at the home of their friend Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay (18131885), had met the previous evening in his absence to indulge in forbidden food in the form of ruti-mangsho [bread and beef-curry] bought from the Muslim bazaar. Having consumed the food, the group then (reportedly exultantly) threw the bones into a neighbouring house, shouting out Look, Look! Cows bones! Expectedly, the entire neighbourhood gave chase while the miscreants took to their heels, and the incident ended with the unfortunate young Krishnamohan, teacher then at the Hare School, and editor, since the May of that year, of the Enquirer, being expelled from his Kulin Brahmin family home forever. Freedom and beef were tied together in opposition to social and political orthodoxy from this moment onward in the popular imagination, never to lose the stigma of their association with one another through the century that followed.
This incident is well known to historians of nineteenth-century Bengal. Repetitively invoked, it has become symbolic of the age of Young Bengal, showcasing as it did the shock-and-awe tactics of the young reformers as they sought to agitate a stagnant cesspool of social conservatism and ritual orthodoxy with a somewhat misplaced adolescent fervour that nonetheless had strikingly serious connotations and consequences in the social and political life of the city in the following years. The courage to implement in personal life the ideals of their philosophical reading was no small thing, and the nineteenth century in Calcutta was emblematic of such personal acts of defiance lived out in the daily lives of legions of ordinary men and women who sought to be true to the spirit of the age. Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay went on to write the first English play by an Indian, The Persecuted, in the same year as the notorious incident detailed above, 1831, which was followed by innumerable essays, lectures, books and translations. Prize-winning tracts such as Native Female Education (1840) and the well-known Dialogues on Hindu Philosophy (1861) apart, he also translated The Rig Veda Sanhita, The Raghu Vansa and The Kumar Sambhava. However, his crowning achievement remains the Vidyakalpadrum or the Encyclopaedia Bengalensis (1846), written in thirteen volumes and two languages, the first attempt of its kind anywhere in India to interpret, as it said in its introduction, European history and physics in Bengali as an effective means of combating aberrations in the minds of the common people in Bengal; for the common mind may thus be free from the evil of ignorance and confusion that permeates the country and reigns over it. The works, and the predilections of Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay as evidenced through those works, extended over the course of much of the nineteenth century and were representative of the zeitgeist of colonial culture in Calcutta..