Page:Tales of Bengal (Sita and Santa Chattopadhyay).djvu/13



two sisters from whose work a selection is now translated and offered to the English-reading public are daughters of Babu Ramananda Chatterjee, the well-known publicist. He edits Prabasi, a Bengali monthly, and The Modern Review, an English one. Both are very influential, the latter being the most widely read of all Indian monthlies. This influence has come to him after a long struggle, in which he has shown uncompromising independence. Sprung from a family of Sanskrit professors and priests, his own generation, his cousins and brothers, first broke through their tradition of aloofness, and learned English. Ramananda Babu himself discarded the brahminical thread more than thirty years ago, when he joined the Brahmo Samaj. For many years he was a College professor, first in Calcutta, then in Allahabad. But he was restive under the educational system of Indian universities and his relations with governing bodies were often strained. He has continued to have strained relations with all governing bodies. Calcutta University has found in him a sleepless critic, who has been largely responsible for the public's loss of confidence in that learned body. Nor can Government have faced any more watchful foe. Without any of the elaborate machinery for collecting news which our great Western journals have at their disposal, he has managed, year after year, to gather in, month by month, often from the most inaccessible sources, items which have served him in his warfare. One never knows what is going to find its way next into the pages of The Modern Review. Yet he cannot be dismissed as an extremist. He has the cross-bench type of mind; and, if the political party that is in the ascendency today in India should win their aims, it is hard to see how they could use Ramananda Chatterjee. But whether they used him or not, he would remain a force to be reckoned with—the most resourceful, the most unresting of critics. Englishmen must have often found him bitter and unfair, but I for one have been compelled,