Brajendranath De

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Brajendranath Dey
Born(1852-12-23)23 December 1852
Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal, India
Died20 September 1932(1932-09-20) (aged 79)
Calcutta (now Kolkata), West Bengal, India
OccupationOrientalist
Spouse(s)Nagendranandini Dey (নগেন্দ্রনন্দিনী দে) (nee Bose) (বসু)
Children12

Brajendranath Dey (Bengali: ব্রজেন্দ্রনাথ দে (দেব সরকার)) (23 December 1852 – 20 September 1932) (Bengali: ৮ পৌষ ১২৫৯ - ৫ আশ্বিন ১৩৩৯) was an early Indian member of the Indian Civil Service.[1]

Early life and education[edit]

Dey, who was born in a Bengali (বাঙালি) Hindu (হিন্দু) Uttar Rarhi Kayastha (উত্তর রার্হি কায়স্থ)-Brahmo (ব্রাহ্ম) family, was the son of Durgadas Dey (দুর্গাদাস দে (দেব সরকার)), a Junior Scholar of Hindu College (later Presidency College) Calcutta (1847-1849) and a registrar in Lucknow, and Trailokyamohini Debi (ত্রৈলোক্যমোহিনী দেবী) (nee Basu). His paternal family, which was settled in Bhowanipur in Calcutta from the 18th century, were originally members of the Vaishnavite sect but, influenced by the Bengal Renaissance, joined the Brahmo movement from the middle of the 19th century. His maternal family, popularly called the garhkata Basu paribar of Anarpur in Barasat, was settled in Maniktala in Calcutta, where he was born. He was born in his maternal grandparents' home at 123, Maniktala Street, Calcutta.[2]

Dey studied at Hare School, Calcutta, and then Canning Collegiate School and Canning College, Lucknow, where he was a student of Nawab Syed Hussain Bilgrami. Always ranking at the top of his class in school, he was placed in the first division in all his final examinations. He came first from his school in the Entrance examination of Calcutta University and fourth in the first division in the First Arts (F.A.) examination of Calcutta University. A student of English (Honours), he ranked sixth in the first division in his Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) examination. Since he was a first divisioner, he was allowed to take the Master of Arts (M.A.) examination of the Calcutta University soon after the completion of his B.A. (Honours) examination. He was ranked second in the M.A. examination and was awarded the silver medal of Calcutta University.[3]

Later, he travelled to England for his higher studies, on the advice of his maternal grand-uncle, Peary Charan Sarkar[4] and his father's mentor, Raja Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee,[5] and for some time assistant commissioner of Lucknow. In England, he joined University College, London to appear in the Open Competitive Services examination. Having taken the examination successfully, he joined the Indian Civil Service in 1873, emerging 17th in a batch of 35 successful probationers selected from a total of 360 candidates.[6] He was the 8th Indian member of the ICS.[7] Subsequently, he was called to the Bar by the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple on 7 June 1875.[8] He was admitted to St. Mary's Hall, Oxford (later merged with Oriel College, Oxford in 1902), where he spent one year, from 1874 to 1875, on a Boden Sanskrit Scholarship, having attended the lectures of Sir Monier Monier-Williams, who was then the Boden Sanskrit Professor, Professor Max Mueller and Mr. Goldstucker and Mr. Ruslan.[9] He was the first Indian ICS officer to have studied in a college in Oxford.[10]

His second son-in-law was Sir Sarat Kumar Ghosh, ICS, Chief Justice of Jaipur and Kashmir and the only interim Chief Justice of the High Court of Rajasthan, his fifth daughter and son-in-law were the social reformer Saroj Nalini Dutt, MBE,[7] and Gurusaday Dutt, ICS, Secretary, Local Self Government and Public Health, Government of Bengal, his sixth son-in-law was Lieutenant Colonel Jyotish Chandra De, IMS,[11] 2nd Indian Principal of the Calcutta Medical College, his seventh son-in-law was Captain (Hon.) Dr. Paresh Chandra Datta, first Chief Medical Officer of the B.R. Singh Memorial Hospital, Calcutta then of the East Bengal Railway and Director of Public Health, Government of West Bengal and his third son was Major (Hon.) Basanta Kumar Dey, Traffic Superintendent General and then Commercial Traffic Manager of the BNR.

