Effete Ness

The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-
Century Bengal
Author(s): John Rosselli
Source: Past & Present , Feb., 1980, No. 86 (Feb., 1980), pp. 121-148
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/650742
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/650742?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
and Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Past & Present
This content downloaded from

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
THE SELF-IMAGE OF EFFETENESS:
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BENGAL*
"A LOW LYING PEOPLE IN A LOW-LYING LAND" - SO RAN A FAVOURITE
British sneer at Bengalis about the turn of the century; to which a h

official added: "with the intellect of a Greek and the grit of a rabbi
Bengalis were "effete": that was the stereotype all through the per
of British rule.
From the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s the Bengali Hindu
elite, a group which had developed in a symbiotic relation to Britis
rule, made the stereotype its own. It strove to overcome its suppos
degeneracy through the pursuit of physical culture. In this it reac
in some ways like other nationalist elite groups in India, China
Europe, which sought in physical culture and martial arts redress f
what they experienced as humiliation.
Three things were peculiar about the behaviour of the Bengali el
First, its sense of degradation was especially physical. Secondly, its
volvement with colonial rule was especially close and its search
remedies drew a great deal upon the thought, practice and collabor
tion of the rulers. Thirdly, a long-standing ambiguity about the def
tion of Bengali society and the place of the elite within it coloured t
myth of physical downfall and resurgence: excluded or hierarchica
subordinate elements (Muslims and low castes) could neither be kep
out of the story nor satisfyingly accommodated within it.
For working purposes the Bengali Hindu elite will be defined as t
land- and service-based groups which by the i85os and i86os w
benefiting from English education and moving in increasing numb
into administrative and clerical posts, chiefly in government servi
and into the legal profession.2 Though many of them belonged to
* The present study was made possible by a grant from the Social Science Resea
Council and a term's leave from the University of Sussex. The Bangiya Sahit
Parisat of Calcutta kindly made me a member and let me use its library. In
footnotes, where a Bengali author favours a particular roman transliteration of
name, that version has been used; otherwise Bengali names and titles are give
the standard modern transliteration from Sanskrit-derived languages, but witho
diacretal marks.
1 Sir Frank Dunlop Smith, private secretary to the viceroy, 1905-I0, quoted in M.
Gilbert, Servant of India (London, 1966), p. 56.
2 "Elite" is intended here in a neutral sense to mean the upper, and in part self-
made, sections of Hindu society. This is not to deny the predominant role of the
British, or to espouse the controversial interpretations put forward in, for example,
J. H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal
(Berkeley, 1968), or Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge,
I968).

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
122 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 86
three caste groups traditionally uppermost in Bengal - brahmans

(far more numerous here than in most other parts of India), kayasthas
and vaidyas - they were not strictly definable in caste terms. The
term "pseudo-feudal", though open to debate, may do as an account of
their relations with peasant and servant groups in the countryside,
based as these were on a serried hierarchy of rights in the control of
land, yet commercialized as Bengal land rights were and often
divorced from face-to-face dealings with the people whose labour
provided revenue. A high concentration of educational, legal and ad-
ministrative institutions in Calcutta, jobs in a peripatetic government
service, land rights sometimes scattered over several areas, the recog-
nized base which many families kept in a particular village: all these
meant that the elite could not readily be divided into urban and rural,
even though some families were Calcutta-based, and some (like Nirad
Chaudhuri's east Bengal family, described in his well-known auto-
biography)3 centred on a rural area; many oscillated between the two.
Nationalist stirrings, as one might expect, appeared first in move-
ments aimed at social and cultural reform. They coincided in the
I86os with a split in the Brahmo Samaj, the monotheistic religious
movement which for three decades had been boldest in calling for such
reform. Members of both resulting Brahmo factions were to be active
nationalists, but it was the more traditional-minded minority faction,
centred on the Tagore family and on the teacher and writer Raj-
narayan Basu, that launched a self-conscious movement for physical
culture.
By this period members of the elite were aware that the British had
certified them as unmilitary, frail, cowardly, in a word, effete: "soft-
bodied little people", who could none the less compete with Eng-
lishmen in civil service examinations.4
This was a long-standing British stereotype, one of a number which
the rulers had worked out as a means of classifying Indian groups.5
Macaulay had given it classic expression:
The physical organization of the Bengali is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a
constant vapour bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements
languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more
hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitu-
tion and his situation are equally unfavourable.6
3 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London,

I95I).
4 Anon., "Hindoo 'Civilians' and their Value", Spectator, 9 May 1868, quoted in
National Paper [Calcutta], 17 June i868.
5 See B. S. Cohn, "Notes on the History of the Study of Modern Indian Society and
Culture", in M. Singer and B. S. Cohn (eds.), Structure and Change in Indian
Society (Chicago, 1968), pp. 3-28.
6 T. B. Macaulay, "Warren Hastings", in his Critical and Historical Essays, 3 vols.
(London, 1843), iii, p. 345.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM IN BENGAL 123
These were words read at a formative age by most British ad-

ministrators of India and by most English-educated Bengalis. Not that
Macaulay had done more than boldly state the routine opinion of the
British of his day. For Lord William Bentinck, the governor-general,
Bengalis were "a mere flock of sheep good only for their valuable
fleeces, and having no political or military character whatever". This
automatic contempt went back a long way - at least to the I770s,
when the historian Orme thought all Indians showed "effeminacy of
character" but that Bengalis were "still of weaker frame, and more
enervated disposition" than the rest.7
By the I86os and I87os not only the Tagore connection but some
other Bengali intellectual and social leaders had themselves taken over
the stereotype. These early products of English education were con-
vinced of their own effeteness.
Bengalis, they admitted, were "lilliputian in size and weak in con-
stitution", "physically about the weakest people in India", "in mere
physique and courage ... inferior to Englishmen". Educated Bengalis
were "broken in health"; "the term of life accorded to the Bengali con-
stitution has been rapidly decreasing". To Bankim Chandra Chatter-
jee, the great novelist, the matter was simple: "Bengalis never had
any physical valour". This lack was freely admitted: "Why are not
Bengalis courageous? ... The reason is simply this: the physical is the
father of the moral man".8 The chorus went on into the late nine-
teenth century and beyond. Sarala Debi, a niece of Rabindranath
Tagore, got the impression on a railway journey that compared with
western and north Indians the Bengali porters "could have been
knocked down with a blow from a straw hat". And Swami Vive-
kananda said of himself: "Alas! this frame is poor, moreover, th
physique of a Bengali . .".9
What was the cause? The explanations put forward by nineteenth-
century Bengalis ran often on positivistic lines. The environment was
to blame: either the climate (Macaulay's "vapour bath") or the ferti-
lity of the soil, which made it unnecessary to exert oneself, or both.
Diet was often invoked. Educated Bengalis ate too much; or they ate
7 J. Rosselli, Lord William Bentinck: The Making of a Liberal Imperialist, I774-
I839 (London, I974), p. I93; R. Orme, A History of the Military Transactions of the
British Nation in Indostan, 4th edn. repr., 3 vols. (Madras, I86I-2), ii, p. 5.
8 Anon., "Dialogue" of the "Chit-Chat Club", Bengal Mag., i no. 4 (Nov. 872);
National Paper, 2 Sept. i868 and i9 May i869; Rajnarayan Basu, prospectus of
the Nationality Promotion Society, in Yogescandra Bagal, Hindu melar itibrtta
[Chronicle of the Hindu Mela] (Calcutta, 1945), pp. I02-I2; Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee, "Bangalir bahubal" [The Physical Valour of the Bengalis] (1 874), in hi
Racanabali [Works], 3 vols. (Calcutta, 1953-69), ii, pp. 209-I3. I render bahubal as
"physical valour": Bankim distinguishes between this and mere bodily strength
(saririk bal).
9 Sarala Debi, Jibaner jharapata [Scattered Leaves of Life] (Calcutta, I957),
pp. 125-6; Vivekananda to Sarala Ghoshal [Sarala Debi], 24 Apr. 1897, in Letters of
Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta, 1964), p. 393.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
I24 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 86
too little (one newspaper put forward both these explanations within
three weeks). A rice diet, short of meat and other animal products,
was "weak and innutritious". Newfangled medicines were harmful;
alcohol had ravaged many constitutions. Early parenthood caused
children to be born with "a homeopathic fund of vitality". Above all,
educated Bengalis had concentrated to excess on their studies: whence
all manner of ills, from "indigestion and brain fever" to "the feeble
development of muscles". The system of English education, Raj-
narayan Basu concluded, was "a machine for killing human
beings".10
Curiously the spread of malaria in late nineteenth-century Bengal,
which beyond doubt undermined the health of many people and cut
down the population of some districts, was complained of (if at all) as a
separate matter with, it seems, no bearing on Bengali "effeteness". At
most, when Rajnarayan Basu did list it among causes of physical
degeneration he gave it no special prominence: it was on all fours with
the eating of pulse and fish.11
Other explanations were genetic. Bankim Chandra, who was
sceptical of environmental causes and anyhow reluctant to set a high
value on mere brute strength, blamed Bengalis' perennial lack of
valour on their non-Aryan descent.12 But the most important explana-
tion of Bengali "effeteness" - because it led to action aimed at over-
coming it - was historical and cultural. We may call it a myth of
physical downfall, holding out hope of resurgence.
"Ask anybody and he will tell you that his father and grandfather
were very strong", Rajnarayan Basu said in I873. For a later writer
the days when everyone was strong, athletic, virtually free from
illness, and when "thanks to daily exercise and nourishing food very
many people were long-lived" (a statement that follows close upon an
account of several early deaths among his relatives), were those of his
own boyhood, that is, the 86os, just before Rajnarayan's complaint.
Warnings of physical degeneration sometimes went together with
wider complaints that young people had strayed from long-standing
norms of manners and morals - they had become less happy in their
family lives, had lost the capacity to laugh, or, as the great religious
and nationalist leader Swami Vivekananda was to complain in the
next generation, had "lost their politeness".13
10 National Paper, 22 May, 12 June 1867, I I May 1870; Bagal, op. cit., pp. 102-
12; Rajnarayan Basu, Se kal ar e kal [Yesterday and Today] (Calcutta, 1874), pp. 38-
53; Bengalee, 21 Apr. 1883; Krsnakumar Mitra, Atmacarit [Autobiography] (Cal-
cutta, 1937), p. 8.
11 Rajnarayan Basu, Se kal ar e kal, pp. 38-53.
12 Bankim Chandra, "Bangalir bahubal", in Racanabali, ii, pp. 209-13.
13 Rajnarayan Basu, Se kal ar e kal, pp. 36-53, 76-92; Krsnakumar Mitra, op. cit.,
p. 8; National Paper, I6 Jan. 1867; Vivekananda's speech to Belur M. S. School,
Indian Mirror, I5 Feb. 1901, quoted in Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, I893-
I902, ed. S. P. Basu and S. B. Ghosh (Calcutta, 1969), p. 215.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM IN BENGAL I25
What had gone wrong? The physical explanation, elab

