Surendranath Dasgupta
Encyclopedia
Surendranath Dasgupta (1887–1952) was a scholar of Sanskrit
and philosophy
.
, Bengal
(now in Bangladesh
). His ancestral home was in the village Goila in Barisal District
. He studied in Ripon College
Calcutta and graduated with honours in Sanskrit
. Later, he received his Masters degree from Sanskrit College
, Calcutta in 1908. He got a second Masters degree in Western Philosophy in 1910 from the University of Calcutta
.
Prof. Dasgupta married Himani Devi, a beautiful lady and the younger sister of India's pioneer film director and founder of Bombay Talkies Himanshu Rai
[Ray]and had six children with her. Dasgupta had three daughters Maitreyi Devi
(Sen), Chitrita Devi (Gupta) and Sumitra Majumdar. Maitreyi Devi and Chitrita Devi (Gupta) were also famous writers. His sons Subhayu Dasgupta, Sugata Dasgupta and Prof. Subhachari Dasgupta also left behind valuable work in nation building. Subhayu Dasgupta wrote the famous book "Hindu Ethos and the Challenge of Change" , while Sugata Dasgupta was a featured speaker and a noted Gandhian while his youngest son, Subhachari Dasgupta, erstwhile professor at the National Institute for Bank Management developed civil society leaders in India for three decades through the People's Institute for development and Training.
His last surviving and youngest child Sumitra Majumdar died in Goa in September 2008.
Dasgupta had taken the Griffith Prize in 1916 and his doctorate in Indian Philosophy in 1920. Maharaja Sir Manindra Chandra Nandi now urged him to go to Europe to study European philosophy at its sources, and generously bore all the expenses of his research tour (1920–22).
Dasgupta went to England and distinguished himself at Cambridge as a research student in philosophy under Dr McTaggart
. During this time the Cambridge University Press published the first volume of the History of Indian Philosophy (1921). He was also appointed lecturer at Cambridge, and nominated to represent Cambridge University at the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris.
His participation in the debates of the Aristotelian Society
, London, the leading philosophical society of England, and of the Moral Science Club, Cambridge, earned for him the reputation of being an almost invincible controversialist. Great teachers of philosophy like Ward and McTaggart, under whom he studied, looked upon him not as their pupil but as their colleague. He received his Cambridge doctorate for an elaborate thesis on contemporary European philosophy.
The impressions that he had made by his speeches and in the debates at the Paris Congress secured for him an invitation to the International Congress at Naples in 1924, where he was sent as a representative of the Bengal Education Department and of the University of Calcutta ; later on, he was sent on deputation by the Government of Bengal to the International Congress at Harvard in 1926.
In that connection he delivered the Harris Foundation lectures at Chicago, besides a series of lectures at about a dozen other Universities of the United States and at Vienna, where he was presented with an illuminated address and a bronze bust of himself. He was invited in 1925 to the second centenary of the Academy of Science, Leningrad, but he could not attend for lack of Government sanction.
In 1935, 1936 and 1939 he was invited as visiting professor to Rome, Milan, Breslau, Konigsberg, Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Zurich, Paris, Warsaw and England.
. Later, he became a Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali in Chittagong College
. After some time, he went back to graduate school and received a PhD from the University of Calcutta, and later went to England to work on his second PhD at the University of Cambridge.
Following his return in 1924, Dasgupta joined the Presidency College
as Professor of Philosophy. Later, he became the Principal of Sanskrit College, and later joined the University of Calcutta as a Professor.
In 1932, he served as President of the Indian Philosophical Congress. His own philosophy was known as Theory of Dependent Emergence.
The list of his famous students includes scholars like Mircea Eliade
and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya
.
He later moved away from his wife Himani Madhuri Dasgupta and their six children and stayed with Suroma Mitra, his secretary and student. Suroma Mitra also holds a PhD in philosophy and taught at Lucknow University and authored few books on philosophy. The relationship caused enormous pain to his near ones and was strongly disputed by Dasgupta's family. Whilst Suroma Mitra claimed to be Dasgupta's wife, such claims were unjustifiable and illegal as Surendranath and Himani were never legally divorced and bigamy was a crime in British and Independent India.
