Page:Ramtanu Lahiri, Brahman and Reformer - A History of the Renaissance in Bengal.djvu/177

 another sphere of work. And this desire ripened into a resolution when, on the death of his first-born child, the neighbours cast in his wife’s teeth that, in taking away his son, the gods had punished the father for the sin of beefeating. He applied for a transfer, and was appointed headmaster of the Burdwan School in April 1851, on a salary of 150 rupees a month.

While Krishnagar was full of the agitations described above, measures were being taken in Calcutta by reformers to promote female education. Mr Drinkwater Bethune, President of the Education Council, and legal member, of the Governor-General’s Council, with the assistance of Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagara and Madan Mohan Tarkalankar, and with the approval of the Indian gentlemen of Calcutta educated in English, founded, on the 7th of May 1849, girls’ school, now raised to a college, which still bears his name. Hare had been the friend of boys, Bethune was the friend of girls. When he visited the school — and this he did every day — he brought presents for the pupils. He often invited them to his house and gave them toys, sweetmeats, and valuable articles of dress. He was fond of frolics too, and sometimes, imitating a high-mettled horse, he trotted about with a Bengali girl, transformed into a Miss Sahib, on his back.

But the foundation of Bethune’s School was not the first move towards female education. Similar endeavours had been made long before. As early as 1817 the School Society took up the question, and at the suggestion of Radhakanta Deb succeeded in getting the doors of its patshalas opened to boys and girls alike. This plan, after two years, appeared faulty to some of the members of the society, and the discussions on the point attracted, in 1819, attention of a Baptist missionary, who made an appeal to the public on the lamentable ignorance