the last third of the nineteenth century and repeated ever
follows. There had once been in Bengal many akhras (g
simple kind) in which landholders and other educated
exercised. Because British rule brought material security a
an obsession with English education the elite came to negl
culture; the akhras and other means to physical cultur
with lathis (bamboo staves) and swords, wrestling, other i
sports - were completely (or "almost") wiped out; at be
left to the uneducated. Hence a catastrophic decline.
But physical effeteness seemed often a mere index o
downfall. The diagnoses put forward cannot be rea
tionalist" or "westernizing"; they hit out at some trad
some western traits, and may rather be called a "purifyin
to the complex situation the English-educated elite found
On the one hand a wide puritanical movement got under
late I86os, notably among members of the Brahmo Sam
among some self-conscious Hindu groups. The movement
against drinking, smoking, the watching of dancing-gi
listening to songs drawn from the ancient Hindu epics, in
self-sacrifice and public service.14 This seems to have been
attempt to refute British attacks on Hinduism as "licentio
tracting from Hindu traditions what could be claimed
(and respectable) essence.
On the other hand the late i85os and i86os were als
when the reading matter which the elite provided for its
down to an obsession with the comic or reprehensibl
Anglicized manners summed up in the figure of the Calcu
an obsession that was to last a good half-century.
The babu as a butt was not new. Satirical writings on
went back to the I82os. In those early writings the target
seem to have been a series of shifting urban types, newly
rich, and their vulgar or ostentatious manners; the s
perhaps be seen as by-products of the rapid growth of Ca
commercial city. By the 85os and 86os this changing stere
taken on as well the features of an intellectual alienated from his social
background; it was also beginning to appear in a spate of magazine
articles (themselves no doubt occasioned by an increased output of
print). The reason for these new and eventually dominant features of
the babu stereotype was presumably the emergence in the i85os and
I86os of considerable numbers of English-educated young men (as
against smaller and more beleaguered numbers in the period from the
14 Krsnakumar Mitra, op. cit., pp. 69-7 , 85-6.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
I8Ios to the i840s) and of law and government service as their

characteristic professions.s1
In the magazine literature of the last third of the century the babu
was, at one level, a figure of fun. He wore an extraordinary mixture of
European and Indian clothes; he drank; he had "three stomachs",
Hindu, Muslim and European, and the last he took to the Great
Eastern Hotel to feed it on beefsteak and mutton chops; he frequented
prostitutes; he had a great deal of half-digested western learning and
his intellect was hair-splitting and lightweight; he was over-sensitive
and conceited; he took up all sorts of western fashions, from knives
and forks to caps and eyeglasses. Above all, he was irreligious or at best
half-hearted; though perhaps more honest than his forbears he
showed a "general want of pluck and manly spirit".
Some commentators struck a deeper note. "How like Englishmen in
so many respects, we - how unlike, in others!" "This unreal society"
-so ran the title of another article; "English education", it com-
plained, "has begotten a huge sham which we recognize by the name
of the educated community". Babus, according to these writers (and
they were talking about themselves and their friends), were torn in
their innermost feelings - drawn on the one hand to close and
courteous relations with women (their own wives included), yet still
caught up in the conventions of the secluded women's quarters and
exposed to discord within the joint family; unable any longer to believe
in Hinduism, yet obliged to keep up caste and perform worship:
A society whose constitution is folded in diplomacy cannot be a fit subject to be con-
gratulated upon, its sight makes us sick, and the heart in despair seeks for the more
bracing atmosphere of reality elsewhere. Our role is patience, and our faith rests
upon a future not yet seen. The young man of the future, our heart tells us, will be
very different.16
The babu's improper or ridiculous ways obsessed contemporaries

because they were at once attractive and problematic. The burden of
much of this comment is that babus misbehave and that because of
their misbehaviour they have become effete. A catalogue of babu fail-
ings concludes: "A red-coated Highlander is formidable enough to
cope with and drive away a crowd of Bengalis even in the very heart of
the City of Palaces".17
15 For early satirical writings, see S. K. De, Bengali Literature in the Nineteenth
Century, 2nd edn. (Calcutta, I962), pp. 555-65; J. C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature
(Oxford, 1948), pp. 127-30. For social change in these years, see A. F. Salahuddin
Ahmed, Social Ideas and Social Change in Bengal (Leiden, 1965); Pradip Sinha,
Nineteenth-Century Bengal: Aspects of Social History (Calcutta, 1965).
16 Shib Chunder Bose, The Hindoos as they are (Calcutta, I881), ch. 15; Bankim
Chandra, "Babu", in Racanabali, ii, pp. Io-I2; Anon., "Young Bengal", Bengal
Mag., i no. 9 (Apr. 1873); Indian Mirror, 17, 24, 31 Aug., 5, 26 Oct., 7 Dec. 1879;
Rajnarayan Basu, Se kal ar e kal, pp. 84-9, 9I-2; Reis and Rayyet, 6 Jan. I883.
See also Bulloram Mullick, Essays on the Hindu Family in Bengal (Calcutta, 1882);
H. J. S. Cotton, New India (London, I885), pp. I47-52.
17 Shib Chunder Bose, op. cit., ch. 15.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
The historical-cultural account of Bengali "effeteness", finally

drew almost from the start on Social Darwinist ideas then current in
Britain. An article of I870, making all the usual points, based itself on
Alfred Russell Wallace's attempt to apply the theory of natural selec-
tion to nations. A generation later the vehement nationalist Sarala
Debi took over the views of an English educationalist who taught
that according to the "inflexible laws of Nature" "physical weakness
is a crime ... Weaklings are despised and a weakling nation is
doomed".18
It was indeed members of the Tagore family and their allies in the
Adi (Original) Brahmo Samaj who launched the first response to the
stereotype of effeteness they had so thoroughly internalized - though
others, such as Bankim Chandra, were quick to take it up. In I866
Rajnarayan Basu's prospectus of a Nationality Promotion Society put
revival of "the national gymnastic exercises" first among the society's
tasks, followed by the publication of tracts in Bengali giving instances
of "the military prowess of the ancient Bengalis", and the reform of
the Bengali diet.19 In the following year members of the Tagore
connection launched the Hindu Mela (Fair), an annual festival in
Calcutta combining displays of handicrafts as well as cultural and
sporting events. The promoters also used the alternative English
name, "National Gathering". There is some evidence that one of their
aims was to take over, purify, and "nationalize" an existing popular
festival of carnival type (the 29th Caitra) which they saw as too often
"animal" and "obscene".20
From the start the Hindu Mela under its chief organizer Nabagopal
Mitra made much of gymnastics, wrestling and other traditional
sports. In 1868 Nabagopal set up a gymnastic school from which there
later developed a well-known though short-lived National School.
Within a few years he had trained and sent out several physical educa-
tion teachers, besides founding a number of akhras. His group had by
then won admirers and imitators outside its own ranks. The Calcutta
Amrita Bazar Patrika, a newspaper whose editor was himself a keen
wrestler, spurred the Hindu Mela on to greater physical feats; it
repeatedly declared that the Mela would not have succeeded in its aims
until a few young men had been crippled or possibly until one of them
had died. Among the rival or majority faction of the Brahmo Samaj,
a group that included one of Nabagopal's old pupils, Bipin Chandra
Pal, was by I876 founding a secret society: its purposes were the de-
velopment of physical culture and the training of all adults in hand-
18 National Paper, I I May 870; Sarala Debi,Jibanerjharapata, pp. 134-6. I have

been unable to trace the author of the passage quoted.
19 Bagal, Hindu melar itibrtta, pp. I02-I2.
20 Letter in National Paper, 28 Apr. 1869.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
ling weapons, as well as self-government and social reform; all this

