A radical trend arose among the Bengali intellectuals during the late 1820s and the 1830s

A radical trend arose among the Bengali intellectuals during the late 1820s and the 1830s. This trend was more modern than even Rammohun Roy’s and was known as the Young Bengal movement.

Its leader and inspirer was the young Anglo-Indian Henry Vivian Derozio, who was born in 1809 and who taught at Hindu College from 1826 to 1831. Derozio possessed a dazzling intellect and followed the most radical views of the time drawing his inspiration from the great French Revolution.

He was a brilliant teacher who, in spite of his youth, attached to himself a host of bright and adoring students. He inspired these students to think rationally and freely, to question all authority, to love liberty, equality and freedom, and to worship truth.

Derozio and his famous followers, known as the Derozians and Young Bengal, were fiery patriots. Derozio was perhaps the first nationalist poet of modern India. For example, he wrote in 1827:

My country in the days of glory past a beauteous halo circled round thy brow, and worshipped as a deity thou west, where are that glory, where that reverence now?

They eagle pinion is chained down at last, and groveling in the lowly dust art thou, Thy minstrel hath no wreath to weave for thee save the sad story of thy misery.

And one of his pupils, Kashi Prasad Ghosh, wrote in 1861:

Land of the Gods and lofty name; Land of the fair and beauties spell; Land of the bards of mighty fame, my native land forever farewell! (1830) But woe me! I never shall live to behold, that day of thy triumph, when firmly and bold, Thou shalt mount on the wings of an eagle on high, to the region of knowledge and blest liberty.

Derozio was removed from the Hindu College in 1831 because of his radicalism and died of cholera soon after at the young age of 22. The Derozians attacked old and decadent customs, rites and traditions.

They were passionate advocates of women’s rights and demanded education for them. They did not, however, succeed in creating a movement because social conditions were not yet ripe for their ideas to flourish.

They did not take up the peasant’s cause and there was no other class or group in Indian society at the time which could support their advanced ideas.

Moreover, they forgot to maintain their links with the people. In fact, their radicalism was bookish; they failed to come to grips with the Indian reality.

Even so, the Derozians carried forward Rammohun’s tradition of educating the people in social, economic and political questions through newspapers, pamphlets and public associations.

They carried on public agitation on public questions such as the revision of the Company’s Charter, the freedom of the Press, better treatment for Indian labour in British colonies abroad, trial by jury, protection of the riots from oppressive zamindars, and employment of Indians in the higher grades of government services. Surendranath Banerjea.

The famous leader of the nationalist movement, described the Derozians as “the pioneers of the modern civilization of Bengal, the conscript fathers of our race whose virtues will excite veneration and whose failings will be treated with gentlest consideration”.