The University of Warsaw made him an honorary Fellow of the Academy of Sciences. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Societe des Amis du Monde of Paris offered him a special reception, and M. Renou, Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Paris, wrote to him afterwards: " While you were amongst us, we felt as if a Sankara or a Patanjali was born again and moved amongst us." Kind and simple and gentle as he was, Dasgupta was always undaunted in challenging scholars and philosophers.
In the second International Congress of Philosophy in Naples, the thesis of his paper was that Croce s philosophy had been largely anticipated by some forms of Buddhism, and that
where Croce differed he was himself in error. On account of internal differences Croce had no mind to join the Congress, but the fact that Dasgupta was going to challenge his philosophy and prove it to be second-hand in open congress, induced him to do so.
In the same way he challenged Louis de La Vallée-Poussin
, the great Buddhist scholar, before a little assembly presided over by McTaggart
. In the meetings of the Aristotelian Society he was a terror to his opponents, his method of approach being always to point out their
errors. He inflicted this treatment on many other scholars, particularly Steherbatsky and Levy.
might be dedicated to him.
Originally Dasguptas plan was to write out the history of Indian systems of thought in one volume. Therefore he tried to condense the materials available within the compass of one book. But as he went on collecting materials from all parts of India, a huge mass of published and unpublished texts came to light, and the plan of the work enlarged more and more as he tried to utilise them.
As a matter of fact, his was the first and only attempt to write out in a systematic manner a history of Indian thought directly from the original sources in Sanskrit,
Pali and Prakrit. In a work of the fourteenth century A.D., the Sarva-darsana-samgraha of Madhavacarya, we find a minor attempt to give a survey of the different philosophical schools of India.
But the account given there is very brief, and the work does not give an exhaustive survey of all the different systems of philosophy. In the present series the author traced, in a historical and critical manner, the development of Indian thought in its different branches from various sources, a considerable portion of which lies in unpublished manuscripts. He spared no pains and underwent a tremendous amount of drudgery in order to unearth the sacred, buried treasures of Indian thought.
He revised his original plan of writing only one volume and thought of completing the task in five consecutive volumes constituting a series. He shouldered this gigantic task
all alone, with the sincerest devotion and unparalleled enthusiasm and zeal.
In 1942 he retired from Sanskrit College and was appointed King George V Professor of Mental and Moral Science in the University of Calcutta. He worked there for three years and
delivered the Stephanos Nirmalendu lectures on the history of religions. He had been suffering from heart trouble since 1940, but was still carrying on his various activities and research work.
In 1945 he retired from the Calcutta University and was offered the Professorship of Sanskrit at Edinburgh which had fallen vacant after the death of Professor Keith. The doctors also advised a trip to England. On his arrival in England he fell ill again.
In November 1945 he delivered his last public lecture on Hinduism in Trinity College, Cambridge. Since then he was confined to bed with acute heart trouble. He stayed in England for five years (1945–50). Even then he published the fourth volume of his History of Indian
Philosophy at the Cambridge University Press, the History of Sanskrit Literature at Calcutta University, Rabindranath the Poet and Philosopher with his Calcutta publishers, and a book on aesthetics in Bengali. In 1950 he returned to Lucknow.
In 1951, through friendly help given by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, he started writing the fifth and final volume of the Historyof Indian Philosophy. He had also planned to write out his own system of philosophy in two volumes. His friends and students requested him several times to complete the writing of his own first.
But he looked upon his work on Indian philosophy as the sacred mission of his life, and thought himself to be committed to that purpose.
With strong determination and unwavering devotion he brought his life's mission very near its completion.
Till the last day of his life he was working for this, and completed one full section just a few hours before his passing away, on 18 December 1952. Even on this last day of his life, he worked in the morning and afternoon on the last chapter of the section of Southern Saivism.
He died peacefully at eight in the evening while discussing problems
of modern psychology. All his life he never took rest voluntarily and till his end he was burning like a fire, full of zeal and a rare brightness of spirit for the quest of knowledge.
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
and philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
.
