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Biography of Radhakant Deb
Name: Radhakant Deb
Birth Date: 1783
Death Date: 1867
Place of Birth: N/A
Nationality: Indian
Gender: Male
Occupations: nationalist, reformer
Radhakant Deb
Radhakant Deb (1783-1867) was a Bengali reformer and cultural nationalist who dedicated his life to the preservation of orthodox Hinduism.Historians have generally looked upon Radhakant Deb with disfavor, chiefly because he defended sati (suttee), the immolation of widows on funeral pyres of their dead husbands. Recent studies which focus on the psychology of Indian nationalism in opposition to British cultural imperialism have prompted a reevaluation of figures like Radhakant, Vivekananda, and Dayananda who, while ambivalent to forms of Westernization, were nevertheless modernizers of the Indian traditions.Radhakant was a member of the Calcutta Hindu elite, which owed both its wealth and social status to profitable relations with Europeans. In the sophisticated atmosphere of the metropolis, Radhakant learned Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bengali, and English.In 1816 Radhakant's father, Gopi Mohun Deb, contributed a large sum of money toward the establishment of Hindu College, the earliest institution of higher learning in Asia …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…articulate its position, it became modern India's first protonationalist movement. The founding of the Sabha proved to be the turning point in Radhakant's life, and for the next 30 years until his death, he increasingly sought ways and means of reconciling reformism with the demands of cultural nationalism. Further Reading Radhakant is briefly referred to in most surveys of modern Indian history, and there is abundant material on his activities in articles on the Calcutta School Society, the British Indian Association, and the history of printing in Bengal. An evaluation of Radhakant's role in the 19th-century Bengal renaissance is in David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835 (1969). See also Nemai Sadhan Bose, The Indian Awakening and Bengal (1960), and Ramesh C. Majumdar, Glimpses of Bengal in the Nineteenth Century (1960).Sengupta, Syamalendu, A conservative Hindu of colonial India: Raja Radhakant Deb and his milieu (1784-1867), New Delhi: Navrang, 1990.
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