Page:Ramtanu Lahiri, Brahman and Reformer - A History of the Renaissance in Bengal.djvu/117

 club, and we shall give a description of its work in the next chapter. It was at this time that some pf the senior students of the Hindu College started The Athenaeum, a journal in which they mercilessly attacked the orthodox institutions of Hinduism. One of the students, Madhab Chandra Mullick, once wrote thus of the religion of his forefathers: “If there is anything that we hate from the bottom of our hearts, it is Hinduism.”

This Madhab Chandra Mullick in time became a deputy-collector; and Kartik Chandra Roy thus writes of him in his Memoirs: “Madhab Chandra Mullick, one of the alumni of the Hindu College, and friend of Ramtanu Babu, was Deputy-Collector of Nadia. He was, when here, very kind to us, and we respected him much. He did much ;h to improve Sriprasad’s school, and to carry out our schemes of social reform.”

There is another passage in Kartik Babu’s Autobiography which runs thus: “That wine is an abomination, and that drinking it is a great sin, has been the belief of this country, but we cannot but condemn this belief as erroneous. Can the practice, so common among the most intelligent and civilised nations of the world, be anything but highly salutary, and therefore commendable? How shall we Indians be civilised, and how will our country be free from the tyrannical sway of error and superstition, if we abstain from wine? The alumni of the Hindu College, who set themselves up as reformers, all drank. When one of them, Babu Madhab Chandra Mullick, was here, we now and then went to his house of an evening and drank each a glass or two of the best liquor.”

Ramtanu, as said above, was admitted into the fourth class of the Hindu College. He studied with so much success that he was soon known as one of the cleverest boys. In time he reached the first class; and having read