The family that was behind India’s modern revolution
A new book by Chandak Sengoopta looks back at the illustrious past of filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s family in Bengal, bringing to the fore the achievements of the pre-Satyajit generation. An excerpt.
Publisher: Oxford University Press Pages: 432 Price: Rs 995
The earliest known Rays established themselves in Bengal in eastern India during the Mughal period. Despite the ruling order being Muslim, they prospered, like many other Bengali Hindus, as scribes or legal professionals. After the establishment of British rule, one member of the family, Harikishore Ray, entered the new landed gentry brought into being by the land reforms of the East India Company and adopted Kamadaranjan Ray, the five-year-old son of a cousin from the scribal branch of the family. The boy was given the new and aristocratic-sounding name of Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri (1863-1915).
Shuttled between two different social identities from childhood, the artistically gifted Upendrakishore embraced neither in full. At odds with the mainstream Hindu faith of his adoptive as well as biological families and not keen on living as a rural landowner or a scribe, in 1879 he N TIO FIC N- NO moved to Calcutta — then the capital of British India and the nearest thing to a world city in South Asia. Such a journey was only too common for aspirational young men of the colonial era but unlike most of them, Upendrakishore did not pursue a career in law, medicine, or the colonial bureaucracy. Although he graduated with a BA, he became an artisan and entrepreneur. Simultaneously, he converted to the Brahmo faith, a monotheistic variety of Hinduism that not only opposed idolatry and polytheism but also rejected the caste system, championed the education of women, propagated the virtues of reason and science, and sought to create a whole new ethos and politics that combined nationalism with a cosmopolitan and universalist outlook. Upendrakishore’s affiliation with this radical group was formalised when he married Bidhumukhi, the daughter of Dwarakanath Ganguli (18441898), a remarkable Brahmo crusader against traditional Hindu as well as modern colonial injustices.
Born into a conservative Brahmin family and milieu in a village near Dhaka (now the capital of Bangladesh), Dwarakanath Ganguli had received little formal education, but even when working as an itinerant schoolteacher in the villages of East Bengal, he had begun to publish a journal for and about women. Shocked by the consequences of polygamy — the highestranking Brahmins of the time (such as Dwarakanath himself) were encouraged to marry as many women as they could — he dedicated himself to fighting the custom through his journal. Predictably, Dwarakanath moved to Calcutta in 1870, converted to Brahmoism, and threw himself into diverse campaigns So here we go; it’s time to back up because YouTube superstars, The Sidemen, are finally here in book form and they’re dishing the dirt on each other as well as the YouTube universe. There’s nowhere to hide as the guys go in hard on their living habits, their football ability, and their dodgy clobber, while also talking Fifa, Vegas and superheroes. They’ll also give you their grand house tour, letting you in on a few secrets. for reform. He and his radical associates were the moving spirits behind two pioneering boarding schools for girls, where Dwarakanath himself did most of the teaching.
Girls’ schools had begun to emerge in mid- nineteenth- century Calcutta but even the best provided no more than elementary education, that too of the kind appropriate for future housewives. Dwarakanath, however, wanted his students to go to university; one of them, Kadambini Basu ( 1861- 1923), eventually became one of the first two women graduates of Calcutta University and, subsequently, one of the first women doctors in India. Just before commencing her medical studies, she married her mentor Dwarakanath Ganguli, who was nearly twenty years her senior and a widower with two children. Needless to say, traditionalists disapproved of the match — less predictably, many supposedly radical Brahmos were displeased too — but it turned out to be a happy and largely progressive match. Dwarakanath supported Kadambini in all her professional ambitions, including a voyage to England that involved leaving their young children with her mother.
Dwarakanath Ganguli’s reformism was not confined to the domestic sphere. Along with many of his Brahmo associates, he worked energetically to build up one of the earliest nationalist bodies in British India, the Indian Association. Founded in 1876, it predated the Indian National Congress by some ten years and, although it was heavily Bengali in its membership, it fought for political reforms which would have benefited all Indians. The Association, like all “moderate” nationalist bodies of the time, wanted India to remain within the British Empire but was sharply critical of the dayto-day government of British India and one of its primary objectives was to ensure that India was ruled mostly by Indians themselves. Today, the Indian Association is often regarded as little more than a bourgeois talking shop but at the time, it was regarded by many as a radical, pro-peasant, and anti-elite organisation. That image was exaggerated but not entirely fictitious. The Association’s support for land reforms and its campaign against the ill-treatment of indentured labourers in the tea plantations of Assam revealed the distinctiveness of its position. The latter campaign, in particular, is of the utmost importance for us, since it was led almost singlehandedly by Dwarakanath Ganguli. In an era when nationalists were preoccupied with opening up the hallowed portals of the Indian Civil Service for Indians, Dwarakanath’s grass-roots activism was unusually radical. Even though it failed to achieve immediate results, its revelation of “slavery in British dominion” embarrassed the Raj far more profoundly than any of the Indian Association’s more genteel “constitutional” campaigns.
Although immersed in the pursuit of art, music, tech- nology, and literature, and showing little overt interest in larger social or cultural questions, Upendrakishore Ray, too, was a reformer, albeit of a very different kind from his father-in-law. Musically inclined from childhood, Upendrakishore, whose conversion to Brahmoism had endangered his inheritance and income, first set up in business as a photographer — scarcely the kind of profession chosen by other young men from the landowning class. He did not even pursue conventional prosperity by photographing the rich and famous — a route taken by many Bengali photographers of the time in Calcutta — and gradually came to concentrate on the question of the printing of photographs. The print culture of nineteenthcentury Bengal was booming but as far as illustrations were concerned, all that Bengali periodicals and books could offer were woodcuts. Upendrakishore may well have sensed an untapped business opportunity here but he was also motivated by his disappointment with the quality of wood-engravings in his first book, a retelling of the Ramayana for children. Thus commenced his lifelong involvement with half-tone photography — a new technology to print photographs or paintings without robbing them of their tonality.
The production of half-tone blocks was a complicated business and the whole process was still new and incompletely understood even in the West. It is remarkable, then, that Upendrakishore mastered it only with the help of imported books and equipment, quickly becoming the premier block- maker for Calcutta’s leading illustrated periodicals.
Harikishore Ray, entered the new landed gentry brought into being by the land reforms of the East India Company and adopted Kamadaranjan Ray.
Excerpted with permission from Oxford University Press.