Page:Ramtanu Lahiri, Brahman and Reformer - A History of the Renaissance in Bengal.djvu/19



I came out to India in 1868, as a young Professor in the Bengal Education Service straight from Oxford, one of the earliest friendships I formed on joining the Krishnagar College was that of the revered Ramtanu Lahiri, a gentleman of high Kulin Brahman birth, whose saintly life and lofty patriotism had already marked him out as a leader of men in the cultured Bengali society of Calcutta and Krishnagar. From that date until his lamented death thirty years later in 1898, I had the privilege of retaining his warm and sincere friendship — a friendship reciprocated on my part with the deep reverence which was felt for him by every one who knew him well. Outside Bengal, he was never so well known as his predecessor, the Raja Rammohan Roy, nor as his successor, Keshava Chandra Sen (Kishub Chander Sen); though his character and his teaching had very much in common with those two great men, his gentle, unassuming temperament always prevented him from taking so prominent a part in public affairs as they were able rightfully to assume. But I am inclined to think that his influence, in bringing out all that was best in the minds and hearts of the young Bengal of his day, was not inferior to theirs. And, however that may be, I am confident that a very large number of Bengali scholars and thinkers of the elder generation would gladly acknowledge that they drew from his teaching and example many of the best lessons of their lives. That example and that teaching seemed to me to possess this especial value, that while he stood up for everything that is good and true in national life as valiantly as any of the roughest and rudest of Radical reformers, his conception of “the gentle life,” the same for Bengalis as for Englishmen, was full of “the milk of human kindness,” and led him to take the truly Conservative line of reform without wanton destruction, and of criticism without rudeness or vulgarity. xi