Family and Education
Dasgupta was born in KushtiaKushtia District
Kushtia, Kushtia district or Kushtia Zila is a district in the Khulna administrative division of western Bangladesh. Kushtia has existed as a separate district since the partition of India. Prior to that, Kushtia was a part of Nadia District under Bengal Province of British India. Kushtia was home...
, Bengal
Bengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...
(now in Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
). His ancestral home was in the village Goila in Barisal District
Barisal District
Barisal is a district in southern Bangladesh. It is also the headquarters of Barisal Division.-Geography and climate:Latitude: 22.75, Longitude: 90.36, Altitude: 4....
. He studied in Ripon College
Surendranath College
Surendranath College is an undergraduate college affiliated to the University of Calcutta, in Kolkata, India. It was founded in 1884 by the nationalist leader Surendranath Banerjea....
Calcutta and graduated with honours in Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
. Later, he received his Masters degree from Sanskrit College
Sanskrit College
Sanskrit College is a specialized state-government administered liberal arts college offering an undergraduate degree in Sanskrit language, Pali language, linguistics, and ancient Indian and world history. It is one of the affiliated colleges of the University of Calcutta. Founded on 1 January...
, Calcutta in 1908. He got a second Masters degree in Western Philosophy in 1910 from the University of Calcutta
University of Calcutta
The University of Calcutta is a public university located in the city of Kolkata , India, founded on 24 January 1857...
.
Prof. Dasgupta married Himani Devi, a beautiful lady and the younger sister of India's pioneer film director and founder of Bombay Talkies Himanshu Rai
Himanshu Rai
Himanshu Roy , one of the pioneers of Indian cinema, is best known as the founder of the Bombay Talkies in 1934. He was associated with a number of movies, including Goddess , The Light of Asia , Siraj , A Throw of Dice , and Karma .He was married to actress Devika Rani.-Bombay Talkies:He was...
[Ray]and had six children with her. Dasgupta had three daughters Maitreyi Devi
Maitreyi Devi
Maitreyi Devi was a Bengali-born Indian poetess and novelist, the daughter of philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta and protegée of poet Rabindranath Tagore. She was the basis for the main character in Romanian-born writer Mircea Eliade's 1933 novel Bengal Nights...
(Sen), Chitrita Devi (Gupta) and Sumitra Majumdar. Maitreyi Devi and Chitrita Devi (Gupta) were also famous writers. His sons Subhayu Dasgupta, Sugata Dasgupta and Prof. Subhachari Dasgupta also left behind valuable work in nation building. Subhayu Dasgupta wrote the famous book "Hindu Ethos and the Challenge of Change" , while Sugata Dasgupta was a featured speaker and a noted Gandhian while his youngest son, Subhachari Dasgupta, erstwhile professor at the National Institute for Bank Management developed civil society leaders in India for three decades through the People's Institute for development and Training.
His last surviving and youngest child Sumitra Majumdar died in Goa in September 2008.
Dasgupta had taken the Griffith Prize in 1916 and his doctorate in Indian Philosophy in 1920. Maharaja Sir Manindra Chandra Nandi now urged him to go to Europe to study European philosophy at its sources, and generously bore all the expenses of his research tour (1920–22).
Dasgupta went to England and distinguished himself at Cambridge as a research student in philosophy under Dr McTaggart
McTaggart
McTaggart is a surname of Scottish or Ultonian origin. It is an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Mac an t-Sagairt, meaning "son of the priest". Also having the forms MacTaggart and Taggart...
. During this time the Cambridge University Press published the first volume of the History of Indian Philosophy (1921). He was also appointed lecturer at Cambridge, and nominated to represent Cambridge University at the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris.
His participation in the debates of the Aristotelian Society
Aristotelian Society
The Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy was founded at a meeting on 19 April 1880, at 17 Bloomsbury Square which resolved "to constitute a society of about twenty and to include ladies; the society to meet fortnightly, on Mondays at 8 o'clock, at the rooms of the Spelling...
, London, the leading philosophical society of England, and of the Moral Science Club, Cambridge, earned for him the reputation of being an almost invincible controversialist. Great teachers of philosophy like Ward and McTaggart, under whom he studied, looked upon him not as their pupil but as their colleague. He received his Cambridge doctorate for an elaborate thesis on contemporary European philosophy.