was to be achieved by strict self-discipline.21
Still in accordance with Rajnarayan Basu's I866 programme, the
same group of people launched a cult of ancient military valour.
Already in I858 Satyendranath Tagore, at that time a first-year
undergraduate, had read a paper to a debating society on "Heroism
of the Ancient Hindus" - that is, the legendary heroes of the
Mahabharata. That was on the morrow of the I857 revolt, in which
Bengal had conspicuously played no part. By Rajnarayan's Se kal ar e
kal (Yesterday and Today) fifteen years later we find almost the full
repertoire of heroes, this time Bengalis: besides a number of mythical
ones (drawn from the scriptures) we hear about the medieval Pala
kings and the seventeenth-century Raja Pratapaditya. Later, under
the influence of the novelist Bankim Chandra, a slightly later
historical figure - Sitaram - was to join a company swollen by
various Rajput, Maratha and Sikh heroes, not to mention the divine
fighters Rama and Krishna.22
A rather pathetic search also began for Bengali military heroes of
modern times. These were reduced in practice to the "Fighting
Munsiff", who had fought in I857 - on the British side - and (a
later arrival) to Colonel Suresh Biswas, a sometime circus performer
and soldier of fortune in the Brazilian army whose only recorded
engagement involved fifty men. The Munsiff was soon dropped, but
middle-aged Bengalis can still recall learning at school about Colonel
Biswas.23
The National Paper, the organ of the Hindu Mela promoters,
started in the late 186os a campaign for Bengalis to be allowed to serve
in the army, as a corrective to their fully admitted effeteness: "If we
wish to be one with Rajputs, Sikhs and Marathas ... we must train
ourselves up as soldiers . ..". Along with this went a less sustained
campaign to urge Bengalis to resist assaults by "low" Europeans.24
How highly developed a nationalist consciousness spoke through
such utterances? The first stirrings of nationalism are hard to pin
down (and the pinning down is often a matter of theoretical definition
of nationalism). My assumption - which I have not the space to
expound here - is that the movements within the elite in the years
21 National Paper, Feb. I868, passim; Bagal, op. cit., pp. 23-4, 30-I, 57-8, 66;
Abanindrakrsna Basu, Bangalir sarkus [Bengali Circuses] (Calcutta, 1936), pp. I-3;
Bipin Chandra Pal, Memories of My Life and Times, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1932-5 ), i,
pp. 311-I7.
22 Bipinbihari Gupta, Puratan prasanga [Old Times], ISt ser. (Calcutta, 1913),
p. 92; Rajnarayan Basu, Se kal ar e kal, pp. 94-6; Sarala Debi, op. cit., pp. I40-2.
23 Rajnarayan Basu, Se kal ar e kal, pp. 94-6; Spectator, 9 May 1868, quoted in
National Paper, 17 June I868; Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, ed. Basu and
Ghosh, pp. 27, 3 I; Birendranath Ghos, Bangalir bahubal [The Physical Valour of the
Bengalis] (Calcutta, [c. 1932]), pp. 104-7; Amrita Bazar Patrika, 3 Dec. 1925.
24 National Paper, 8 May 1867 and I July 1868.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
about i820 to I850 had had to do either with demand

British for higher status (for better access to justice, or t
with internal social and religious reform, sometime
struggle for social control among competing groups of m
their followers.25 By the years around 1870 some member
were reading enthusiastically (through British Liberal
about Mazzini. The National Paper showed itself aware
between physical culture and nationalism in the work
pioneers like Ling in Sweden and Jahn and Arndt in Ger
had promoted a cult of ancient Gothic or Germanic he
both Rajnarayan Basu and a man of somewhat differe
the Christian and Liberal Lal Behari Day - could wri
identical terms that God had the power to raise Benga
nations as he had raised others from lowly beginnings: "T
nation is now despised of all, but... perhaps this weak nat
in future to be a leading nation of the earth".26
Yet in these years, when even the moderate early re
of the Indian National Congress lay in the future, th
group was in practice unready to go beyond an ambig
nationalism. Neither in Rajnarayan's prospectus nor in th
the National Paper was it clear whether the "nation" appe
Bengal or India or a purified and united Hindu communit
again the stated aim was that of bringing together all Be
groups, "from the most orthodox... to the most advanced
Freethinker" - or, as a speaker at the first Mela put i
distinct Hindu nationalities into one common Hindu n
"Nationality" seems here to be used as a translation of
often rendered as "community" or "caste". Muslims were
disliked.28 When the National Paper claimed that "th
certainly form a nation by themselves" it merely sho
promoters did not yet think of a nation in territorial ter
that they were not prepared to think of demanding
pendence.29
The Hindu Mela petered out in the late 87os. By the tim
culture came to be once again a point of nationalist propa
I89os, the climate among the Bengali elite had chang
25 See the contrasting interpretations of this period in D. Kopf, Britis
and the Bengal Renaissance (Berkeley, 1969), which sees a proto-na
ment in being in the 83os, and, on the other hand, Salahuddin Ahme
and Social Change in Bengal; Pradip Sinha, Nineteenth-Century
Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta, I978).
26 National Paper, 26 Aug. and 30 Dec. 1868; Rajnarayan Basu, S
pp. 94-6; Bengal Mag., i no. 6 (Jan. 1873), pp. 25I-60 (pseud. arti
Chandra Dutt), and i no. 8 (Mar. 1873), pp. 362-4.
27 National Paper, 17 Apr. 1867 (speech of Supati Mukherjee).
28 Ibid., 5 May 1869.
29 Ibid., 4 Dec. 1872, quoted in Bagal, Hindu melar itibrtta, p. 42.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
through an intervening revival of Hindu social and religious ideas

(what has been called "social reaction"), in part through a series of
clashes with British officials and, still more significant, with the
British unofficial community in Calcutta over the Ilbert Bill (i883)
which brought out blatant assertions of British racial superiority.
Though all-India nationalist agitation, which began in these years,
was in the end to shift the lead away from Bengal and to leave many
Bengali nationalists in a critical or dissident position, the founding of
Congress in 1885 seemed at first to widen the setting in which mem-
bers of the Bengali elite naturally took a chief part.
Thus Sarala Debi, who in the i 89os roused a number of young men
to the pursuit of militant nationalist physical culture, drew her in-
spiration in part from western India - from the emerging nationalist
leader B. G. Tilak - as well as from Bankim Chandra's novels at
home.
The gymnastic displays and traditional sports she encouraged were
laced with commemorations of Pratapaditya and other heroes. Lik
some other Tagores she loved to invent new festivals; she manage
to incorporate a combination of physical culture displays and th
worship of ancient heroes into twentieth-century celebrations o
Durga Puja, the chief religious festival of the Bengali year. Saral
Debi was also in touch with Swami Vivekananda soon after his
triumphal return from America and Europe; his insistence on the nee
for physical strength as a means to national regeneration is we
known.30
Vivekananda and, in a minor way, Sarala Debi helped to inspir
some of the leaders of the terrorist movement that grew out of th
Swadeshi agitation of 905-I - itself an agitation that seemed to
put Bengal at the forefront of the nationalist struggle, since it grew o
of the British decision to partition the province.
The Anusilan Samiti, from which one of the main networks o
terrorist societies developed, was to begin with a group dedicated to
the endeavour which Bankim Chandra had summed up in the ter
anusilan - the fullest development of all faculties, physical an
mental. Though the terrorists' choice of violence as the mode
political struggle against the British came to be the prime motive for
of the movement, they kept up, as a means of self-discipline and pr
paration, the practice of physical culture and of sports such as lathi
play; this was often bound up with religious vows and with a cult of
austerity and sexual abstinence drawn from the Hindu tradition
Brahmacharya (the course set for a young adept, which include
twice-daily physical exercises). Pulin Behari Das, the famous terroris
leader of the Dacca Anusilan Samiti, later published a manual of lath
30 Sarala Debi, Jibaner jharapata, pp. 127-48, 166; Sumit Sarkar, The Swadesh
Movement in Bengal, I903-I908 (Calcutta, 1973), pp. 304-5, 470-I.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM IN BENGAL i3I
play in which he insisted that without a healthy body and

character there could be no true intellectual development;
quired adepts to be of "pure race", that is, caste Hindus un
polluting activities.31
During the second wave of the terrorist movement in
physical culture came to be still more associated in Ben
(and often in reality) with terrorism: a well-known exa
Simla Byayam Samiti (Simla Physical Culture Club), fo
refounded in I926 in the north Calcutta district of Sim
dranath Basu, a follower of the Yugantar terrorist fa
clubs demanded, at least in theory, adherence to Brahmach
rules forbade smoking, drinking, long hair and fashionable
Atindranath Basu's sons later became followers of Subhas Chandra
Bose, the unfulfilled alternative leader to Gandhi in the wider
nationalist movement.32
So far, the story of the Bengal physical education movement in its
relation to nationalism has been told along the lines generally followed
by Bengali historians and by a still-living oral tradition. Literature
and oral tradition have a common element of myth - telling of a
golden age of health and strength followed by decline and (actual or
hoped-for) resurgence - set to a shifting chronology: the crucial
transition from decline to resurgence may come, according to the
writer or speaker, anywhere between the i86os and the 1930s.33 This
suggests, not that the story is itself untrue, but that unacknowledged
pressures may have led to omission or distortion and to a vagueness
characteristic of myth. The received account needs to be examined
more closely and, at some points, modified.
31 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, TheAutobiography of an Unknown Indian (Bombay, 1964

