Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane

By BRIAN A. HATCHER. Calcutta: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xx + 307, maps, plates, tables. $29.95.

This volume, a revised version of a doctoral dissertation at Harvard,

illumines the world view of the complex figure of Igvarcandra Bandyopadhyay (1820-91), better known by the title Vidyasagar, "Ocean of Learning," conferred upon him by his teachers at Calcutta's Sanskrit College. Rather than perpetuating a tendency to view nineteenth-century Bengali reformminded intellectuals as hybrids of tradition and modernity and of Indian and Western ideas, Hatcher considers Vidyasagar as a triveni, a confluent of three streams of thought: Sanskritic culture, Western ideas, and "the cultural ethos and vernacular discourse of colonial Bengal" (p. 2). Vidyasagar, a kulin ("perigreed") brahman educated in an institution founded by the British to train pandit assistants to the courts and later employed by the British as a teacher of their own civil servants at Fort William College and of Bengali youth at his alma mater, of which he became the first Principal, negotiated an identity as a Bengali Sanskrit pandit imbued with nineteenth-century Western ideals of moral and social improvement. These trends merged in a concern for the improvement of Bengali education and society, to which, resigning government service at age thirty-eight, he devoted the remainder of his life. Among the strengths of Hatcher's study of this committed, yet enigmatic figure who declined to express himself on the issue of faith, are its vast documentation, particularly from Bengali-language sources, its familiarity with Bengali culture, and its sensitivity to the fluidity of intellectual and social stances.

Part 1 assembles the makings of Vidyasagar's world view. Along with an account of his early years, which does not always escape the hagiographical tone of its Bengali sources, Hatcher deconstructs the mix of attitudes: Cosmopolitan Orientalist (Jones), Evangelical Vernacularist (Carey), Improving Orientalist (Wilson), Improving Anglicist (Roy), and more, which were operative in Vidyasagar's milieu. For all the cumbersomeness of these labels, this is a useful and convincing way of constructing Vidyasagar's position as that of an Improving Vernacularist.

Parts 2 and 3 outline the two concepts which Hatcher identifies as central to Vidyasagar's world view: yatna, translated as "devoted...