Today is the birthday of Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee(1864-1924),the legendary Tiger of Bengal. In pre-independence India,on his initiative,the modern education system spread-ed all through the sub-continent,from Burma(Myanmar i.e) to Peshawar. A man with great personality,high self esteem,academic integrity and a general intransigent attitude towards Britishers,he was the person who revolutionasied the Indian education system. Perhaps the most emphatic figure of Indian education, he was a man of great personality, high self-respect, courage and towering administrative ability. He became the first student to be awarded a dual degree (MA in Mathematics and Physics) from Calcutta University and received the prestigious Premchand-Roychand scholarship. Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee was responsible for the foundation of the Bengal Technical Institute in 1906 and the College of Science of the Calcutta University in 1914. The Calcutta Mathematical Society was also founded by Mukherjee in 1908 and he served as the president of the Society from 1908 to 1923.[1][2] He was also the president of the inaugural session of the Indian Science Congress in 1914. The Asutosh College was also founded under his stewardship in 1916, when he was Vice-chancellor of University of Calcutta. Ashutosh Mukherjee had a vision of the kind of education he wanted young people to have, and he had the acumen and courage to extract it from his colonial masters. He set up several new academic graduate programs at the Calcutta University: Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Applied Psychology, Industrial Chemistry, Ancient Indian History and Culture, Islamic culture. He also made arrangements for postgraduate teaching and research in Bengali, Hindi, Pali and Sanskrit. Scholars from all over India, irrespective of race, religion, caste, and gender, came to study and teach there. He even persuaded European scholars to teach at his university. He was one of the first persons to recognize the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan and Md.Shahidullah and patronised these 2 great scholars to climb the peak of excellence. Curzons education mission in 1902 identified the universities including the Calcutta University, as centres of sedition where young people formed networks of resistance to colonial domination.[4] The cause of this was thought to be the unwise granting of autonomy to these universities in the nineteenth century. Thus in the period of 1905 to 1935, the colonial administration tried to reinstate government control of education. In 1923, Mukherjee refused the post of Vice Chancellor when Lord Lytton tried to impose conditions on his reappointment. Mukherjee was a member of the 1917-1919 Sadler Commission, presided over by Michael Ernest Sadler, which inquired into the state of Indian education. He was thrice elected as the president of The Asiatic Society. In 1910, he was appointed the President of the Imperial (now National) Library Council to which he donated his personal collection of 80,000 books which are arranged in a separate section. He was the president of the inaugural session of the Indian Science Congress in 1914. He was a polyglot learned in Pali, French and Russian, and was awarded the titles of Saraswati and Shastravachaspati by the pundits of Bengal for his service to Indian education. Mukherjee was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Star of India (CSI) in June 1909[5] and knighted[6] in December 1911. The epitaph beneath his marble bust at the Ashutosh Museum of Arts at the University of Calcutta reads: “ His noblest achievement, surest of them all/ A place for his mother tongue --- in step mothers hall. ”
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 01:47:03 +0000
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