edn.), pp. 249-55; Bhabatos Ray, Biplabi Pulin Das [The Revolutionary Pulin Das]
(Calcutta, I965), pp. 38-53, I00-3; Sumit Sarkar, op. cit., pp. 471-3; Gopal Halder,
"Revolutionary Terrorism", in Atul Gupta (ed.), Studies in the Bengal Renaissance
(Jadavpur, 1958); Pulin Behari Das, Lathikhela o asisiksa [Lathi- and Sword-Play]
(Calcutta, 1924), introduction, pp. 1-2, I 1-I3.
32 Information about this has to be gleaned from survivors and from fugitive
sources: Birendranath Basu, "Sarbajanin Durgotsaber adi katha" [The Origins of
the Public Durga Festival], and the obituary of Amarnath Basu, both in Simla
Byayam Samiti, Subarna jayanti sarbajanin Durgotsab [Golden Jubilee Festival
Programme] (Calcutta, 1975); interviews with Sri Birendranath Basu, Sri Sama-
rendranath Basu, Sri Krishna Kundu, Sri Bimal Maitra and Sri Rakhal Chandra
Saha, all conducted in October and November I975. See also Birendranath Ghos,
Bangalir bahubal, pp. 141-3.
33 Nalini Kishor Guha, Banglay biplabbad [The Revolutionary Movement in
Bengal], 4th edn. (Calcutta, 1969), pp. 12-13; Sajanikanta Das, introduction to Umes
Mallik, Yader gayejor ache [Those who are Strong] (Calcutta, 1946); Bimanbehari
Majumdar, Militant Nationalism in India (Calcutta, I966), pp. 7, Io3; Bipin
Chandra Pal, Memories of My Life and Times, i, pp. 264-6; Jaladhar Sen, preface to
Birendranath Ghos, op. cit.; report of I 5th anniversary meeting of Baghbazar Gym-
nasium, in Amrita Bazar Patrika, 2 Dec. 1925; Birendranath Basu, Bharatir kusti o
tahar siksa [Indian Wrestling and its Study] (Calcutta, 1934), p. i.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
The following questions need to be asked. How far did the Bengali
physical education movement differ from other such manifestations of
nationalism? If the self-image of effeteness was in some way peculiar to
Bengal, how far did it reflect reality? How deeply rooted in Hindu
tradition was the movement, and on the other hand how far was it
shaped by the influence of British rulers and British culture? Finally,
why was the movement persistently yet ambiguously involved with
non-respectable or excluded elements such as bandits, low castes and
Muslims?
The Bengali movement was in many ways like other nationalist
revivals of physical culture in Europe, in China, and in India itself.
The deliberate revival of traditional sports or the new emphasis given
them - as with Indian wrestling and lathi-play - can be paralleled
in early nineteenth-century Hungary (horse-races) and also in late
nineteenth-century Ireland (the old sport of hurling). In early nine-
teenth-century Scandinavia and Germany body-building went
together with a cult of ancient heroes, a call to national self-defence,
and a devotion to folk music and folk dance.34
The Bengali elite's sense of degradation and weakness had a good
deal in common with that voiced by Mao Tse-Tung in his pre-Marxist
phase: "Our state", as he wrote in 1917, "is weak. The military condi-
tion is not honoured. The physical condition of our people is
deteriorating from day to day". He denounced the ill effects of exces-
sive study and went on to preach a combination of gymnastic exer-
cises, activism and military spirit. Earlier, about the turn of the
century, the Chinese secret societies that led the Boxer Rebellion com-
bined traditional religious inspiration with puritanical avoidance of
women and other sources of sensual pleasure; the shading-off among
them of physical into supernatural powers, and the charges sometimes
brought against them of disreputable activities such as brigandage,
can - as will be seen- both be found in the Bengali movement. Oi
the other hand the popular tradition of secret societies taken up with
martial arts and physical training seems to have been more plainly an
expression of dissidence than anything at all comparable at popular
level in Bengal, and hence more straightforwardly available to a
nationalist such as the young Mao.3
Among other Indian communities of the late nineteenth and early
34 There appears to be no systematic treatment of physical education in its rela-

tion to nationalism. See J. G. Dixon et al., Landmarks in the History of Physical
Education (London, 1957), esp. the articles by J. G. Dixon and P. C. McIntosh;
G. Barany, Stephen Szechenyiand the Awakening of Hungarian Nationalism, I791-
I84I (Princeton, 1968), pp. 167, 172, 180-3.
35 Mao Tse-Tung, Une etude de l'education physique, ed. and trans. S. R. Schram
(Paris and The Hague, 1962); V. Purcell, The Boxer Uprising (Cambridge, 1963),
pp. I60-5, 235-8; J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, ii (Cambridge,
1956), pp. I45-6.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
twentieth century exclamations at their own fallen state

to come by. "We are now the menials, we are now the por
vile men ... everything of ours has been broken and torn
a poet on his fellow-Muslims, echoed early in the twentieth
the great Iqbal's lament over the latter-day "age of the pe
... Where, in Muslim's hand
Will he find dagger or rifle? And if there were,
Our hearts have lost all memory of delight
In death.
So too a leading poet of south India lamented: "we Tamils have lost
our prowess, our heroism; we have no land, no kingdom; we do not
have our own rulers; will the Goddess of Knowledge ... be born
here?".36
A semi-mythical notion of physical downfall and resurgence during
the British period is - to judge from the thin English-language
literature - still held among some Indian (non-Bengali) teachers of
physical education. Resurgence is said to have come about through the
regions and institutions the writer is best acquainted with, for in-
stance, through Maharashtra and Maratha institutions. The writers
who lay particular stress on downfall and resurgence are those who are
committed to indigenous modes of physical culture, as against the
western sports (hockey, football, cricket) that became popular in India
from the 88os onwards.37
For all these resemblances, the Bengali elite still seems peculiar in
its markedly physical sense of collective degradation. In the work of
Iqbal and the other Indian writers quoted, the collective grievance was
subjection, decline from a high estate, enslavement to western culture:
though Iqbal was prepared to deride the brainy but physically flabby
graduate38 there was no hint that entire Indian groups (Tamils, say, or
Muslims) were constitutionally weak. In modern works by non-
Bengali physical educationists the accounts of Indian physical decline
seem perfunctory. Even in the British period a number of elite groups
(leading Muslims, Rajputs, Marathas) could identify themselves with
traditions of imperial or royal rule and of military valour; some were
officially designated by the British as "martial races". The one group
that had to wrestle with a notion of its own constitutional weakness
36 Kaikobad, "Abahan" [Evocation] (1894), quoted in Sufia Ahmed, "Some

Aspects of the History of the Muslim Community in Bengal, 1884-1912" (London
Univ., S.O.A.S., Ph.D. thesis, 1960), p. 477; "Jehad" [Holy War], in Poems from
Iqbal, trans. V. G. Kiernan, 2nd edn. (London, I955), p. 62; Subramania Bharati,
quoted in S. Vijaya Bharati, Subramania Bharati: Personality and Poetry (New
Delhi, I975), P. 3.
37 C. Tirunarayanan and S. Hariharan, An Analytical History of Physical Educa-
tion (Karaikudi, 1967), pp. 3-29, 36-7; D. C. Mujumdar (ed.), Encyclopaedia of
Indian Physical Education (Baroda, 1950), pp. 8-24, 450-2; Eraj Ahmed Khan,
History of Physical Education (Patna, 1964), pp. 345 ff.
38 Thought and Reflections of Iqbal, ed. S. A. Vahid (Lahore, 1964), p. 42.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
was the Bengali elite perhaps akin in this, though not in other
ways, to certain groups that have felt themselves victims of a great
catastrophe: Jews before the founding of Israel, and perhaps Highland
Gaels after the Clearances, come to mind.39
It may be said - it is said by some Indians and by some old India
hands in Britain -that the Bengali elite was indeed effete and the
stereotype was justified. If this implies a verdict of moral, spiritual or
cultural "decadence" I am unable to pursue the discussion, finding as
I do the concept of decadence meaningless in historical explanation. If
it implies that the elite's belief in its own physical inferiority was
warranted (along perhaps with some of the material explanations
advanced for it) then the statement can at least be inquired into.
The late nineteenth century, when the self-image of effeteness
established itself, was the heyday of physical anthropology. Its most
authoritative exponent in the Government of India, H. H. Risley,
was confident that Bengalis could be "recognized at a glance"; he
identified them, on the strength of nose measurements, as members of
the "Mongolo-Dravidian type" (somewhat more Dravidian in west
Bengal, more Mongol in east Bengal). But he did not go on to give
scientific warrant for the stereotype of effeteness. At most, Risley's
observation that Indians' height decreased as you went down the
Ganges or towards the south - unimpeachable as a very general rule
turned, in the hands of a popularizer, into the statement that one of
the main characteristics of Bengalis was low stature.40
Even if the physical anthropologists had got further with their work
and whatever one might think of their assumptions - such state-
ments would run into an immovable obstacle. This is the difficulty of
knowing at any time in the nineteenth century who might be meant by
Bengalis. The Muslims of Bengal (a slight majority) were generally
not thought of as Bengalis, by themselves or by others, at least into the
early twentieth century.41 Many of those who complained of Bengali
effeteness clearly had in mind English-educated, mainly high-caste
Hindus; yet Sarala Debi with her talk of railway-porters (who in such
a multilingual province might not even be Bengali-speaking) seemed
to have in mind the population as a whole. The question of fact seems
unanswerable.
As a matter of naive observation, present-day Bengalis (defined, still
39 See Alexander Carmichael (ed.), Carmina Gadelica, 2nd edn., 5 vols. (Edin-
burgh, 1928-41), iii, pp. 328-9, 350-5.
40 H. H. Risley, The People of India (London and Calcutta, 1908), pp. 39-4I;
J. D. Anderson, The Peoples of India (Cambridge, I 9 I 3) p. 28.
41 See Sufia Ahmed, op. cit.; Mohammed Abdul Awwal, "The Prose Works of Mir
Masarraf Hosen, 1869-1 899" (London Univ., S.O.A.S., Ph.D. thesis, 967); Mustafa
Nurul Islam, ''Bengalee Muslim Public Opinion as Reflected in the Vernacular Press
between 1901 and 1930" (London Univ., S.O.A.S., Ph.D. thesis, 1971); Anil Seal,
Emergence of Indian Nationalism, ch. 7.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
shakily, as Bengali-speakers) do not seem to diverge very widely from