Two of his grandsons were Ranajit Datta, chairman and managing director of Braithwaite, Burn and Jessop Limited and the historian Barun Dey, chairman, West Bengal Heritage Commission. Two of his great-grandchildren were the singer Uma Bose[12] and the cameraman Subrata Mitra.[13]

Career[edit]

Administrative[edit]

He took up his first posting in the civil service as assistant magistrate and collector of Arrah, Behar in 1875. He served in districts where the rulers of erstwhile zamindari estates, such as Darbhanga and Dumrao, had a strong presence. After serving in a number of districts in Behar, he was posted in Raniganj, Bengal in 1881.[14] He officiated as the district magistrate and collector of Bankura, Burdwan and Faridpore. He served as the full district magistrate and collector of Khulna, where he was befriended by Dr. Krishnadhan Ghosh, the civil surgeon of the district, and the father of Aurobindo Ghosh.[15][16] He became the magistrate and collector of Balasore in Orissa and then of Malda and Hooghly.[17] He was the first Indian to be elected as chairman of the Hooghly Municipal Corporation. He was an (acting) commissioner of the Burdwan Division.[18][19]

As the district officer of Hooghly, he started the Duke Club there which was meant to be exclusively for Indians.[20] One of his Commissioners once told him not to entertain the thought of wanting to join a British club in the district.[21]

After retirement he remained actively involved in the work of the Calcutta Improvement Trust.[22][23]

Academic[edit]

While still in service he translated Kalidas's 'Vikramarvasi' and 'Manichudabadana' from Sanskrit to English.[22] He edited an English-Bengali dictionary[19] and published an article on inter dining in the Madras Social Reformer (1910).

In his post-retirement years he served as a vice-president of the council of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta.[24][25]

He was the translator and editor, in two volumes, Nizamuddin Ahmad's Tabaqat-i-Akbari. The third volume, which he had left fully prepared, was published posthumously by Baini Prasad and also M. Hidayat Hosain.[26][27][3]

Legacy[edit]

A road in Chinsura, the headquarter of Hooghly dictrict, and a town hall in Malda, the headquarter of Malda district, which are both in Bengal, are named after him.[28]

At the time of his centenary celebration in 1952, his second son, Basanta Kumar Dey, esq., a senior officer of the BNR[29] took the initiative to publish in three articles sections of his reminiscences in the Calcutta Review. This work was entrusted to Tapan Raychaudhuri, then of the Department of Islamic History and Culture of the University of Calcutta.[30]

In 2001, approximately 2,000 photographs of himself and his family members were given in loan by one of his grandsons, Barun Dey,[31][self-published source?][32] to the photographic archives of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. Later, when the archive was shifted to the newly established Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre, CSSSC, Calcutta, the photographs too were deposited there.[33]

Publications[edit]

A member of a Kayastha family of Bengal, he was a scholar of Persian and Sanskrit. He edited and translated a few works from those languages into English. They were as follows:

