This study anatomizes the cultural, sociological, and historical context and problematic of the English educated urban males of colonial Bengal mostly based in Calcutta, the capital of the Company Rāj (1772-1858). It seeks to demystify the babu and rescue him from the straitjacket of the stereotype that views him either as the bad boy of a South Asian Babylon or a herald of bourgeois modernity. I seek to probe the origins and odyssey of the babu by examining the controversies surrounding his education, intentions, and life style. I maintain that despite his multiple shortcomings and slips, the babu (especially of the bhadralok category) served as the agent of assimilation and absorption of Western worldview and modernity. Like the Enlightenment philosophe of Europe, the Bengali babu heralded what is generally. known as the Bengal Renaissance. The babu, truly, was the child of his twin mothers: Bengal and Britannia. He was at once eager to imbibe Western ideas, especially, humanism, liberalism, and nationalism, and make them a significant adjunct to his inheritance. From a metahistorical perspective, the making and maturing of the English educated Bengali babu mirror the history of the Romano-Celtic Britons centuries earlier. Like the Celtic ancestors of his colonial master and mentor who had thrived under Imperial Rome, the Bengali babu thrived under the British East India Company and subsequently under Imperial Britain. From this perspective, thus, both the babu and the saheb appear to share a parallel historical odyssey.
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