Ramananda Chatterjee

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This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content.

Modern Review

Dileep Padgaonkar, talking terms - Editor Par Excellence, Sep 17 2016 : The Times of India

How Ramananda Chatterjee's journal Modern Review influenced public opinion across undivided India

2016 marks the 150th birth anniversary of Ramananda Chatterjee. His name does not ring a bell outside the narrow circle of historians of our freedom movement. He deserves to be better known, especially by those active in the media today, because he laid the foundations of modern Indian journalism.Few publications, if any , commanded as much respect and influence on opinion and decision makers across undivided India as the two journals he founded and edited during the first four decades of the 20th century: The Modern Review (in English) and Prabasi (in Bengali).

Both journals welcomed in their pages contributors who held diverse, even divergent, views on issues related to India's past, present and future trajectory .The editor himself was an ardent nationalist and liberal. And though he laid store by facts and figures to make his case in his own articles, he could never, as a nationalist, be detached about British rule in India. He considered it his mission to deprive it of all moral justification.

His liberalism was obvious from the wide range of topics ­ politics and the economy , social reform and new tendencies in the arts and literature ­ both journals covered. Such was their reputation that new talent, much like well-known personalities, considered it a great honour to appear in them.The contributors to the review included, among many others, such names as Rabindranath Tagore (at a time when he was being abused by Bengali chauvinists), Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, M K Gandhi, C F Andrews, Verrier Elwin, Premchand, Romain Rolland, Lala Lajpat Rai, Sister Nivedita and Jadunath Sarkar.

Samples of their writings have recently been published in a volume `Patriots, Poets and Prisoners' put together by Ramananda Chatterjee's descendants ­ Anikendra Sen, Devanghshu Datta and Nilanjana S Roy ­ with a lucid introduction by Ramchandra Guha. But for an illuminating account of his life and work one can do no better than turn to Thy Hand! Great Anarch, the second volume of the autobiography of Nirad C Chaudhuri.

Nirad Chaudhuri, who served as an assistant editor of the Modern Review, noted with great admiration how Ramananda Chatterjee, born in a poor Brahmin family in westernmost Bengal, made his way in the world on the sheer strength of his intellectual abilities and personal integrity. But there were times when the editor's views on some matters befuddled his assistant. One such subject was Ramananda-babu's unwavering advocacy of women's education and indeed of women's liberation as he conceived it.

In regard to women, writes Chaudhuri, the editor had a fixed dogma: that a woman could do no wrong even for political reasons. And this even after two Bengali girls shot dead the English district magistrate of Comilla at the height of the civil disobedience movement. Moreover, he insisted on publishing the educational or professional achievements of all Indian women in his two magazines, with the photographs of the heroines. For Chaudhuri this was a `sore trial' because, in his eyes, most of the women, young or elderly , were plain and at times even ugly. He described this fad as the editor's `sublimated debauchery'.

However, it is precisely Ramananda Chatterjee's relentless espousal of progressive causes with a steady moral compass to guide him that accounts for the rich legacy he bequeathed to later generations of journalists. His was no narrow nationalism. He bore not the slightest taint of caste or communal prejudice. He was wholly committed to democracy and to an equitable social and economic order. He cultivated an extraordinarily wide range of interests and shared them with his readers. Not the least was his heightened sense of humility and his lively sense of humour.

Ramananda babu, as Nirad Chaudhuri noted, “had the typical venerable bearded appearance of the Brahmo of the late 19th century , who, it might be added, looked in their Bengali dress very much like St Peter as represented in Renaissance painting“. He was once mistaken for Tagore when he was watching a session of the General Assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva. The editor is said to have responded to this case of mistaken identity with a bemused smile and a chuckle. He told the nation what it needed to know ­ not merely what it wanted to know.

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