  • (ed. & tran.), Kālidāsa's play Vikramorvasi, 'Vikramorvaçi', Canto I., in Calcutta Review, Oct. 1884, pp. 440–2.[34]
  • (ed. & tran.), The Tabaqat-i-Akbari of Khwaja Nizamuddin Ahmad: A History of India from the Early Musalman Invasions to the Thirty-eighth year of the Reign of Akbar (in 3 Vols.), (Calcutta, reprint, 1973)[35]
  • "Reminiscences of an Indian Member of the Indian Civil Service", in Calcutta Review, (1953–5).[36]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Indiasaga Who's Who
  2. ↑ Maniktala, a neighbourhood in North Calcutta is named after either Raja Manikram Bose or Manik Pir, both of whom lived there in the 18th and the 19th centuries. Since Manikram or Manikchand Bose, the caretaker of Alinagar (i.e. Calcutta) during Alivardi Khan's reign and an agent of the Nawabs of Oudh, lived in the 18th century and Manik Pir lived in the early 19th century, and a map of Calcutta of 1784 shows the existence of Maniktala then, it is surmised that the locality is, indeed, named after Manikam Bose. Manikram Bose was an ancestor of Brajendranath's maternal grandfather, Rajendralal Basu, a managing clerk of a Scottish solicitor's firm in Calcutta and a lawyer, who fought a case for the Nawab of Farukkhabad in the aftermath of India's first war of independence in 1857. For details see Brajendranath De, "Reminiscences of an Indian Member of the Indian Civil Service", Calcutta, 1925-29.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Full Text of 'Tabaqat-i-Akbari'
  4. ↑ Peary Charan Sarkar was a luminary of the Bengal Renaissance who served as assistant professor of English at Presidency College, Calcutta and then principal of Hare School, Calcutta. The road that runs behind it on which stands the University of Calcutta and Hindu Hostel is named after him. His youngest son, Sailendra Sarkar founded another school in North Calcutta which is now named after him. For details see B.De, "Reminiscences of an Indian Member of the Indian Civil Service", Calcutta, 1925-29.
  5. ↑ Raja Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee of Shankarpore was a member of the Young Bengal Movement who initially worked in the kutchery of the Rajas of Burdwan. Later, he fell out with his former employers and eloped with Rani Basanta Kumari,a daughter of Dewan Pran Chand Kapoor and the eigth wife of Raja Tej Chandra Ray. He was taken to Lucknow by Lord Canning and awarded the confiscated taluk of Shankarpore and given the rank of assistant commissioner of Lucknow. He was a senior friend of Dey's father, Durgadas, and adviced Dey on how and when to travel to the United Kingdom to take the ICS examination. For details see B.De, "Reminiscences of an Indian Member of the Indian Civil Service", Calcutta, 1925-29.
  6. ↑ India Office, Great Britain (1905). The India List and India Office List 1905. Harrison and Sons. p. 447.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Forbes, Geraldine Hancock (1996). Women in Modern India. The New Cambridge History of India. Vol. IV.2. Cambridge University Press. pp. 28–29. ISBN 978-0-521-65377-0. As one of the first eight Indians appointed to the Indian Civil Service (ICS), Brajendra Nath ... He insisted on educating his daughters and one of them, Saroj Nalini Dutt, led the way in organizing rural women's organizations in the years immediately following World War I.
  8. ↑ University of Wisconsin Law Library
  9. ↑ Oxford University Calendar, 1875, p. 366
  10. ↑ Renu Paul (in consultation with Mitra Sharafi), 'South Asians at the Inns of Court: Middle Temple, 1863-1944', compilation based on H. A. C. Sturgess, (eds.) Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. From the Fifteenth Century to the Year 1944 (London: published for the Hon. Society of the Middle Temple by Butterworth & Co., 1949), volumes II (1782-1909) and III (1910-44), p. 2.
  11. ↑ Lives Less Forgotten: Lieutenant Colonel Jyotish Chandra De
  12. ↑ Lives Less Forgotten: Uma Bose[permanent dead link]
  13. ↑ Lives Less Forgotten: Subrata Mitra
  14. ↑ Military and ICS Manual
  15. ↑ Heehs, Peter (2008). The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 33. ISBN 978-0-231-14098-0.
  16. ↑ "Govt. Notifications: Orders by the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal". The Liberal and the New Dispensation. Calcutta: R.S. Bhattacharji. XII (30): 9. 6 August 1893.
  17. ↑ "Mr. B. De", in Bengalee, 7 September 1910; see also Indian Daily News, 3 September 1910
  18. ↑ Gupta, Tapati Dutta (1993). Social Thought of Rabindranath Tagore: A Historical Analysis. Abhinav Publications. p. 122. ISBN 9788170173021.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Late Mr. B. De.: Passing Away of an Old Civilian" in Liberty, Friday, 30 September 1932
  20. ↑ Sinha, Mrinalini (October 2001). "Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India". The Journal of British Studies. 4 (44): 489–521. doi:10.1086/386265. JSTOR 3070745. S2CID 143900100.
  21. ↑ Ballantyne, Tony; Burton, Antoinette M. (2005). Bodies in Contact. Duke University Press. p. 193. ISBN 0-8223-3467-4.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 'Late Mr. B.De: Passing Away of An Old Civilian' in Liberty, Friday, 30 September 1932
  23. ↑ "Late Mr. B. De, Calcutta Corporation Tributes", in Liberty, Saturday, 1 October 1932
  24. ↑ "Birth Centenary of B.De Celebrated" in The Statesman, Wednesday, 24 December 1952
  25. ↑ "He Rehabilitated Persian in Bengal: Tributes to Late B.De: Birthday Celebration" in Amrita Bazar Patrika, Wednesday, 24 December 1952
  26. ↑ "Mr.B.De Dead Retired Member of the Civil Service" in The Statesman, 30 September 1932
  27. ↑ Sudha Sharma, Status of Muslim Women in Medieval India, Allahabad
  28. ↑ Map of Chinsura, Hooghly, Bengal
  29. ↑ Lives Less Forgotten: Basanta Kumar De
  30. ↑ Mrinalini Sinha, "Reconfiguring Hiararchies: The Ilbert Bill Controversy, 1883-84", in Reina Lewis and Sarah Mills, Feminist Post-Colonialist Theory: A Reader, New York and London, Routledge, 2003, p. 456
  31. ↑ "Situating an Eminent Historian Eminently" – Sabyasachi Bhattacharya. Retrieved 2015-03-21.
  32. ↑ Lives Less Forgotten: Barun De
  33. ↑ Jadunath Bhavan Museum and Resource Centre, (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 2009), p. 7
  34. ↑ Schuyler, Jr., Montgomery (1902). "Bibliography of Kālidāsa's Mālavikāgnimitra and Vikramorvaçī". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 23: 93–101. doi:10.2307/592384. JSTOR 592384.
  35. ↑ Tabaqat-i-Akbari by Khwaja Nizamuddin Ahmed
  36. ↑ Reminiscences of an Indian Member of the Indian Civil Service' in the Calcutta Review

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