The Ocean of Kindness

A young man stepped down from a train at a small station in Bengal. He was well dressed and had a heavy bag, and he looked around impatiently for a porter. There was none.

A simply dressed man in a plain cotton shawl and slippers came up to him and offered to carry the bag. The young man was glad of the help. They walked together to the house where he was going, and the young man reached into his pocket to pay.

The stranger refused the money. He only smiled, and went on his way.

Later that day, so the story goes, the young man went to hear a famous scholar speak, and his face turned red. The scholar on the stage was the man who had carried his bag.

A well-known story

This tale has been told in Bengal for well over a century, in several versions. Nobody can say for certain when it happened, or whether it happened exactly like this. But people kept telling it because it sounded just like him. The scholar was Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and he never believed that any honest work was beneath him.

The boy from Birsingha

He was born in 1820 in the village of Birsingha, in the Midnapore district of Bengal. His family were poor. His father worked in Calcutta for a small wage, and the boy was sent there to study.

He was clever and determined. Stories are still told of how he learned English numbers from the milestones along the road to Calcutta, and how he studied at night under the street lamps because his family could not spare oil. At the Sanskrit College in Calcutta he did so brilliantly that he was given the title Vidyasagar, the ocean of learning. He was not yet twenty.

He went on to become the principal of that same college. He opened its doors to students who were not Brahmins, which many traditional scholars opposed. He wrote Barnaparichay, a simple primer for learning the Bengali alphabet. Families in Bengal used it to teach their children to read for generations.

The widows

What moved him most was the suffering of widows.

In those days many girls were married very young, sometimes to much older men. If the husband died, the girl became a widow, even if she was still a child. She was not allowed to marry again. She had to give up good food and bright clothes, and often lived out her life as a burden in someone else's house.

Vidyasagar studied the ancient Sanskrit texts and argued from them that remarriage of widows was allowed. He wrote, spoke and collected signatures. Many powerful people were furious, and he received threats. But in 1856, the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act became law.

A law on paper was not enough. Vidyasagar helped arrange the first marriages of widows himself and often paid for them, though it left him in debt. In 1870 his own son, Narayan, married a widow, with his blessing.

He also fought for girls' education. He helped to found many schools for girls across Bengal, at a time when most people thought girls did not need to read.

The poet in Versailles

His kindness did not end at reform. It reached into private lives.

In the 1860s the great Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt was living in France with his family. He had run out of money and was deep in debt, and he feared he might be sent to prison. In desperation he wrote to Vidyasagar. Vidyasagar raised money, borrowing some himself, and sent it to him. Their letters still survive.

Madhusudan never forgot it. In a poem, he praised Vidyasagar not only as a sea of learning but as an ocean of compassion.

Vidyasagar gave in many smaller ways too. He paid students' fees, sent money to poor families and fed hungry people at his door. He often gave away so much that he had too little for himself.

The last years

In his last years, tired and unwell, he spent long stretches at Karmatar, a small place in the Santhal country, in what is now Jharkhand. He bought a house there with a garden. He treated the Santhal villagers with homeopathic medicines, bought them food and clothes, and sat and talked with them as friends.

He died in Calcutta in July 1891. Today the railway station at Karmatar is named after him: Vidyasagar.

It seems a fitting place for his name. A station, where long ago, so the story says, a well-dressed young man learned what greatness really looks like.

Want to read more?

Brian A. Hatcher's Vidyasagar: The Life and After-life of an Eminent Indian is a careful modern biography. Subal Chandra Mitra's older Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar: A Story of His Life and Work gathers many of the stories told about him. Amales Tripathi's Vidyasagar: The Traditional Moderniser looks at his work for reform.