A journey within

An Indian For All Seasons: The Many Lives of R.C. Dutt Meenakshi Mukherjee Penguin 385 pages Rs. 399

While he was alive,Romesh Chunder Duttone of the earliest Indians to qualify for the Indian Civil Servicewas derided by a British ICS officer for oscillating between adulation for colonial rule and sedition. Even today,a hundred years after Dutts death,it is a serious allegation to level at one who excelled as an administrator,and post-retirement as a political agitator,whose lasting legacy is a corpus of works ranging from Indias economic and cultural history to Bengali historical novels to translations of Sanskrit texts. That versatile breadth,representative of the Bengal Renaissance,is what academic,critic and Sahitya Akademi winner Meenakshi Mukherjee had sought to locate in An Indian For All Seasons: The Many Lives of R.C. Dutt. Unfortunately,Mukherjee passed away a day before the books Delhi launch.

The book begins with Dutt,20,running away to England to take the ICS exam,along with Surendranath Banerjea and Bihari Lal Gupta,leaving behind his wife and two infant daughters. Mukherjee underscores this event,for this daring endeavour would be feverishly followed by Indian newspapers,while their subsequent success would bring national adulation. Induction into the Heaven-Born service would set the tone for Dutts life and work: critiquing exploitative British economic policies while arguing for greater administrative representation for Indians.

Dutt,energised by Gladstonian liberalism,suffered the same disillusionment as many of his contemporaries when faced with the chasm between British idealism and colonial policy. He did not shy away from voicing his misgivings,recording the abject outcome of Permanent Settlement in The Peasantry of Bengal 1874. The ideas enumerated here would form the core of the Open Letters to Lord Curzon 1900 and the seminal Economic History of India: Volume I amp; and II 1902 amp; 1904. However,his volte face on Permanent Settlement in the Letters,betraying sympathy for Bengals landowners,would incite charges of duplicity and dishonesty. Similarly,the exhaustive data and analysis of Economic History would be marred by its cautious ending,where keeping with the philosophy of the Moderates he was Congress president in 1899,Dutt demands administrative adjustments rather than a complete rejection of foreign rule.

Dutts cultural history,its facts culled from Hindu myths and a largely borrowed historiography,draws flak from Mukherjee,unlike his Bengali literary history which presages the Book History of today. Mukherjees careful delineation of the polymath shows that his vision was more pan-Indian than many other leading Bengal Renaissance figures. He bridged several worldsWest/India,colonialism/nationalism,elite/subalternbut kept vacillating in his loyalty to either. Such vacillations also informed his personal life: his daughters received English education,but were married by 16 while the son got to study in England. As Mukherjee notes in the Introduction,contradictions were inevitable in a man who was locating himself between a reinvented tradition and colonial modernity. The historical moment shaped and liberated the man; ironically,it also clipped his wings.