This is a comprehensive biography about one of the stalwarts in Indian history, whose beginnings were somewhat uncertain. Barely 20 years old, Romesh Chunder Dutt set out, without informing his family, on a slow boat from Calcutta to Diamond Harbour and thence to catch a steamer to London. To study and compete for the ICS, “the heaven-born service,” was the objective.
As a civil servant, Romesh Chunder was conscientious, if not spectacular. However, as a product of western liberal education, he could not remain entirely neutral and frequently expressed his views about the conditions of the people he was expected to administer.
The Pabna agitation organised by the peasants, the inequities imposed on them by Indigo planters, and the unspoken complicity and nexus between the landlords and the colonial administration were evident. And the outcome was the insightful book, The Peasantry of Bengal, published in 1874. That was also the year of the famine and two years later came the terrible cyclone that hit the deltaic region of Bengal.
Postings
When Dutt was deeply involved in organising relief, he was called away to Barisal to assist in the festivities on January 1, 1877 to mark Queen Victoria assuming the title “Empress of India”.
Considering the plight of the cyclone victims, the administration could not have been more insensitive. Other postings followed and he served as the District Officer in Pabna and Mymensing. In 1894, he was appointed Commissioner of the Burdwan Division, probably the first Indian native to officiate in that capacity though only for a year. In 1897, he took early retirement from the ICS.
Dutt's 26 years of government service was also marked by furloughs to England for extended periods when he did a fair amount of study and writing. By then, he had also become acquainted with the leading figures of the London Indian Society formed by Dadabhai Naoroji in 1865.
Post-retirement, he plunged into writing and public speaking, quite often in support of the members of the London Indian Society or the East Indian Association contesting elections to the House of Commons. He also served as the London Correspondent for a Calcutta-based journal The Indian Mirror . In 1899, he was invited to be the President of the Lucknow session of the Indian National Congress.
Meenakshi Mukherjee's biography presents an interesting account of the tussle between the ‘moderates' and the ‘swarajists' in the Congress which had become prominent by then. Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal were open about their dissatisfaction with the party's three-day annual tamasha every December. To quote Tilak, “we will not achieve any success in our labours if we croak once a year like a frog.”
President of INC
Dutt's presidentship of the INC came in for criticism at the hands of the British, who accused him of alternating between “adulation of the British, on the one hand, and sedition, on the other.” These criticisms persisted even after his death.
As the author recounts, as late as 2007, while she was researching for the book in the Bangeya Sahitya Parishad Library in Kolkata, a visitor was dismissive of her effort to write a biography of Dutt, who was called by the visitor “a toady of the British.”
As Finance Minister and Dewan of Baroda State, Dutt could strike a constructive relationship with the ruler, Sayaji Rao Gaekwad, and this facilitated the ushering in of administrative reforms and welfare measures — for instance, compulsory education, the library movement, prevention of child marriage, local-self-government, and separation of the judiciary from the executive.
His tenure as the Dewan of Baroda, however, was not to last long. At an official banquet in honour of the visiting Lord Minto, he suffered a heat attack and died soon thereafter.
Monumental work
R.C. Dutt is remembered for his monumental work, The Economic History of India (1902), and his translation of the Rig Veda in Bengali. Even while strenuously trying to uphold the values of Victorian England, he sought to strike a balance between liberalism, on the one hand, and the Hindu traditions, on the other. In a revealing letter to J.N. Gupta, another ICS officer who had asked for his daughter Sarala's hand in marriage, he speaks feelingly about inter-caste and widow marriage.
This constant struggle to strike a balance resulted in many contradictions in him. Mukherjee records, in her thoughtful afterword, that it is these contradictions in his ideas and attitudes that made researching R.C. Dutt's life a fascinating project. She deserves praise for this well-researched work. Had the distractive side-stories been avoided, the narration would have flowed more easily.
For her, Dutt was a “colonial intellectual who embodied the pulls of different epistemologies.” That he was a stalwart among the people of his generation is not open to dispute. Was he an “Indian for all seasons”, as the author chooses to describe him? It is for the reader to come to his own judgment.
AN INDIAN FOR ALL SEASONS— R.C. DUTT: Meenakshi Mukherjee; Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110017.
Rs. 399.
