- Lived:
- 26 June 1838, Kanthalpara village near Naihati, Bengal → thirty-three years of postings as a deputy magistrate in district towns across Bengal → died Calcutta (Kolkata), 8 April 1894
- Field:
- literature — the first great Indian novelist, founding editor of Baṅgadarśan, India's first serious literary critic, and author of the hymn Vande Mātaram
- The Big Idea:
- A magistrate in the empire's own service invented the modern Indian novel in Bengali — and buried inside one of those novels a hymn to the motherland that outgrew the book, the author, and eventually the empire itself.
- In their words:
- "Mother, I bow to thee! Rich with thy hurrying streams, bright with thy orchard gleams, cool with thy winds of delight…" (the opening of Vande Mātaram, in Sri Aurobindo's 1909 translation)
- If you remember one thing:
- The British government's own officer wrote the song the British government would later jail Indians for singing — and the song's afterlife, adopted, truncated, contested, and argued over to this day, is the history of India arguing with itself about what the nation is.