More than three decades have passed since the publication of The Bengali Intellectual Tradition in 1979 under the auspices of Council for Political Studies. For us it is heartening to note that although the book has been out of print for a long time the steady demand for the volume has never receded over these years. Under the circumstances, when M/S KP Bagchi & Company, the publisher, approached us with the request to consider the publication of a revised and enlarged edition of the book, we readily agreed.
This new edition includes all the essays of the first edition of the book in unaltered form except the one on Sri Aurobindo, which has been withdrawn by the author. In its place a new essay by the author on Bhupendranath Datta has been included. Besides, the volume now opens with an essay by Professor Rabindra Kumar Das Gupta, which is very aptly reflective of the spirit of the volume. Three new essays on Begum Rokeya, Swarnakumari Devi and M.N. Roy have been included in the present edition.
Amal Kumar Mukhopadhyay, President, Council for Political Studies, has painstakingly reorganized the second edition of the book. In conformity with the new stylistic requirements of the twenty-first century the volume has been copy edited by Rita Banerjee, Joint Secretary of our organization. We thank M/S KP Bagchi & Company for undertaking the publication of this new edition.
Every people has a debt to its history-the debt of a kind which it is impossible for one to repay although about which one should not cease to have a sense of acknowledgment. In order that this sense is never lost it is only apt for a people to remember once in a while its own intellectual tradition and keep others aware of it. Hence the need of our taking occasional dips in the stream of our Indian ideas. But to reach this stream one has to cut across the track traversed by the Bengali intellectuals. For toward the development of modern Indian ideas Bengal, indeed, has had no small contribution. Ever since Rammohun Roy launched his war against some of the antique Hindu ideas and beliefs there went on in Bengal throughout the nineteenth century a splendid intellectual movement that turned the tide of Indian history to a new direction. In the increasingly politicized atmosphere of the twentieth century Bengal where highly com-plex objective conditions more and more called for concrete action rather than for passive ideas and precepts the legacy of the nineteenth century Bengali intellectualism, however, was not overthrown. Even during these troubled times some of the Bengali intellectual giants continued looking after the ideational harvest of the country right up to the middle of this century when suddenly the curtain seemed to have been drawn marking the end of Bengal's leadership in India's intellectual movement.
In today's India many of these Bengali thinkers remain unknown or very little known; even in Bengal they are scarcely read. Of course, quite different has been the lot of some others like Rammohun Roy and Iswarchandra Vidyasagar-the recognized greats of our society-who were not merely thinkers but activists as well in as far as they not merely delved in dry theories but also avidly plunged into exciting social and political programmes. From the present generation they usually receive a relatively better treatment. As far as they are concerned, we-the ordinary folk-do not fail to observe our routine rituals of remembrance and our contemporary scholars ceaselessly sharpen their pens either to eulogize them or to debunk them, which, incidentally, has been the latest fashion among some of the angry Indian scholars of our times. While it is surely necessary to remember these stalwarts and make a due appreciation of their ideas and services it is as well imperative to bring to the limelight those back-stage Bengali thinkers who all their life chose to intern themselves in the quiet island of ideas with-out ever trying to enter into the tumult of activism.
It is with this feeling that the present book has been planned. Our intention has been to focus mainly on those writers and scholars of Bengal who, no doubt, over times have made a distinct contribution to the development of Indian ideas, but still remain rather unknown to the common folk just because they refused to directly associate themselves, for some reason or other, with the most striking social and political events of mod-ern India. But, then, instead of giving them our exclusive attention, we have decided to place in the book side by side with some of those Bengali thinkers who are much known and often discussed. This we have reckoned as the most right thing to do because otherwise, we have felt, any account of the modern.
Bengali intellectual tradition must suffer from a lack of sequence. Thus the book contains essays on twelve Bengali thinkers beginning with Rammohun Roy and ending with Dhirendranath Sen, representing a time-span of about a century and a half. It makes a modest attempt at giving a glimpse of a hundred and fifty years of Bengali social and political ideas.
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