the subcontinental average of size and muscular development
which of course leaves them smaller than some and implies wide varia-
tions. Even if we suppose the Bengali physique to have improved in
this century there seems no obvious reason to think that it has
improved more than that of other Indians. We are thus driven to
hypothesize that whatever the justification for it and there may
have been some the stereotype of Bengali physical puniness and
fragility was overdrawn.
The story, so often repeated, that physical culture had all but
vanished from Bengal up to the I86os also seems exaggerated. There is
scattered evidence that akhras were active in and about Calcutta in
the early and mid-nineteenth century. Titu Mir, the Muslim rebel
leader of the I 830s, is said in his youth to have exercised at an akhra
in his village; later, in Calcutta, he defeated several well-known
wrestlers. The first Hindu Mela, in I867, clearly drew upon existing
skill and practice among Bengalis. Ambikacaran Guha, or Ambu-
babu, outstanding among the athletes then on display, was a rich
member of a business family who pursued wrestling as a pastime.
Abinascandra Ghosh, known as "the last natural Bengali palwan
[strong man]", was a landholder rich enough to own a garden house in
north Calcutta where some of the young athletes of the I87os first
exercised; at one Hindu Mela he beat ten Panjabi and Pathan
wrestlers one after the other. Yet others taking part in athletics at the
1868 Mela were "some of the skilful men of the lower orders". The
Hindu Mela, then, did not revive physical culture from scratch,
though it may have spread the practice among the elite and invested it
with a new tone.42
Late nineteenth-century Bengalis' account of their own physical
weakness and of the utter decline of physical education among them
needs to be taken not as a fact (though it may have had some basis in
fact) but as an attempt to explain and, literally, to body forth a cul-
tural crisis. In particular it must be explained by the long-drawn-
out, ambiguous relationship between the elite and the British.
Dvijendranath Tagore at one of the early Hindu Melas came upon a
picture that was about to be exhibited as a sample of modern Indian
art; it showed a group of Indians kneeling before Britannia and
saluting her with joined palms. "Turn it round!", he exclaimed.
Though the group to which Dvijendranath belonged wished to assert
42 A. G. Siddiqi, Sahid Titumir [The Martyr Titu Mir], 2nd edn. (Dacca, 1968),
quoted in Amalendu De, Bangali buddhijibi o bicchinnatabad [Bengali Intellectuals
and Separatism] (Calcutta, 1974), pp. 98-9; National Paper, 17 Apr., 15 May 1867
and 22 Apr. I868; Birendranath Ghos, Bangalir bahubal, pp. 3-4, 26-9, 31. Abina-
scandra Ghosh was a cousin of Manmathanath Mitra, an early nationalist and an
organizer of the Hindu Mela.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
"nationality",43 the cultural idiom available to it (as to many other

members of the elite) was in large part British. The more wide-awake
Bengali Hindus had sincerely taken to the thought of Mill and
Spencer and all that went with it; but by the 870s they were beginn-
ing to meet with rebuff from more and more of the British, for whom
an increasing sense of hierarchy and authority was beginning to
colour Liberal ideology (while educated Bengalis were beginning to
seem a threat to the monopoly of high-ranking I.C.S. jobs). In Mann-
oni's formulation, these members of the elite had fallen into the
essential colonial relationship of dependence; now, under these new
strains, they were travelling the "road from psychological dependence
to inferiority".44
When Rajnarayan Basu (author of a famous lecture claiming
primacy for Hinduism over the other religions) complained of the
effeteness of the younger generation, one of his pieces of evidence was
that the young no longer spoke of Bacon and Newton in the Bengali
high honorific mode. Earlier, in the I85os or early i86os, it was a
certain Captain Beadle of the irrigation department who had got him
interested in physical culture -specifically, in building a fives and
rackets court in the government school of which the young Raj-
narayan was headmaster.45 Though he and his fellows complained of
their own dependence they went right on being dependent on the
British - for knowledge of their own effeteness and for some of the
remedies they took to.
Hindu culture in its characteristic multiplicity of "paths" could, it
is true, have offered alternatives- though not such as Brahmos could
readily take. In a general way the notion of a fourfold division of castes
in which one division was supposedly made up of warriors, and the
allied notion of dharma (the duty to fulfil one's life-task as a member
of a particular caste), could have underwritten a search for vigour and
militancy, though with some awkward contortions for those not
warriors by caste. More specifically, there was in India a long-standing
tradition of militant physical culture carried on by naked fighting
ascetics, most of them devotees of Siva. By the I87os such armed
monks could still be seen in parts of the subcontinent, but no longer in
Bengal: there they could only be objects of scholarly study.46 By the
period of "social reaction" in the I88os Bankim Chandra could
43 Bagal, Hindu melar itibrtta, pp. 19-20.
44 0. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban (London, 1956 edn.), p. 84.
45 Rajnarayan Basu, Se kal ar e kal, pp. 84-5; Rajnarayan Basu, Atmacarit
[Autobiography], 3rd edn. (Calcutta, 1952), pp. 7I-6.
46 J. N. Farquhar, "The Fighting Ascetics of India", Bull. John Rylands Lib., ix
(1925), pp. 431-52; Aksay Kumar Datta, Bharatbarsiya upasak sampraday [Indian
Ascetic Groups], ed. Binoy Ghose (Calcutta, 1969 edn.), pp. 232, 246-7; G. S.
Ghurye, Indian Sadhus (Bombay, 1964 edn.), p. I 113, and ch. 0. The word akhra or
akhada - used in nineteenth-century Bengal to mean a gymnasium - in other parts
of India meant a meeting- or dwelling-place, or regiment of naked militant ascetics.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
imagine such monks (in his historical novel Anandamath)4

a struggle for the liberation of Bengal. Here and in his oth
he deliberately drew upon the traditional warrior virt
traditional Hindu belief in the supernatural physical powe
by great spirituality. Though these works were to be highl
(on Sarala Debi, and on leaders of the terrorist moveme
easy to say how literally their supernatural aspect was tak
At a more mundane level, members of the physical cult
ment, right from the first Hindu Mela, drew for some o
upon the traditional system of physical self-mastery called
There was always some stress laid on exceptional physi
the extreme, bending iron bars with one's teeth, having on
alive for a time, supporting enormous weights. The very
taught in government schools often had a strong element
body-building or acrobatics, or both - a trait which Beng
education seems to have in common with that of other pa
even though, all the way from I870 to I940, some
ministrators at times expressed disapproval.48
Nevertheless Bengali physical culture from the I87os on
marked at least as much by the influence of British of
supporters of British rule -men who acted on ground
widely different from those put forward by Bengali nati
key figure here was Sir George Campbell, lieutenant-
Bengal in 187 I-4.
Campbell -a Liberal activist and a King Stork who w
self into the ground by trying to follow everything up i
introduced a series of reforms aimed at making governm
education wider and more practical; he was especially i
that perennial will-o'-the-wisp, an effective system of pr
tion in the villages, and, at higher levels, in bringing in sc
technical subjects. Physical culture was a minor part
gramme. Nevertheless he did find money to start gym
appoint teachers of physical education in a number of
colleges. Together with the inspectors of schools he tried to
tions to action and to control the kinds of physical cultur
approving "ordinary" but not acrobatic exercises, po
English-type horses; at one point he allowed the Calcut
(Muslim school) to buy gymnastic apparatus by diverti
tended for Arabic books. Within a few years, in 1875, the
47 Bankim Chandra, Anandamath (Calcutta, 1883).

48 Bagal, op. cit., pp. 58-60; interview with Sri Sasanka Sanya
Birendranath Ghos, op. cit.; Vasant G. Rele, The Mysterious Kund
I93 ), pp. 9, 7 I; and, for British objections, the proceedings of Sir G.
note 49 below); Eraj Ahmed Khan, History of Physical Education
Danielson, Health and Physical Education for Schools in India (C
p. I7.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
number of government schools and colleges put on a grand demonstra-

tion outside the lieutenant-governor's mansion; all but four of the
pupils were Bengali Hindus. Here the British equipment came into
play that was to figure in Indian physical culture from then on - the
parallel bars, rings, trapeze, wooden horse - though Indian gym-
nastics and wrestling were also on show and, official disapproval
notwithstanding, some tightrope-walking and acrobatics.49
Campbell started from a benevolent version of the usual British
stereotype of Bengalis as acutely intelligent but physically effete. In
another of his reforms he therefore introduced riding and walking
tests for competitive entrants to the subordinate civil service. His
physical education measures, he wrote, would promote those qualities
of "physical energy, activity and endurance" which were "the great
want" among Bengalis; the tests- which had met some opposition
held out to them standards "by which they will gradually fit
themselves to emulate Europeans"; if the measures succeeded, "the
Bengali race may have a great future before it".50
In all this Campbell and the other British officials of his day were
working alongside rather than against the Hindu Mela group with its
proto-nationalist stirrings. From the beginning the Hindu Mela was
patronized by high British officials; at one Calcutta akhra Campbell
himself handed out medals. Though the tone of Indo-British relations
was changing, those were still days when the man who was to succeed
Campbell as lieutenant-governor could give public readings from the
Mahabharata in English translation, and when another British civil
servant could read a paper to an Anglo-Bengali debating society on
"Bodily Training as an Agent in National Regeneration". Exhorta-
tions to physical fitness came, besides, from the civil servant Sir
Charles Trevelyan and from the philanthropist Mary Carpenter.51
Although some of the British in India appealed to Prussian and
49 C. E. Buckland, Bengal under the Lieutenant-Governors, 2 vols. (Calcutta,
1901), i, pp. 482-5, 518-39, 570-I; India Office Records (hereafter I.O.R.), Bengal
Education Proc., vol. 163, July 1872, no. 113; Oct. 1872, nos. 9, 14-15; Nov. 1872,
nos. I8, 20; Dec. 1872, nos. i6-I8; vol. 164, Jan. I873, file 1/1-4, p. 39; Mar. 1873,
file 38/I-4, pp. 178-9; "B" Proc., 1873 (summary), 31 May, file 77/4-6, io June, file
69/2-4, 29 Oct., file I5I/I-3, 22 Nov., file 69/5-7; Bagal, op. cit., pp. 73-5. The
colleges where physical education was started were those of Dacca, Hooghly, Patna
and Berhampur, along with the Calcutta Madrassa and Normal School and schools at
Cuttack, Barrackpur, Howrah, Bhagalpur and elsewhere. Archana Mandal, "The
Ideology and the Interests of the Bengali Intelligentsia: Sir George Campbell's
Education Policy, 1871-74", Indian Econ. and Social Hist. Rev., xii (1975), pp.
81-98, does not deal with physical education.
50 I.O.R., Official Publications, Bengal Administration Report, 1872-3, intro-
duction, p. 48.
51 National Paper, 12 June 1867, I8 Mar., 15 Apr., I6 May I868; Bipinbihari
Gupta, Puratan prasanga (Calcutta, I966 edn.), pp. 215-16. After Sir Richard
Temple's public readings from the Mahabharata the vote of thanks was moved by the
nationalist playwright Girish Chandra Ghosh. The author of the paper on "Bodily
Training" was H. Le Poer Wynne (addressing the Bethune Society).