The impressions that he had made by his speeches and in the debates at the Paris Congress secured for him an invitation to the International Congress at Naples in 1924, where he was sent as a representative of the Bengal Education Department and of the University of Calcutta ; later on, he was sent on deputation by the Government of Bengal to the International Congress at Harvard in 1926.
In that connection he delivered the Harris Foundation lectures at Chicago, besides a series of lectures at about a dozen other Universities of the United States and at Vienna, where he was presented with an illuminated address and a bronze bust of himself. He was invited in 1925 to the second centenary of the Academy of Science, Leningrad, but he could not attend for lack of Government sanction.
In 1935, 1936 and 1939 he was invited as visiting professor to Rome, Milan, Breslau, Konigsberg, Berlin, Bonn, Cologne, Zurich, Paris, Warsaw and England.
Career
His career in teaching began with a short stint as a Lecturer in Rajshahi CollegeRajshahi College
Rajshahi College is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in Bangladesh. Established in 1873 in Rajshahi city, it is said to be the third oldest college in Bangladesh after Dhaka College and Chittagong College. Rajshahi College was the first institution in the territories now...
. Later, he became a Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali in Chittagong College
Chittagong College
Chittagong College is a well-respected college in Bangladesh. It is also the second college established in Bangladesh after Dhaka College. Having started out as Chittagong District school in 1836, it was upgraded to an Intermediate college in 1869. It started providing science education in...
. After some time, he went back to graduate school and received a PhD from the University of Calcutta, and later went to England to work on his second PhD at the University of Cambridge.
Following his return in 1924, Dasgupta joined the Presidency College
Presidency College, Kolkata
Presidency University, Kolkata, formerly Hindu College and Presidency College, is a unitary, state aided university, located in Kolkata, West Bengal. and one of the premier institutes of learning of liberal arts and sciences in India. In 2002 it was ranked number one by the weekly news magazine...
as Professor of Philosophy. Later, he became the Principal of Sanskrit College, and later joined the University of Calcutta as a Professor.
In 1932, he served as President of the Indian Philosophical Congress. His own philosophy was known as Theory of Dependent Emergence.
The list of his famous students includes scholars like Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day...
and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya
Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya was an eminent Bengali Marxist philosopher from India. He made extensive contributions to the exploration of the materialist current in ancient Indian Philosophy...
.
He later moved away from his wife Himani Madhuri Dasgupta and their six children and stayed with Suroma Mitra, his secretary and student. Suroma Mitra also holds a PhD in philosophy and taught at Lucknow University and authored few books on philosophy. The relationship caused enormous pain to his near ones and was strongly disputed by Dasgupta's family. Whilst Suroma Mitra claimed to be Dasgupta's wife, such claims were unjustifiable and illegal as Surendranath and Himani were never legally divorced and bigamy was a crime in British and Independent India.
The University of Warsaw made him an honorary Fellow of the Academy of Sciences. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Societe des Amis du Monde of Paris offered him a special reception, and M. Renou, Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Paris, wrote to him afterwards: " While you were amongst us, we felt as if a Sankara or a Patanjali was born again and moved amongst us." Kind and simple and gentle as he was, Dasgupta was always undaunted in challenging scholars and philosophers.
In the second International Congress of Philosophy in Naples, the thesis of his paper was that Croce s philosophy had been largely anticipated by some forms of Buddhism, and that
where Croce differed he was himself in error. On account of internal differences Croce had no mind to join the Congress, but the fact that Dasgupta was going to challenge his philosophy and prove it to be second-hand in open congress, induced him to do so.
In the same way he challenged Louis de La Vallée-Poussin
Louis de La Vallée-Poussin
Louis de La Vallée Poussin — Birth full name Louis Étienne Joseph Marie de La Vallée-Poussin — was a Belgian Indologist and scholar of Buddhist Studies.-Education:...
, the great Buddhist scholar, before a little assembly presided over by McTaggart
McTaggart
McTaggart is a surname of Scottish or Ultonian origin. It is an Anglicisation of the Gaelic Mac an t-Sagairt, meaning "son of the priest". Also having the forms MacTaggart and Taggart...
