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Iswar Chunder Vidyasagar, a great upholder of the right of widows to remarry and an advocate of education, both elementary and higher. He died at Calcutta in 1891. K.M. Banerjea, D.L., C.I.E., an opponent of the caste system, the greatest scholar among Indian Christians. He died at Calcutta in 1885. Keshub Chunder Sen, religious reformer, an advocate of a higher marriage age for girls.
Western Christian teachers, they say, are hidebound by tradition; and the ready-made rigidity of the creeds of the Churches is no doubt a factor in the state of mind we are describing. P.C. Mozumdar, the successor of Keshub Chunder Sen. But the attitude is by no means limited to Brahmas.
"Is there a single soul in this audience," said the Brahmo leader, the late Keshub Chunder Sen, to the educated Indians of Calcutta, mostly Hindus, "who would scruple to ascribe extraordinary greatness and supernatural moral heroism to Jesus Christ and Him crucified?"
It was almost immediately upon the death of Keshub Chunder Sen, at the beginning of 1884, that his immediate family and a few of his followers proclaimed that his spirit still abode in the Mandir, where he so often spoke, and that no one should succeed him or speak from the Mandir hereafter!
In his last years, the Brahma leader, Keshub Chunder Sen, frequently spoke of God as the divine Mother, but we are not to suppose that it expresses a radical change of thought about God. Keshub Chunder Sen's last recorded prayer begins: "I have come, O Mother, into thy sanctuary"; his last, almost inarticulate, cries were: "Father," "Mother."
The new name is not a rendering of any of the vernacular names in use in modern India; it is due directly to its use in English literature and in Christian preaching and teaching. The late Keshub Chunder Sen's Lectures in India, addressed to Hindu audiences, abound in the use of the name.
He was the first to establish a vernacular press in India, and, with Alexander Duff, the first English schools. Though he did not formally profess Christianity, he studied our Christian Scriptures, acknowledged their value and influence, and published a book entitled "The Precepts of Jesus." Another Hindu who exerted great influence during the half-century just passed was Keshub Chunder Sen.
Bees and Durham disgorged on our coral strand. From my saying this do not suppose that I am Mr. Whitley Stokes, or Babu Keshub Chundra Sen. I am a Churchman, beneath the surface, though a pellicle of inquiry may have supervened.
The difficulties in the way of female education in India are well expressed in a late letter from one of the most distinguished native reformers, Baboo Keshub Chunder Sen of Calcutta. "No words of mine," he says, "would convey to you an adequate idea of the great obstacles which the social and religious condition of the Hindoo community presents in the way of female education and advancement.
Keshub Chunder Sen was not perhaps cast in so fine a mould as Ram Mohan Roy or the more conservative Dr. Tagore, but his ideals were the same, and his life-dream was to find a common denominator for Hinduism and Christianity which should secure a thorough reform of Hindu society without denationalizing it.
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