Romesh Chunder Dutt

Early life and education

Dutt was born into a distinguished Bengali Kayastha family well known for its members' literary and academic achievements. His parents were Thakamani and Isam Chunder Dutt, a Deputy Collector in Bengal, whom Romesh often accompanied on official duties. He was educated in various Bengali District schools, then at Hare School, Calcutta. After his father's untimely death in a boat accident in eastern Bengal, his uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, an accomplished writer, became his guardian in 1861. He commenting on his uncle, wrote, "He used to sit at night with us and our favorite study used to be pieces from the works of the English poets." He was a relative of Toru Dutt, one of nineteenth century Bengal's most prominent poets.

He entered the University of Calcutta, Presidency College in 1864. He passed the First Arts examination in 1866, ranking second in order of merit and won a scholarship. While still a student in the B.A. class, without his family's permission, he and two other friends, Behari Lal Gupta and Surendranath Banerjee, left for England in 1868.

At that time, only one other Indian, Satyendra Nath Tagore, had qualified for the Indian Civil Service. Dutt aimed to emulate Tagore's feat. For a long time, before and after 1853, the year the ICS examination was introduced in England, only British officers were appointed to covenanted posts.

At University College London, Dutt continued to study British writers. He qualified for the Indian Civil Service in the open examination in 1869, taking third place. He was called to the bar by the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple on 6 June 1871.

Pre-Retirement

He entered the Indian Civil Service as an assistant magistrate of Alipur in 1871. A famine in Meherpur, District of Nadia in 1874 and another in Dakhin Shahbazpur (Bhola District) in 1876, followed by a disastrous cyclone, required emergency relief and economic recovery operations, which Dutt managed successfully. He served as administrator for Backerganj, Mymensingh, Burdwan, Donapur, and Midnapore. He became Burdwan's District Officer in 1893, Commissioner (offtg.) of Burdwan Division in 1894, and Divisional Commissioner (offtg.) for Orissa in 1895. Dutt was the first Indian to attain the rank of divisional commissioner.

Post-retirement

Dutt retired from the ICS in 1897. In 1898 he returned to England as a lecturer in Indian History at University College, London where he completed his famous thesis on economic nationalism. He returned to India as dewan of Baroda State, a post he had been offered before he left for Britain. He was extremely popular in Baroda where the Maharaja, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III and his family members and all other staff members used to call him the Babu Dewan, as a mark of personal respect. In 1907, he also became a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Decentralisation.

Politics

He was president of the Indian National Congress in 1899. He was also a member of the Bengal Legislative Council.

Literature

He served as the first president of Bangiya Sahitya Parishad (Bengali: বঙ্গীয় সাহিত্য পরিষদ) in 1894, while Rabindranath Tagore and Navinchandra Sen were the vice-presidents of the society.

His The Literature of Bengal presented "a connected story of literary and intellectual progress in Bengal" over eight centuries, commencing with the early Sanskrit poetry of Jayadeva. It traced Chaitanya's religious reforms of the sixteenth century, Raghunatha Siromani's school of formal logic, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's brilliance, coming down to the intellectual progress of the nineteenth century. This was presented by Thacker, Spink & Co. in Calcutta and Archibald Constable in London in 1895, but it had formed earlier in Dutt's mind while he managed famine relief and economic recovery operations in Dakhin Shahbazpur. It had appeared originally under the disguise of an assumed name in 1877. It was dedicated to his esteemed uncle, Rai Shashi Chandra Dutt Bahadur.

History

He was a major economic historian of India of the nineteenth century. His thesis on deindustrialization of India remains forceful argument in Indian historiography. To quote him:

India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing as well as great agricultural country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the markets of Asia and of Europe. It is, unfortunately, true that the East Indian Company and the British Parliament ... discouraged Indian manufactures in the early years of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufactures of England . . . millions of Indian artisans lost their earnings; the population of India lost one great source of their wealth.

He also directed attention to the deepening internal differentiation of Indian society appearing in the abrupt articulation of local economies with the world market, accelerated urban-rural polarisation, the division between intellectual and manual labour, and the toll of recurrent devastating famines.

Awards

Death

While still in office, he died in Baroda at the age of 61 on 30 November 1909.