. In the meetings of the Aristotelian Society he was a terror to his opponents, his method of approach being always to point out their
errors. He inflicted this treatment on many other scholars, particularly Steherbatsky and Levy.
A History of Indian Philosophy
When Lord Ronaldshay, the Governor of Bengal, came to visit Chittagong College, he had a long talk with Professor Dasgupta in his classroom, and was so much impressed by it that he expressed the desire that the first volume of the History of Indian Philosophymight be dedicated to him.
Originally Dasguptas plan was to write out the history of Indian systems of thought in one volume. Therefore he tried to condense the materials available within the compass of one book. But as he went on collecting materials from all parts of India, a huge mass of published and unpublished texts came to light, and the plan of the work enlarged more and more as he tried to utilise them.
As a matter of fact, his was the first and only attempt to write out in a systematic manner a history of Indian thought directly from the original sources in Sanskrit,
Pali and Prakrit. In a work of the fourteenth century A.D., the Sarva-darsana-samgraha of Madhavacarya, we find a minor attempt to give a survey of the different philosophical schools of India.
But the account given there is very brief, and the work does not give an exhaustive survey of all the different systems of philosophy. In the present series the author traced, in a historical and critical manner, the development of Indian thought in its different branches from various sources, a considerable portion of which lies in unpublished manuscripts. He spared no pains and underwent a tremendous amount of drudgery in order to unearth the sacred, buried treasures of Indian thought.
He revised his original plan of writing only one volume and thought of completing the task in five consecutive volumes constituting a series. He shouldered this gigantic task
all alone, with the sincerest devotion and unparalleled enthusiasm and zeal.
In 1942 he retired from Sanskrit College and was appointed King George V Professor of Mental and Moral Science in the University of Calcutta. He worked there for three years and
delivered the Stephanos Nirmalendu lectures on the history of religions. He had been suffering from heart trouble since 1940, but was still carrying on his various activities and research work.
In 1945 he retired from the Calcutta University and was offered the Professorship of Sanskrit at Edinburgh which had fallen vacant after the death of Professor Keith. The doctors also advised a trip to England. On his arrival in England he fell ill again.
In November 1945 he delivered his last public lecture on Hinduism in Trinity College, Cambridge. Since then he was confined to bed with acute heart trouble. He stayed in England for five years (1945–50). Even then he published the fourth volume of his History of Indian
Philosophy at the Cambridge University Press, the History of Sanskrit Literature at Calcutta University, Rabindranath the Poet and Philosopher with his Calcutta publishers, and a book on aesthetics in Bengali. In 1950 he returned to Lucknow.
In 1951, through friendly help given by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, he started writing the fifth and final volume of the Historyof Indian Philosophy. He had also planned to write out his own system of philosophy in two volumes. His friends and students requested him several times to complete the writing of his own first.
But he looked upon his work on Indian philosophy as the sacred mission of his life, and thought himself to be committed to that purpose.
With strong determination and unwavering devotion he brought his life's mission very near its completion.
Till the last day of his life he was working for this, and completed one full section just a few hours before his passing away, on 18 December 1952. Even on this last day of his life, he worked in the morning and afternoon on the last chapter of the section of Southern Saivism.
He died peacefully at eight in the evening while discussing problems
of modern psychology. All his life he never took rest voluntarily and till his end he was burning like a fire, full of zeal and a rare brightness of spirit for the quest of knowledge.
Selected writings
- A History of Indian Philosophy, 5 volumes
- General Introduction to Tantra Philosophy
- A Study of Patanjali
- Yoga Philosophy in Relation to Other Systems of Indian Thought
- A History of Sanskrit Literature
- Rabindranath: The Poet and Philosopher
- Hindu Mysticism
- Kavyavicha
- Saundaryatattva
- Rabidipika
External links
- A History of Indian Philosophy (5 Volumes) at archive.org
- A History of Indian Philosophy (All 5 Volumes combined, 2517 Pages, with outline) at archive.org
- Philosophical Essays at archive.org
- Yoga - As Philosophy and Religion at archive.org
- Indian Idealism at archive.org