3 - The Tattwabodhini Period: The Conflicting Contours of Self-Fashioning or Towards a Global History?

Summary

In the preceding chapters I have laid out the two major, albeit connected, narratives of religion and science that were instrumental in shaping the intellectual horizon of Akshay Dutta's mind. His milieu was one of debate and discussion, influences that emerged out of a complex network of intellectual practice qualified by colonial modernity and its associated implications of a global labour–capital dynamic working from within a colonizer–colonized binary. It was a space where the principal aim of science education and practice was to develop a utilitarian template leading to motives of profit through governance and vice versa. The questions of religion and individual religious practice, on the other hand, were implicated by complex processes of reform and refashioning that often had their own transnational and global influences and subversive intent. The figure of Akshay Dutta emerges through this web-like narrative as part of the bhadralok milieu of nineteenth-century Calcutta through events and articulations that will not be subsumed within an easy and overbearing trope of either colonialism or nationalism, modernity or otherwise, but remain as a symptom of the fraught nature of the intellectual tendencies of the period.

Akshay and Rammohun: Imagining the Universe

Akshay Dutta spent the most crucial and active years of his working life as the editor of the Tattwabodhini Patrika between 1843 and 1855. A substantial part of his oeuvre, books or tracts that were subsequently published as individual volumes, germinated in the pages of the Tattwabodhini. It may be said that the larger part of Akshay's intervention into the intellectual and social structures of nineteenth-century Bengal was initiated or provoked through either what he wrote or what he, as the editor, published in the pages of the Tattwabodhini. It was during this Tattwabodhini period that, one might say, Akshay emerged as a crucial player in the larger canvas of Bengali intellectual history through the way he shaped the debates and discussions around the pages of the periodical. In the first chapter I have referred to his ideological debate with Debendranath Tagore regarding the nature of the Brahman and the infallibility of the Vedanta. Although there remained a clear ideological rift between the two, the pages of the Tattwabodhini bear ample testimony to Akshay's considerable independence in choosing the subject matter for the issues of the periodical