- Lived:
- 26 September 1820, Birsingha village, Midnapore district, Bengal → Calcutta (Kolkata), with his last two decades spent increasingly at Karmatar, in the Santal country of present-day Jharkhand; died Calcutta, 29 July 1891
- Field:
- Sanskrit scholarship, education, social reform — principal of Sanskrit College, architect of the Bengali primer, and leader of the widow-remarriage campaign
- The Big Idea:
- If society quotes scripture to justify cruelty, out-read it. Vidyāsāgar beat the orthodoxy at its own texts to make widow remarriage legal in 1856 — and taught all of Bengal to read while he was at it.
- In their words:
- "I consider the inauguration of widow marriage into Hindu society the most virtuous deed of my life." (letter to his brother, 1870, defending his own son's marriage to a widow; translated in Subal Chandra Mitra's 1902 biography)
- If you remember one thing:
- The gentlest Bengali of his century was also the hardest to move: a pandit in a plain shawl and slippers who forced open the Sanskrit college to lower castes, forced widow remarriage into law, gave away nearly everything he earned, lost his biggest campaign, and walked away from Calcutta to run a free clinic among the Santals.