Index talk:Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar, a story of his life and work.djvu

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Biographies of Vidyasagar
From Vidyasagar: The Life and After-life of an Eminent Indian by Brian Allison Hatcher (2014)

First biographical sketch of Vidyasagar was by Ramgati Nyayaratna, in Bengali, tucked away within his survey of the Bengali literature (1872). Ramgati was a Brahmin scholar who had been Vidyasagar's student at the Sanskrit College. His sketch set the style of subsequent biographies. Ramgati's biography was a literal one, his goal was to cast Vidyasagar as the progenitor of the modern Bengali prose; and subsequent biographies remained focused on Vidyasagar's role as author and prose stylist. Ramgati also set the precedent for treating Vidyasagar's life as a rags-to-riches story. The tri-thematic biographical template established by Ramgati, about Vidyasagar's interventions in shiksha (education), sahitya (literature) and samaj (society), came handy for later works.

Then came the four major biographies, that date from the period immediately after Vidyasagar's death in 1891. These four have been instrumental for the latter-day understanding of this remarkable intellectual, whom Tagore and Gandhi used to look up to. The first three were in Bengali, by Shambhu Chandra Vidyaratna (Vidyasagar's younger brother), Biharilal Sarkar (a conservative critic) and Chandi Charan Bandyopadhyay (a Vidyasagar acolyte). Both Biharilal and Chandi Charan drew from Shambhu Chandra's text. Biharilal's text had an immense role in latter-day understandings of Vidyasagar, as it was largely replicated in the 1902 English biography by Subal Chandra Mitra. While not the earliest biography in English, it was Subal Chandra's biography that helped popularise Vidyasagar's life well beyond Bengal, and the source probably used by Gandhi for his 1905 sketch of Vidyasagar's life and character in the Indian Opinion.