While he was alive, Romesh Chunder Dutt—one of the earliest Indians to qualify for the Indian Civil Service—was derided by a British ICS officer for oscillating between “adulation” (for colonial rule) and “sedition”. Even today, a hundred years after Dutt’s death, it is a serious allegation to level at one who excelled as an administrator, and post-retirement as a political agitator, whose lasting legacy is a corpus of works ranging from India’s economic and cultural history to Bengali historical novels to translations of Sanskrit texts. That versatile breadth, representative of the Bengal Renaissance, is what academic, critic and Sahitya Akademi winner Meenakshi Mukherjee had sought to locate in An Indian For All Seasons: The Many Lives of R.C. Dutt. Unfortunately, Mukherjee passed away a day before the book’s Delhi launch.

The book begins with Dutt, 20, running away to England to take the ICS exam, along with Surendranath Banerjea and Bihari Lal Gupta, leaving behind his wife and two infant daughters. Mukherjee underscores this event, for this daring endeavour would be feverishly followed by Indian newspapers, while their subsequent success would bring national adulation. Induction into the “Heaven-Born” service would set the tone for Dutt’s life and work: critiquing exploitative British economic policies while arguing for greater administrative representation for Indians.

Dutt, energised by Gladstonian liberalism, suffered the same disillusionment as many of his contemporaries when faced with the chasm between British idealism and colonial policy. He did not shy away from voicing his misgivings, recording the abject outcome of Permanent Settlement in The Peasantry of Bengal (1874). The ideas enumerated here would form the core of the Open Letters to Lord Curzon (1900) and the seminal Economic History of India: Volume I & and II (1902 & 1904). However, his volte face on Permanent Settlement in the Letters, betraying sympathy for Bengal’s landowners, would incite charges of duplicity and dishonesty. Similarly, the exhaustive data and analysis of Economic History would be marred by its cautious ending, where keeping with the philosophy of the Moderates (he was Congress president in 1899), Dutt demands administrative adjustments rather than a complete rejection of foreign rule.

... contd.