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
French physical education as a model52 it seems reasonable to suppose

that Campbell's reforms flowed in the main from changes in Britain
From the I85os to the I87os the practice of sending boys to publi
schools (many of them new or newly reformed) was taking a fast hold
among the British business and professional classes; within the public
schools those years saw a shift to the cult of "manly sports" and the
rise of muscular Christianity.53 The army reforms carried through
after the Crimean War included the adoption of a system of gymnasti
exercises and the setting up in I86I of the Aldershot Gymnasium
These changes influenced British administrators in India, as usual
little late.
The viceroy in I870 - just ahead of the Campbell reforms in
Bengal - launched the idea of "an Eton in India" to enable the sons
of Indian princes to be brought up "as a gentleman should be"; it
should be staffed by "thoroughly educated Englishmen, not mere
bookworms, but men fond of field sports and outdoor exercises .. .".
Within the decade not only was the college set up but a later viceroy
was exhorting its pupils to keep up the aristocratic qualities of
"energy, fearlessness, the love of healthful exercise, an instinctive
scorn of all unmanly ease. No race, no class can long maintain its
social and moral ascendancy if it degenerates in physical vigour".54
Campbell's Bengal reforms, like his education policy in general, had
a more democratic and utilitarian bent (though in practice they
affected the educated classes most). But his insistence on mens sana in
corpore sano and his scorn for mere cram were an I87os common-
place.
He and his officials also seized on the work of Archibald MacLaren,
the author of the gymnastic system adopted by the army at home: they
quoted him as an authority and his books were used in government
colleges. MacLaren, head of the Oxford Gymnasium, was so well
attuned to the spirit of the time as to appeal in his writings both to the
Darwinian survival of the fittest and to the national aspirations of
Continental peoples, conveyed through rhymed fairy-tales: these in-
cluded patriotic stories of Joan of Arc and Karageorge of Serbia, as
well as much northern European mythology. MacLaren thus makes a
neat unconscious link between the followers of Turnvater Jahn in
early nineteenth-century Germany and the Bengali nationalists of the
I89os and I goos, some of whom were to be trained on his principles.55
52 Report of Committee on Establishment of a Civil Service Department at

Hooghly College: I.O.R., Bengal Education Proc., vol. 163, July 1872, no. 7.
53 See D. Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning (London, 1961).
54 H. Sherring, The Mayo College ..., I875-895, 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1897), i,
pp. 1-5, i8i.
55 I.O.R., Bengal Education Proc., vol. 163, Oct. 1872, nos. 55-7; Dec. 1872,
no. I7; F. Boase, Modern English Biography, 6 vols. (London, 1965 edn.), s.v.
MacLaren; A. MacLaren, A System of Physical Education, Theoretical and Practical
(cont. on p. 140)

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
Government colleges were a means of both fostering and perpetuat-

ing the elite. It was here that notions of Bengali effeteness struck
home; for effeteness meant a want of the virtues proper to an elite.
Missionary schools more often catered for Indians of humbler status.
This may explain why - to judge from scattered and largely negative
evidence - missionaries up to the I870s were concerned with the
spiritual, moral and intellectual progress of their charges, in that
order, scarcely at all with their physical fitness.56 In the I88os and
189os we do find one or two examples of missionary schools catering
for the Indian elite where physical education had recently been
brought in as a means of instilling "combined action" and "voluntary
subordination".7 A famous missionary headmaster and copy-book
muscular Christian, Tyndale-Biscoe, laid particular stress on
cleanliness as well as on sports. In this he followed the Calcutta
rationalist and educational pioneer, David Hare: where Hare had
been content to give dirty boys a stroke or two of the cane58 Biscoe
threw them into the river with a rope attached. He forced his brahman
teachers to row and made his whole school turn out daily in twenty-
five seconds flat to exercise on the usual gymnastic apparatus ("we
just hustle the east"). He denied that making over Indian "jellyfish"
might endanger British rule - "let us deal with men".59 Though the
evidence is sketchy, missionaries may have played some part in
encouraging Bengalis to look upon body-building as equivalent to
character- and hence to nation-building.
Nor was this the last of British educational influence. As late as the
1930s the Bratachari movement, a high-minded Scout-type movement
dedicated to the cult of past Bengali glories, sports and folk arts, could
be launched by Guru Saday Datta, a member of the I.C.S. and (in his
(note 55 cont.)
(Oxford, 1869), p. 22; A. MacLaren, The Fairy Family: A Series of Ballads and
Metrical Tales Illustrating the Fairy Mythology of Europe (London, I857; 2nd edn.,
London, 1874); A. MacLaren, A Military System of Gymnastic Exercises for the Use
of Instructors (London, 1862).
56 W. Adam, Reports on the State of Education in Bengal, i835 and 1838, ed.
Anathnath Basu (Calcutta, I941), pp. 146-7; A. Duff, India and India Missions
(London, I839); J. Mullens, A Brief Review of Ten Years' Missionary Labour
(London, I863), pp. II9-20; C. B. Leupoldt, Further Recollections of an Indian
Missionary (London, 1884); L. G. Mylne, Missions to Hindus (London, Ig98);
memorandum by Calcutta Missionary Conference, "Educational Movements in
India", Church Missionary Intelligencer, new ser., vi (Oct. I870).
57 H. F. Blackett, Two Years in an Indian Mission (London, 1884), pp. 94-6. The
author taught at Delhi High School in the early i88os. Though the examples
available come from north India, they may point to similar changes in Bengal.
58 Rajnarayan Basu, Atmacarit, p. 2I.
59 C. E. Tyndale-Biscoe, Character-Building in Kashmir (London, 1920), pp. 3-8,
2I, 47-53. Kashmir, where Biscoe worked, was a princely state, exempt from direct
rule: the alleged effeteness of its upper classes had not the full implications of the
Bengali stereotype. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout
movement, advocated in his preface to Biscoe's book the use of the same methods in
British slums: ibid., p. i.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM IN BENGAL I4I
earlier days at least) a supporter of British rule. Guru Sad

fluenced - like his friend Rabindranath Tagore - by th
Japan, but he was also deeply affected by the British fol
typified by Cecil Sharp.60
At all times from the I86os onwards, then, the physica
movement could draw on some kind of British inspi
support; even in the I930S it did not have to be ostens
against British rule. The reasons were no doubt that phy
per se could seem neutral, that among the British upper
classes its value was unquestioned, and that Bengalis who
alized the stereotype of effeteness did not necessarily ro
who had taught it to them. At the same time some Beng
from the 189os onwards, see physical culture as a militant
a training for national revolution; even as they toughene
and revived traditional sports they still drew upon the Bri
of the materials that went to make a myth of decline and
The chief task that faces nationalist elite groups - accor
argument put forward by Brass61 - is that of bringi
gruence, in the society they claim to speak for, identifyin
or most of which are, to begin with, disparate. This was
severe problem in the all-India nationalist movement, and
proved an insoluble one. Within Bengal a look at the a
Bengali identity in the physical education movement may
light on the difficulties of building up and holding toget
Bengal nationalism.
The myth of effeteness and resurgence, made as it was
part by the Hindu elite, had something of an oddly unreso
say about low-caste men, Muslims and Eurasians. The bur
was that in the days of decline physical culture was left
proto-nationalists of the 86os and I87os on occasion p
some glee to the troops of lathiyals (retainers armed
staves) maintained by big landholders to overawe tenants
rivals, though they sometimes added - unrealistically
things no longer went on: past or present, lathiyals were
Bengalis could indeed attain physical and military prow
60 Guru Saday Datta, Bratacari-paricay [Introduction to Bratach
1941), preface, and pp. 83-9I; Guru Saday Datta, Bratacari-marmm
of Bratachari Thought] (Calcutta, I 938), pp. I 7, 4 I, 57, I 35-6; inform
Barun De. Guru Saday's 1 934 collection of songs for his movement i
to the tune of Tipperary, chosen on the grounds that it was good fo
popular in Bengal, and had been sung by soldiers under fire: Gur
Bratacari-sakha [Friend of Bratachari] (Calcutta, I934), pp. I7-18. F
nath Tagore's attempt to introduce ju-jitsu into his school, see
Mukhopadhyay, Rabindra-jibani [Life of Rabindra], 4 vols. (Calcutt
p. 266.
61 p. R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India (L
introduction, and p. 410.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
point was not insisted upon, perhaps because many lathiyals were
Muslims, hence, in common parlance, not proper Bengalis. Again,
only incidentally do we discover Eurasian teachers in the akhras set up
or inspired by members of the Hindu Mela group (and intended to
mould a Bengali Hindu "nation"), not to mention a British teacher in
charge of Nabagopal Mitra's own gymnastic school. These might be
explained by the shortage of Bengali Hindu teachers in the early days.
But thirty years later, when Pulin Behari Das set up an akhra in
Dacca to teach Bengalis to defend themselves against insults and
attacks from the British, he employed first a Muslim lathiyal and then
another Muslim who called himself Professor Martaza. A former
circus performer of part-British descent, Martaza had already trained
Sarala Debi's circle of young adepts in lathi- and dagger-play. Other
east Bengal clubs began in the same way with Muslim lathiyals as the
instructors - even though members came to see self-defence against
Muslims as a chief aim of the training.62
What in fact were the relations between different social groups
within the physical education movement? Any analysis must be im-
pressionistic: the evidence is patchy and not always easy to interpret
(Bengali surnames, for instance, do not always indicate caste, let alone
class).
We will start from a figure that seems to have loomed behind
people's thinking about physical culture. This was the big landholder,
somewhere in the interior of Bengal, surrounded by his lathiyals and
other retainers and engaging with them not only in sports and gym-
nastics but in hunting and tiger-taming. Such figures undoubtedly had
existed well before Calcutta intellectuals started worrying over their
own effeteness. A late survival was the maharaja of Muktagachia in
Mymensingh district, who flourished round about 900o: he was a
famous wrestler and both kept and taught wrestlers.63 But, Mukta-
gachia apart, the stories we have of "strong man" landholders
quickly merge into legend. Thus the record of two such landholders in
widely separated parts of Bengal speaks of their having, as young men,
stopped a tiger (or a wild elephant or forest buffalo or runaway horse)
single-handed; both are also said to have put to flight a threatening
gang of bandits.64 We seem to have here approximations to the com-
mon legendary figure of the young prince (typically incognito or in
62National Paper, 24 Apr. 1867, 18 July, 18 Nov. 1868; Bipinbihari Gupta,
Puratan prasanga, pp. 215-I6; Abanindrakrsna Basu, Bangalir sarkus, pp. I-3;
Bhabatos Ray, BiplabiPulin Das, pp. 38-47; Nirad Chaudhuri, Autobiography (1964
edn.), pp. 250-I.
63 Birendranath Ghos, Bangalir bahubal, pp. 141-2; interview with Sri Sama-
rendranath Basu, Oct. I975. The maharaja's name was Jagatkishor Acharya
Chaudhuri.
64 Birendranath Ghos, op. cit., pp. 112-20. The two men are named as
Harachandra Mukhopadhyay of Maluti, near Rampurhat, and Baidyanath
Mazumdar of Bejura, in Mymensingh district. No dates are given.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND NATIONALISM IN BENGAL
I43
reduced circumstances, as one of these was) who by his un

