Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar rewrote the Bengali alphabet primer, got widow remarriage legalised, and walked out of every institution that would not do what he wanted. He came from a poor Brahmin family and is said to have learned his numbers from milestones on the road walking to Calcutta; he took the title Vidyasagar, ocean of learning, from the Sanskrit College where he later became principal. Barnaparichay, his two-part primer, standardised written Bengali prose and is still the book Bengali children begin with. He opened the Sanskrit College to non-Brahmin students against the whole weight of its own faculty. His campaign for widow remarriage was fought on the orthodox party's own ground, quoting the Parashara Samhita to argue that the texts permitted what custom forbade, and the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act passed in 1856; he then spent his own money arranging and funding marriages, including his son's to a widow, and was largely ruined by it. He fought polygamy and child marriage with less success. He resigned his posts repeatedly rather than accept interference, and spent his last years among Santal villagers running a free school and dispensary. He is credited with fixing the modern shape of the Bengali script by dropping and reordering letters, and Barnaparichay has been continuously in print since 1855. The Vidyasagar Setu over the Hooghly and Vidyasagar University are named for him. His son Narayan married a widow at his urging and Vidyasagar bore the whole social cost publicly. Rabindranath Tagore wrote that he was one of the few Bengalis who was a complete man. He fell out with his own family late in life and lived apart from them. Statues of him were beheaded in a Kolkata riot in 2019, which says something about what he still stands for.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history