Read carefully the passage given below and write your answers to the questions that follow in clear, correct and concise language : 15x5=75 marks
The thought of Young Bengal (Peary Chand Mitra, one of the circle, called it in 1877 'Young Calcutta') flowed through the fourth decade of the 19th century, arising in the late twenties and ebbing away after the mid-forties. Its inspirer was Derozio (1809-31), competent scholar, gifted writer, radical thinker, and the most famous of our teachers in the new education. It will be unusual to link with Young Bengal a second name, that of David Hare (1775-1841) who seems so different from Derozio in so many ways. Hare was indeed no professional instructor or intellectual, no man of letters or of academic learning. He had neither the brilliance nor the waywardness of his contemporary; unlike him he had become in diet and habits almost a half-Hindu. Yet between the two may be detected an underlying resemblance which furnishes a key to a proper estimation of Young Bengal.
Common to both was the passionate conviction that for India nothing was more essential than "a dissemination of European learning and science among her people." Both encouraged freedom of thinking and discussion and inspired a courage and personal integrity in their followers to throw off the fetters of that antiquated bigotry which still clung to their countrymen. And unlike other leaders around them, both were 'godless' secularists with little faith in denominations or religious instruction, and yet staunch idealists. Nor can one forget that in the hour of trial Hare tried to stand by Derozio and his maligned pupils about whom he declared - "your countrymen look upon you as - their reformers and instructors"; while the Derozians were the first to honour Hare publicly, and after his death they were in the forefront in the endeavour to perpetuate his memory, in the unique First of June anniversaries for 25 years without a break.
Henry Louis Vivian Derozio was a Calcutta Eurasian of Portuguese-Indian ancestry, the son of an officer in an English mercantile firm. (In the Hindu College Records of 1831, the name is occasionally spelt as De Rozio; Max Muller wrote D. Rozario). He was educated in one of the pioneer English-teaching private schools of the early 19th century, run by the Scotsman Drummond in the Dharmatala area. Drummond was a scholar-poet, and as a notorious free-thinker an exile from his native land. It may safely be conjectured that Derozio derived from Drummond his taste in literature and philosophy, his love of Burns, his faith in the French Revolution and English Radicalism.
Derozio's youthful critique on Kant was considered as something which "would not disgrace even gifted philosophers"; his translation of a French essay on Moral Philosophy was printed posthumously. The fame already won secured him an appointment as teacher to the senior classes in the Hindu College before he had ended his "teens".
Derozio's personality brought "a new era in the annals of the College", the youthful teacher drawing the senior boys like a magnet round him. According to his biographer "neither before, nor since his day has any teacher, within the walls of any native educational establishment in India, ever exercised such an influence over his pupils." Not alone in the classrooms, but outside the hours as well, he strove with success "to broaden and deepen the knowledge of his pupils" in Western thought and literature, the new fountain which emancipated and intoxicated. The College students clustered round him and very many of them carried down to their last days the deep impress stamped on them by their Master. This was the cementing link which held together the Young Bengal group, the memory which made a close-knit fellowship of affection and friendship even in later life.
Unlike most teachers, Derozio encouraged his students to debate freely and question authority. He urged them to think for themselves, "to be in no way influenced by any of the idols mentioned by Bacon — to live and die for truth." One of his pupils, Radhanath Sikdar, said of him : "he has been the cause and the sole cause of that spirit of enquiry after truth, and that contempt of vice — which cannot but be beneficial to India." Another, Ramgopal Ghosh, held up the motto: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool, and he who does not is a slave."