International Seminar cum Lecture on “Bengal Renaissance and Modernity” at the Department of History
The Department of History, Raja Peary Mohan College, Uttarpara organized an International Seminar cum Lecture on “Bengal Renaissance and Modernity” on 4th September, 2017. The speaker, Prof. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay is a professor of Asian History at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His recent books are Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-independence West Bengal (Routledge, 2009); Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal (Sage, 2004); From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India (Orient Longman, 2004) etc.
The speech of Prof. Bandyopadhyay generated a lot of debate on regarding Bengal Renaissance-whether it was Bengal Renaissance or Indian Renaissance, whether it was urban Calcutta centered or not etc. To limit cultural history within geographical boundary is not justified. We cannot think of renaissance without thinking of Jayakrishna library of Uttarpara. Therefore renaissance is not only an urban cultural movement. More important is that our modernity emerged from this cultural movement. However, the question remains, have we become truly modern? According to Dipesh Chakrabarty, it is easy to live within modernity, but it is difficult to define it. If modernity proclaims the victory of science, scientism and rationalism, religion and magic should take back stage. But our modernity accommodates both. Dipesh himself acknowledges this crisis. In fact Europe also adjusted pre-modern and modern simultaneously. But the colonial masters, who wanted India to climb to the status of Europe, presented the picture of a Hyper-Real Europe. This was never the true picture of Europe. According to Australian scholar Yan Koplan, there has never been complete segregation between church and state in Europe. According to Prosenjit Duara, Asian civilizations contain in themselves the idea of transcendentalism, that is, we appeal to moral authority for transcendence. When European modernity entered our country, it couldn’t dispel this idea. Rather they developed a conversation – which can be called dialogic transcendence.
We can say in tune with Ashis Nandy that, India is modern, a bit pre-modern but largely non modern or backward. Burchhardt saw a break in European civilization after the coming of renaissance. It never happened here. According to me, if we designate our modernity half-baked, it is simply appropriate because we did not want to do away with pre-modern. English education which was supposed to bring about modernity never fulfilled its historic role. It meant only liberal arts and language and never incorporated such curricula which inspire critical thinking. As Sabyasachi Bhattacharya remarks this was a queer situation where knowledge was produced in Europe and distributed elsewhere. The same thing was reflected in social reform. Whenever Rammohan and Vidyasagar initiated any reform, they sought the sanction of scripture behind their activity. In fact in the battle between modern and non-modern, we face the crisis of national identity. In such cases everyone tries to find out to golden age in ancient heritage. Different people do it in different ways. In fact the history of warp and weft between constitutional and everyday modernity is the crux of our modernity.
