Ramtanu Lahiri, Brahman and Reformer/Appendix 3

Ramtanu Lahiri had, as the narrative of his life shows us, a mind so liberal, so tolerant, and so many-sided, that there was probably no Indian gentleman of his time who numbered among his intimate friends so many Englishmen. As we have given, in Appendix II., a brief account of the lives of some of his chief Indian friends, we now proceed to give a few notes on the English gentlemen who completed the circle of his friends and admirers.

We have shown in the text how great was the debt of Ramtanu, as a boy, to the kindness, and the wise insight into character, of the great pioneer of English education in Bengal, David Hare.

This philanthropist was born in Scotland, in 1775. He came to India in 1800, as a watchmaker, and a great friendship grew up between him and Rammohan Roy after the latter had settled in Calcutta. We have already in this work dwelt on his efforts to give young Bengalis a sound and thorough education in English, and the gentle and affectionate way in which he carried on this work, so we need not recur to those points here. The whole of his life spent in India he devoted to the promotion of the welfare of the people of the country. We have mentioned in the body of the book every public movement in Calcutta in which he took part, and the good offices he did to all, especially to the young; and all that now remains for us is to take the reader to the last scene of his useful life.

He, as the reader has already been told, was seized with ​cholera at one o'clock in the morning of 31st May 1842. Even in the incipient stage of the disease he guessed that its effects would be fatal; and so told his bearer to ask Mr Grey to have his coffin ready. His old pupil, Prasanna Kumar Mitra, then a qualified doctor, attended him, and did all in his power to check the course of the disease; but all his attempts were futile. On the second day Mr Hare asked Prasanna not to increase his sufferings by further application of blisters. The few remaining hours of his life he passed peacefully, and breathed his last on the 1st of June, before nightfall.

Sir Frederick Halliday, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and one of the greatest men in India during the period covered by this Biography, was a firm friend and patron of Mr Lahiri during the whole of his career. The events of his life are too well-known to demand any recapitulation in this place. His official life in India lasted from 1825 to 1859; and he took a leading part in such great historical events as the suppression of the great Mutiny, in the creation of the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal, in the suppression of the Santal Rebellion, in the introduction of the education policy founded on the famous Despatch of 1854, in the early formation of the railway system of Bengal and Upper India, and in various great reforms in rent and revenue legislation. He was a member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India from 1868 to 1886; and died on 22nd October 1901.

This famous Indian administrator, who throughout took a warm interest in the various reforms associated with the name of Ramtanu Lahiri, was more closely connected with the Government of Bengal than almost any other civil servant. He served ​under Sir Frederick Halliday in the suppression of the Santal Rebellion in 1855, and was Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal for many years. He went to Burma in 1871, and during his absence from Bengal also acted, in 1875, as a member of the Supreme Council of India. From 1877 to 1882 he was the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and attained signal success in that capacity. On his retirement, in 1882, he was appointed to the Council of the Secretary of State in London—where he died in 1887.

It is interesting to note that all the Indian officials most closely associated with the history of the district of Nadia and the city of Krishnagar during the lifetime of Ramtanu Lahiri—including, among many others, Sir Augustus Rivers Thompson, Sir William James Herschel, baronet, Sir Charles Cecil Stevens, Sir Roper Lethbridge, Professor S. Lobb, and Mr William Benjamin Oldham were each and all numbered among Mr Lahiri’s intimate friends. Sir Rivers Thompson, who was the great-grandson of Warren Hastings, and in boyhood a renowned Eton "Blue," was the Collector and Magistrate of Nadia during the early period of Ramtanu’s retirement, and the friendship then formed lasted through life. In 1882 Sir Rivers became Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal; and was often known to take counsel with Mr Lahiri during the troubled times of his rule. He retired in 1887, and died at Gibraltar in 1890.

Sir William Herschel, who was a member of the Bengal Civil Service from 1853 to 1878, and is now living in retirement at Oxford, was the Judge of Nadia, and remarkably popular at Krishnagar at the time when Ramtanu was resident for the last time in that district. Mr Lahiri, to the last day of his life, spoke with warm affection and respect of the encouragement he had ​derived from the friendship and support of this distinguished man.