saves the people from some great danger.
After this it seems natural to find, not a landholder bu
brahman in a crowded area of north Calcutta, the star
career as a propagator of physical culture has come down
same semi-legendary terms. Gaurmohan Mukherjee (b
said as a boy to have led a group of his fellows in ri
neighbourhood of drunks and "miscreants"; his physical f
do not with tigers or elephants but with extraordinary d
Hooghly over three boats. He became a famous stron
teacher and founded many akhras. Aspects of Gaurm
recur in those of other leaders. Thus his pupil Priyana
began by leading the boys of his village akhra just outsid
social service tasks - clearing jungle, repairing roads
while Atulkrishna Ghosh, a landholder of Uluberia, west
and a famous lathi-player and teacher, traced his skill ult
bandit with a Robin Hood-like reputation for stealing from
give to the poor.65
What we have here is the single charismatic leader, as a
young, no longer necessarily a landholder, possibly but no
of high caste, round whom other young men and legends
This seems to have been the kind of person who did most
physical culture in and about Calcutta between I860
Characteristically the young man opens an akhra, perhap
house (Bengali akhras need little by way of premises or eq
draws the young men of the neighbourhood to join him,
hires one or two professional low-caste or Muslim instruc
then go on to found many akhras (perhaps as many as fi
neighbourhoods. But the original akhra or the whole grou
splits or vanishes as rival leaders spring up or the origina
interest. Finally, however, fresh akhras may come into b
same neighbourhood under new leaders.66
A Calcutta neighbourhood amounted to no more than a
inhabited streets. In those streets it was not difficult for
adolescents by western standards - to form round a leade
of tightly knit, intensely loyal group called a dal. The da
ever, exceedingly liable to splits, in turn leading to the f
yet other dais. The process has been studied in ninetee
politics.67 Calcutta dais of popular make-up - that is, not
65 Ibid., pp. 139-40; Abanindrakrsna Basu, op. cit., pp. 4-9, 68; inter
Samarendranath Basu and Sri Birendranath Basu, Oct. I975.
66 See the careers of Gaurmohan Mukherjee, Priyanath Basu, Bh
Krishnalal Basak and Atindranath Basu as described in Abanindrak
cit.; Birendranath Ghos, op. cit.
67 S. N. Mukherjee, "Caste, Class and Politics in Calcutta, 1815
Leach and S. N. Mukherjee (eds.), Elites in South Asia (Cambridge, 1
Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History, pp. 9I-4.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
students - took part in the 189os in the Bandomata movement: they

went about at festival time singing, dancing, and reciting verses that
hit out at social failings and sometimes stirred up personal scandal; the
performance might end in an affray.68 Above all, the dais with their
dadas (elder brothers, that is, leaders) were notoriously central to the
organization of the terrorist movement. The physical culture move-
ment as most young men experienced it - in neighbourhood akhras
rather than in government schools - seems to have followed the same
pattern of dal organization, and the same splitting-off process quickly
set in. Both in the literature and in the talk of survivors much is made
of who trained whom: the relationship of guru to disciple, dada to
follower, is the great thing.
The social composition of these dais cannot be fully made out. A
number of the leaders and teachers belonged to the category known as
"educated men". Landholders and attorneys are found among them.
Gaurmohan Mukherjee's mother was a "learned woman" and his
maternal uncle a traditional Sanskrit scholar. Priyanath Basu's father
was one of the founders of the Hindu Mela. A brother of Surendra-
nath Banerjea (the moderate nationalist leader and sometime I.C.S.
official) became a famous strong man. Another strong man, Barsati
Babu (Amarnath Ray), is said to have been a nephew of a Com-
missioner of Patna. On the other hand surnames characteristic of
trading and artisan castes can also be found (Basak, Kalu, Saha). In
the circus - an activity, as we shall see, closely bound up with
physical culture - one gets an impression of a mixture of odd mem-
bers of the upper castes or the educated category and people of unclear
but probably humble social origin.
Indeed there seems to have been a tension throughout the history of
the physical culture movement between the ideal of the gentleman
amateur and the temptation of professionalism. The Hindu Mela
group right from the start wanted the director of each new akhra to be
"a man of education and a gentleman" as well as a professional
athlete; but the two qualifications seem to have been felt as in some
way incompatible. Biographies of leaders stress that they were
educated gentlemen, relate that they "spent money like water" on
promoting physical culture, or claim that they gave instruction with-
out payment - a claim contradicted by former pupils. The ideal
seems to have been the liberal landholder who exercises and who
promotes physical culture as a social service. Going professional -
joining a circus or working for an Indian prince at a high salary -
attracted censure. Gaurmohan Mukherjee disapproved of his pupi
Priyanath Basu going into the circus; Amarnath Ray's family with its
I.C.S. connections prevented his taking service under the maharaja
68 Yadugopal Mukhopadhyay, Biplabi jibaner smrti [Reminiscences of a Revolu-
tionary] (Calcutta, 1956), p. I 17.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
of Cooch Behar; another famous strong man, Bhim Bhawani

(Bhabanicaran Saha), had to run away from home to join a circus
his mother had forbidden it.69
Already in the I86os and I87os there were complaints that sup-
posedly amateur physical culture clubs were being tempted into
giving displays in rich people's houses; these "abandoned boys" were
likened to performers ofpanchali (a kind of concert party) and yatra
(mythological opera). The temptations of professionalism in a very
poor society are understandable. Strength and athletic skill could be a
living. They could be a very good living from the I88os to the 1920S,
when the circus was at its most popular: one star performer of the
I88os is said to have earned 1,500 rupees (over £75) a month.70
Akhras with their patriotic and religious overtones could thus be an
avenue to a career. Priyanath Basu went on from founding akhras to
setting up Professor Bose's Great Bengal Circus; a number of other
akhra leaders, strong men, gymnasts, teachers of physical education in
government or private schools (these roles often overlapped) joined his
or other circuses or set up their own. Indeed these circuses seem to
have been almost as fissile as akhras; they may have worked on a
similar dal organization even though their Bengali leaders at times
joined forces with American, German or British animal-trainers. In
India they depended a good deal on engagements at the courts of
princes and maharajas; but from the end of the century onwards their
annual visits to Calcutta and other cities are said to have aroused as
much enthusiasm as football matches were to do from the I 93s. They
also toured abroad, mainly in South-East Asia, but also to Hong Kong
and Japan; individual performers reached Paris, Australia and the
United States.
Though the circus performers were, like most of their kind, an in-
ternational lot, enough of them were Bengalis for the circuses to be
regarded as proof of Bengali valour. A famous strong man often cited
in evidence, Syamakanta Banerjee, managed to work for a maharaja
as an animal-trainer, become a soldier in a princely state, teach
physical education in a government school, and perform in a circus
before he felt a call to become a monk and retired to the Himalaya,
where, under the name Soham Swami, he wrote a number of religious
books. He is supposed to have been enlightened by a meeting with an
ascetic whose arm, made strong by spirituality, he was unable to move.
Syamakanta's most celebrated feat had been to wrestle with a tiger;
69 National Paper, 30 Dec. I868; Birendranath Ghos, op. cit., pp. 5, 26-9, 31,
34 ff., 5o-I; Sankari Kinkar Datta, "Atiter smrti katha" [Memories of Bygone Days],
in Simla Byayam Samiti, Subarna jayanti sarbajanin Durgotsab; obituary of Gobar
Babu [Yatirindranath Guha], Byayam-carca, ix no. 2 (Feb. 1972).
70 National Paper, 18 Nov. 1868 and 8, 29 June 1870; Birendranath Ghos, op. cit.,
p. 23.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
such wrestling bouts - which others besides him undertook from

time to time- called out to an understandable Indian fascination
with tigers and tiger imagery, and appeared to set a seal on Bengali
courage.71
So too Professor Bose's Circus was praised for its "patriotic efforts
at wiping out the unjust stain of physical cowardice cast on the
Bengali community". The appearance of young women in tights who
played with a tiger on an elephant's back was greeted in the nationalist
press as evidence that even the female half of Bengali society -
supposed to be above all cowardly and fearful - could be as brave as
Europeans and Americans and no less emancipated: "they have raised
the Bengali nation in the estimation of the public". By the Swadeshi
movement of 905-I I it is clear that the circus leaders, whether their
original motives for launching their ventures had been purely
nationalistic or not, were going along eagerly with the stream of
nationalist sentiment: thus Priyanath Basu as ring-master made
Swadeshi speeches ending with the hymn Bande Mataram (Hail,
Mother!), and wrote the following song:
If you seek improvement
But ignore the great treasure of physical culture
The country, once higher than heaven,
Will now go to its doom!72
Professor Ramamurti Naidu from Madras, "India's Strongest

