It is often unusual to write a 'foreword' for a standalone critical essay. Generally speaking, a monograph or a collection of essays would demand a foreword, placing the volume within a certain critical space, unpacking its politics and already provoking a dialogue with its readership. A single essay, on the other hand, would attempt its own intervention, working its way into the heart of a debate. However, although initially surprised at the request, as I finished reading Brian Hatcher's essay 'A less familiar Vidyasagar: pioneer of social research', I began to realize the possibility of a turn in Vidyasagar scholarship that the essayist was anticipating in this work. Hatcher is a known and established expert on Vidyasagar, having written extensively on the subject for a couple of decades now. But, what he was attempting in this essay would foreground a crucial turn in the way the scholarship on Vidyasagar has been shaped across the globe, engendering what one might call a perspectival shift. A brief foreword, therefore, may not be amiss in this instance.
For those who work on the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Bengal there is often a template for placing the major actors with their contextual roles categorically marked, and the work of critique is played out within or through a pre-determined ideological network that pre-supposes the political roles of these actors. Reformist or conservative, pro-modern or anti-modern, radical activist or reticent theorist-the historian would sometimes presume the fit for figures such as Rammohun Roy, or Isvarchandra Vidyasagar, Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay or Akshay Kumar Dutta, Swami Vivekananda or Keshub Chandra Sen. I do not claim that such a deterministic template is necessarily uncritical, but there is always both the scope and the necessity to rethink such ideologically set patterns of analyses.
Brian Hatcher, one of the leading historians of nineteenth-century Bengal and its religio-cultural history, begins his essay by reminding the readers of the necessity to revisit and rethink. In the context of the history of nineteenth-century Bengal, this act of revisiting or rethinking has multiple implications. In the first place, it involves the discovery or remembering of individuals on the fringes of a dominant narrative, one that reiterates the importance of those figures who are always at the centre of the argument. Second, and a more difficult task will be to reassess reform movements initiated by some of these important intellectuals or groups vis-à-vis those that have not been studied with equal emphasis, but have, in the future, assumed an important role in the history of a place or a moment in time. Hatcher's recent book Hinduism Before Reform may be a case in point, where he analyses the slow but emphatic rise of the Swaminarayan sect as a foil to the Brahmo movement in the nineteenth century. The third, and the most difficult task, perhaps, would be to try and read one of the already established figures in history, firmly embedded within set ideological mores, against the grain of an expected political stance that critics have always used for or against the person. This is what Hatcher has set out to do in this essay to reassess Vidyasagar's contribution to nineteenth-century Bengali life in the light of newer readings that are somewhat incommensurate with the general pattern of critical literature about him.
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