Hardly any other official of the renaissance period in Bengal was more closely associated than Sir John Phear, at that time a Puisne Judge of the High Court of Calcutta, with every movement of reform; and it was in this way that, during Mr Lahiri’s residence in Calcutta towards the close of his life, a warm friendship sprang up between these two noble-minded men. Sir John, after serving for some years as Chief Justice of Ceylon, retired to England, in 1879, and lived at Exmouth, in Devonshire, until his death, in 1905. On the sad occasion of the death of Ramtanu, in 1898, Sir John Phear wrote from Exmouth in the following appreciative terms to Mr Sharat Kumar Lahiri:

“I had seen an announcement of your father’s death in a newspaper before your letter reached me, and I felt that I had sustained a great personal loss. I valued Babu Ramtanu’s friendship very highly and held him in sincere esteem. Permit me to assure you that I sympathise deeply with you and your relatives in your sorrow. Time is sadly shortening the list of old friends remaining to me in India, but they will ever live in my memory.”

Sir William Hunter, the most widely read and most picturesque Anglo-Indian writer of modern times, during the time that he was editing The Imperial Gazetteer of India, was an intimate friend of Ramtanu Lahiri. In a letter written on the occasion of the death of the latter, in 1898, Sir William wrote thus of the loss sustained by Bengal and India:

“I take the opportunity of expressing my sympathy in the death of the late Babu Ramtanu Lahiri. His decease must have ​left a sad blank, and I beg to assure Mr S. K. Lahiri that I share his sorrow for the loss of his respected father."

Sir Charles Stevens, some time acting as Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and now living in retirement in London, was one of those Krishnagar notabilities of whose friendship and help Mr Lahiri always spoke in warm terms of gratitude. During the time that Sir Charles was the Collector and Magistrate of Nadia, and afterwards, when he was successively Chief Secretary to the Government of Bengal, member of the Bengal Board of Revenue, additional member of the Governor-General's Council, and, finally, officiating Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal there were many occasions when he was able to show his sympathy for Ramtanu's earnestness in the cause of reform. Shortly before the death of the latter Sir Charles thus wrote of him from Belvedere:

"It is many years since I had any intercourse with him, but I used to know him when I was in Nadia. He was distinguished in those days for having had the courage of his opinion and for a degree of enlightenment surpassing all but a few of his countrymen."

And similarly, on the occasion of Mr Lahiri's death, Mr Sharat Kumar Lahiri received from Sir Charles Stevens a most sympathetic letter of condolence, which contained the following striking appreciation of the reformer's work, which is particularly weighty as coming from an authority more competent to speak on the subject than almost any other:—

"Whenever the history of social reform in Bengal is adequately written your father's name will have an honourable and conspicuous place in it. He was a reformer in days when reform was novel and unfashionable, and to preach it, and still more to practise it, involved serious sacrifices. The social progress of later years must have been most satisfactory to him, as both justifying and rewarding his efForts."

All that need be said of the warm friendship and deep respect felt for Mr Lahiri by the editor of this Biography has already been said in the Introduction.

Like so many other English friends of Mr Lahiri, Sir Henry Cotton was first known to him when serving in the Nadia district. Throughout the whole of a distinguished official career, Sir Henry's interest in the veteran reformer never flagged. At the time of Ramtanu's death Sir Henry Cotton was Chief Commissioner of Assam; and he thus wrote to Mr Sharat Kumar Lahiri from Shillong:

"Your father died in the fulness of years and was, I believe, the last of a generation who profoundly influenced modern thought in Bengal more than sixty years ago. Probably there is now no man alive who was personally associated with Derozio and David Hare. It is a pleasure to me to remember that I met your father on several occasions and to recall the kindly manner in which he would speak to me of bygone days. Babu Ramtanu Lahiri led a blameless life, and his exemplary character remains as a guide and beacon to your countrymen at the present time. I offer you my sincere condolence in your loss."

Mr Oldham, another valued friend of Ramtanu Lahiri, was at one time an official in Nadia, and was a member of the Bengal Board of Revenue in 1900.

Sir James Westland, who was Finance Minister of India from 1893 to 1899, thus wrote of Mr Lahiri on the occasion of his death, in 1898:

​“Before receipt of your letter I had seen a newspaper notice of the death of your venerable father, Babu Ramtanu Lahiri, and it recalled to my mind the occasion on which I first made his acquaintance—namely, the marriage of his daughter at Krishnagar, somewhere about 1867, at which I was present. Babu Ramtanu Lahiri was even then a man advanced in years, and he was one for whom I entertained a great respect, in common with many others of my friends at that station.

“I feel it an honour that his family should so far have remembered the past days of my acquaintance with him as to invite me to the memorial service, and I would certainly have been present had I been in Calcutta. I shall be much obliged by your communicating to the deceased gentleman’s family my sympathy with them in the loss they have sustained.”

Among the English sympathisers with Ramtanu Lahiri in his work of reform in Bengal, the names of these gentlemen ought to be included.