The viewless winds are wandering!
Now o’er the flower-bells fair they creep
Waking sweet odours out of sleep;
Now stealing softly through the grass
That rustles as the breezes pass,
Just breathing such a gentle sigh
As love would live for ever by!”
With these lines have been captivated, nearly two centuries of scholars; lines that poured from the pen of one of modern India’s most endearing symbols of intellectualism, a poet ingenium cui sit, cui mens divinor, a rousing spirit of the Bengal Renaissance – Henry Louis Vivian Derozio.
The mere fact that two centuries after his birth, we come together to celebrate the life of this young poet, bears testimony to the impact that Derozio’s short yet eventful life had on intellectual awakening in 19th century Bengal. Derozio remains the guiding spirit of Presidency College, the forerunner of which was the Hindu College where Derozio taught, and planted the seeds of rational thought in the minds of his fellow countrymen.
From his nationalistic ideals to his Byron-inspired poetry, to the spark of rational thought that was to eventually lead to the fire of Renaissance, to his Voltairean views on religion, Derozio was certainly ahead of his times. His ideas were radical, coming as they were, in the stagnant social background of the early 19th century. If we are to sit down today by the Ganga, as Derozio did then, and contemplate on what he means to us in this age of mechanized packaged thought, his relevance would become conspicuous. His years at Hindu College were marked by a desire to propagate a love for knowledge, and devotion towards truth. In black pantaloons and wellington boots, a handsome turban on his head and Wood stock gloves on his hands, Derozio single-handedly went about the task of revolutionizing the education scenario. The spirit of questioning and a disdain of blind faith in dogma were some of Derozio’s most important lessons for the generations after him. No wonder that even today, Derozio and his inquisitive spirit are held in such high esteem in 86/1, College Street.
At this point, I’d like to relate to you a scientific experiment conducted on a group of 10 monkeys to study their behavior. I would sympathize with you if you thought that I was deviating from the topic at hand, but I beg you to bear with me. It so happened that five monkeys were trapped in a cage. This cage had a ladder, on top of which a bunch of bananas were placed. Initially, each of the monkeys tried to climb up the ladder to lay hands on the fruit. Alas! They would not even place a foot on the ladder, that the other monkeys would be drenched in a rain of water poured from outside. They so disapproved of getting wet that they decided to keep a lookout on their companions, lest any of them try to climb up the ladder. Soon, they reached an understanding that the ladder was out of bounds.
This was where one of the monkeys was replaced. Immediately, the new monkey tried to climb up the ladder! But only to find himself dragged back down and beaten up. It did not take him much time to realize that the ladder was taboo. Soon after, another monkey was replaced, and he too followed the script of committing the monkey version of the “original sin”! It goes without mentioning that he was furiously bashed up. The only catch lay in the fact that out of the four beating him up, one did not know why he was doing it! For he had never been drenched in water the way the others had.
The replacements continued till none of the original five monkeys were in the cage. The situation now was something like this: There were five monkeys who did not allow the others to climb up the ladder, but had no idea why. It had become an accepted rule that not going up the stairs was “the way things worked here”, the all-pervading “truth”, parallels of which you can find all around you.
Getting back to the point, what this narrative brings to light is the extent to which dogma can influence monkey psychology and make them behave like a mob. There are parallels to this tale that we can find in human society all around us. As such, the rationalist ideals that Derozio stood for become so very relevant in our quest for intellectual enlightenment.
The contemporary world is replete with instances of the unquestioning monkeys. No wonder that with advances in communication technology, we have witnessed advances in mob culture prevailing in societies across the globe. Add to that the fact that intolerance has become the dogmatic reality of the 21st century, we boil down to a potent and dangerous mix of indoctrinated bigotry, that threatens the advancement of rational thought at the pace of technology itself.
Derozio, were he to be living today, would have been two centuries and a year old. And an indignant old man he would have been too. In an age of user manuals, Derozio would have cut a sorry figure indeed. But we do need another Derozio. Or at least we need the spirit of Derozio resting stagnant within us all, to rise and lead us back on a path of rational awakening. What we need today is a second Renaissance! To lift us out of our material existence, to ignite the spark of intellectual questioning, to make us objectively and subjectively aware of the realities of the world around us.
Once more, my harp, another strain,
And then – adieu to song and thee –
I will not wake thy notes again, –
‘Tis time thou should’st forgotten be.
carvaan 