Man" and another circus leader, gave a lecture and demonstration in
Calcutta in I909 to advance the cause of National Education (the
movement to boycott government schools); somewhat later his
example in breaking an iron bar, stopping a motor car, and letting an
elephant stand on his chest started a Chittagong schoolboy on a path
that took him into the post-IgI8 terrorist movement.73
Strong men and circuses had shown, in the words of a raja of
Banaras, "what the natives of this country, even the Bengalis, can
do".74 Yet physical culture kept at all times a tinge of the disreputable.
In particular it kept an underground link with gang violence and
banditry, at any rate in the apprehensions of educated Bengalis.
Apologists of the movement complained right down to the 1930s that
upper-class parents refused to let their children engage in physical
culture on these grounds. Back in the 86os parents were said to have
kept their sons away from the parallel bars partly through fear of "the
71 Abanindrakrsna Basu, op. cit., pp. 63-5; Umes Mallik, Yader gaye jor ache,
pp. 79-84; interview with Sri Birendranath Basu, Oct. 1975.
72 Abanindrakrsna Basu, op. cit., pp. 29, 36-9.
73 Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee, Origins of the National Education
Movement (Jadavpur, I957), pp. 152-3; Birendranath Ghos, op. cit., pp. 33-4;
Ananta Simha, Agnigarbha Cattagram [Chittagong, Womb of Fire] (Calcutta, 1968),
PP. 4-5.
74 Abanindrakrsna Basu, op. cit., pp. 82-3 (my italics).

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
risk to life and limbs" and partly through the associa

strength with "blackguardism". In the 1930s many Be
to look upon physical culture as "gang violence or the f
buffaloes". But, as in the I86os, the young were suppos
away from such outgrown fears:
Now the young take no pleasure in going and sitting at the
Wah's [a well-known Calcutta restaurant], wearing Goldneck [p
of western-type shirt], holding a Gold Flake and puffing out s
occur to them that if they wrestle in a loincloth they will be take
nor do they hate the thought that if they fight with lathis on
ground they will be getting up to tricks fit for Doms [one of t
groups].75
Physical culture thus seemed to some people to be dangerous,

socially disreputable, and morally dubious. These fears were not quite
vain. Though the yogic tradition could be used to underwrite both
violence and non-violence there seems to have been no parallel in
Bengal to the Japanese concern with the ethical and minimal use of
violence in martial arts.76 On the contrary Pulin Behari Das dwelt on
the cuts and broken heads lathi-and-sword adepts might sustain; he
proudly claimed inheritance from Thugs (religiously dedicated
murderers) and bandits, the only survivors - as he saw it - of the
ancient Hindu warriors who had been driven into the forests by the
deplorable Buddhist cult of non-violence.7 In 1908, 1925 and 1946
- years of notable Hindu-Muslim tension - some of the most
famous physical culture clubs and leaders were busy organizing "self-
protection" of Hindus against Muslims; at such times the line between
"self-protection" and active organization of rioting was not always
clear.78
When one looks at the violence endemic in wide areas of Bengali
life, the odd thing is that groups of educated Bengalis should ever have
come to think of their nation as effete. Just when the educated men
round the Tagore family were lamenting in the I86os the degeneracy
and feebleness of Bengalis, a young man was growing up in an east
75 National Paper, 9 May i 869; Gobar Babu [Yatirindranath Guha], preface to
Birendranath Basu, Bharatir kusti o tahar siksa.
76 For an account of the vision that led P. Mitter [Pramathanath Mitra], one of the
founders of the Anusilan Samiti, to reinterpret yoga as non-violent, see Nalini Kishor
Guha, Banglay biplabbad, pp. 332-4; see also E. Westbrook and 0. Ratti, Aikido and
the Dynamic Sphere (Rutland, Vt., and Tokyo, 1970), pp. I7, 20, 23.
77 Pulin Behari Das, Lathikhela o asisiksa, introduction, and p. 94. Pulin claimed
that his old Muslim instructor Professor Martaza had learned lathi-, sword- and
dagger-play from some Thug prisoners he had made friends with in Poona gaol;
Martaza had later joined the Thugs in their remaining hide-outs in the Aravalli
mountains and learned still more of their secrets: Bhabatos Ray, Biplabi Pulin Das,
PP. 44-5.
78 Atindranath Basu, leader of the Simla Byayam Samiti (Simla Physical Culture
Club) in north Calcutta, is said to have organized Hindu "self-protection" not only
on the spot but as far afield as Pabna in east Bengal: interview with Sri Birendranath
Basu, Oct. 1975.

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC
Bengal village where two rival landholders, who had quarrelled over
land rights, kept troops of five or six hundred lathiyals apiece. These
men went armed with lathis, swords, shields; they used to catch oppos-
ing lathiyals by their long hair, drag them to the ground, wound them,
take them prisoner, sometimes kill them; there was much bragging
and shouting and one affray left many wounded.79 But men like these
did not just fight off other landholders' retainers. They served to
frighten or, if need be, beat up recalcitrant tenants, to exact the dues
the landholder chose to raise, and generally to impose his authority.80
Such violence was (and is) seldom far from the surface of Bengali as of
much other Indian rural life, though it has not always been carried on
by the same groups.
Educated Bengali nationalists, however, could not (but for a few
awkwardly jocular references in the early days) appeal to this kind of
rural brute force as evidence of national valour. It was exercised on
behalf of themselves or of people like themselves - principal or sub-
ordinate landholders - and it was exercised upon Bengal peasants in
defiance of principles which educated nationalists were coming to
adopt as their own: the rule of law, the equality of all citizens.
So although the redemption of educated Bengalis from the slur of
effeteness meant the calling in as instructors of helpers and servers
lathiyals, door-keepers, low-caste men and Muslims - these men were
not acknowledged as full members of the Bengali society that was
being redeemed. In the myth of physical downfall and resurgence the
educated elite appeared as sole actors. At most, when significant por-
tions of the elite had turned violently against the British in the
terrorist movement, some of the non-respectable helpers and servers
could in retrospect be given a halo of patriotic or Hindu fervour as
legendary great-hearted bandits. But the plague of Bengal was not
effeteness; it was poverty and oppression. This the myth could not
cope with; hence its discontinuities and contradictions. With the
departure of the British and the abolition of landholders' rights,
oppression did not vanish, but its terms shifted. The educated elite no
longer needed to find physical compensation for its inward anxieties,
and physical culture ceased to be the stuff of living nationalist legend.
University of Sussex John Rosselli
79 Krsnakumar Mitra, Atmacarit, pp. 74-5. This see

1865-70.
80 See the detailed picture of rural violence and oppression in Lal Behari Day,
Govinda Samanta (London, 1874), also published as Bengal Peasant Life (Calcutta,
1878).

128.210.126.199 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:51:25 UTC

Effete Ness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Effete Ness

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Effete Ness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Self-Image of Effeteness: Physical Education and Nationalism in Nineteenth-

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/650742

This content downloaded from

"A LOW LYING PEOPLE IN A LOW-LYING LAND" - SO RAN A FAVOURITE

British sneer at Bengalis about the turn of the century; to which a h

This content downloaded from

three caste groups traditionally uppermost in Bengal - brahmans

3 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London,

This content downloaded from

These were words read at a formative age by most British ad-

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

What had gone wrong? The physical explanation, elab

14 Krsnakumar Mitra, op. cit., pp. 69-7 , 85-6.

This content downloaded from

I8Ios to the i840s) and of law and government service as their

The babu's improper or ridiculous ways obsessed contemporaries

This content downloaded from

The historical-cultural account of Bengali "effeteness", finally

18 National Paper, I I May 870; Sarala Debi,Jibanerjharapata, pp. 134-6. I have

This content downloaded from

ling weapons, as well as self-government and social reform; all this

This content downloaded from

about i820 to I850 had had to do either with demand

This content downloaded from

through an intervening revival of Hindu social and religious ideas

This content downloaded from

play in which he insisted that without a healthy body and

31 Nirad C. Chaudhuri, TheAutobiography of an Unknown Indian (Bombay, 1964

This content downloaded from

34 There appears to be no systematic treatment of physical education in its rela-

This content downloaded from

twentieth century exclamations at their own fallen state

36 Kaikobad, "Abahan" [Evocation] (1894), quoted in Sufia Ahmed, "Some

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

shakily, as Bengali-speakers) do not seem to diverge very widely from

This content downloaded from

"nationality",43 the cultural idiom available to it (as to many other

This content downloaded from

imagine such monks (in his historical novel Anandamath)4

47 Bankim Chandra, Anandamath (Calcutta, 1883).

This content downloaded from

number of government schools and colleges put on a grand demonstra-

This content downloaded from

French physical education as a model52 it seems reasonable to suppose

52 Report of Committee on Establishment of a Civil Service Department at

This content downloaded from

Government colleges were a means of both fostering and perpetuat-

This content downloaded from

earlier days at least) a supporter of British rule. Guru Sad

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

reduced circumstances, as one of these was) who by his un

This content downloaded from

students - took part in the 189os in the Bandomata movement: they

This content downloaded from

of Cooch Behar; another famous strong man, Bhim Bhawani

This content downloaded from

such wrestling bouts - which others besides him undertook from