Polymath Extraordinaire: Life and Works of Brajendranath Seal

By Srikanta Chatterjee

Editors' Note: University Practice-Connect has published a set of articles describing the challenges of higher education, especially in countries like India. These articles discuss (a) the difficulty in addressing the specific social issue of these countries in the curriculum and pedagogy of higher education; (b) the irrelevance and the challenges in enhancing the reputation of universities/colleges in all countries on the basis of a common scale. Yet another challenge is to enhance the participation of academics from various countries in the organic production of useful knowledge. The segregation of disciplines also corrodes the intellectual wholesomeness and social usefulness of academic work. In such a context, the knowledge of the work of some earlier Indian academics, which cuts across disciplines and is rooted in the limited academic circumstances that prevailed then in India would be useful. This article on Acharya Brajendranath Seal is relevant in this context.

Introduction

The cultural and intellectual horizon of the 19^th century Bengal was illumined by a whole galaxy of outstandingly gifted personalities whose influence gradually spread to the rest of India and contributed to a societal and cultural resurgence which has come to be known as the Bengal, and the Indian, Renaissance. Somewhat surprisingly, the name of one of the most versatile of these luminaries has been largely forgotten. Acharya Brajendranath Seal (1864-1938), scholar, thinker, educational administrator and reformer. Seal’s range of intellectual interests spread across almost the entire field of knowledge, encompassing humanities and the sciences; education and aesthetics; language and literature; arts and architecture; sociology and anthropology; mathematics and statistics, and music. He is better known as a ‘philosopher’, probably because no other single description could capture his versatility adequately. In this essay, I discuss Seal’s life, his scholarly pursuits and some of his other involvements. I attempt this as a broad overview of Seal’s thoughts and works, mostly from secondary sources. A more thorough and critical appreciation of the achievements of this versatile genius must await the labours of another author.

Birth, family and early life

Seal was born in north Calcutta on 3 September 1864. Bengal experienced a devastating storm around the time of his birth, and Seal came to acquire the unflattering sobriquet, ‘Jhoro’, the ‘stormy’, or ‘troublesome’ one! His father, Mahendrnath Seal was a successful lawyer practising at the Calcutta High Court and his mother Radharani Devi was, by all accounts, a devoted mother and loving homemaker. Both his parents died before Seal was 9 years old, so he was cared for at his maternal grandfather’s family.  But, when his maternal grandfather also passed away soon after, Seal’s elder brother Rajendranath had to give up his studies to support Brajendranath and himself.

Education and career

After spending a short time in a single-teacher primary school (pathsala), Brajendranath joined the primary section of the General Assembly’s Institution (later, the Scottish Church Collegiate School). Progressing on to the secondary stage of this school, Brajendranath passed the University Entrance Examination in 1878 with a scholarship.  A brilliant student overall, Brajendranath’s favourite subject was mathematics. Anecdotes abound about his prodigious academic abilities. One of these is that he mastered the entire 4-year high-school mathematics curriculum in the first year and that he would often help solve difficult mathematical problems with much greater ease than his fellow students and, sometimes, even his teachers.

Seal advanced in due course to the college section of the same institution and passed, with high grades, first, the First Arts (FA) examination in 1880, and, then, the BA Honours in 1883. It is worth noting that it was in this college that Seal first met Narendranath Dutta or Naren, the future Swami Vivekananda, as a fellow student, who was a year older than Seal in age but a year behind him in the college. Their close friendship and life-long intellectual and spiritual journey together are the stuff of a legend. They were both greatly influenced by the, then, principal of the college, the scholarly metaphysician and sensitive poet, William Hastie, who, among other things, reportedly, aroused Narendranath’s interest in the spiritual life of Shri Ramakrishna Paramhansa of nearby Dakshineswar. The young Brajen and Naren were to pay the simple and mystical priest of Dakshineswar a visit together, but more of that later in the essay.

After graduating with first-class Honours in 1883, Seal continued his postgraduate studies in Mental and Moral Philosophy, a course which contained several subjects, including mathematics and philosophy. Seal’s proficiency in both of these (and others) was so extraordinary that to choose one of them as the subject for his postgraduate qualification was no easy task.  He chose Philosophy and was, again, awarded a first-class degree.

In the same year, Seal married Indumati, daughter of Joygopal Rakshit, a civil engineer of Assam. Indumati was English-educated and, by all accounts, well-read in English literature.  She would sometimes share with her husband her love of the works of the English poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. The marriage, however, did not last long as Indumati died young, in 1900, leaving behind three sons and a daughter.

Seal’s professional career as an academic can be split into two distinct parts, the first part covering his career in several affiliated colleges and the second in two universities.

Professional career: 1884 -1912

A Brahmo by choice for a while, Seal started his teaching career in 1884 as a lecturer of English at the City College, a Brahmo institution with which were connected several scholarly Brahmo elite of the time. The professional career path of a college teacher around that time was pretty limited in any single Indian province, as was the number of qualified teachers. Seal moved to Morris Memorial College in Nagpur in 1885, as a lecturer in Philosophy and English, and soon became its Principal. Family considerations, however, forced him to return to Bengal soon. In 1887, he joined the Berhampur Krishnanath College in Murshidabad as its Principal.

Founded under a government initiative in 1853, this college suffered a series of setbacks and saw its status decline from a first grade to a third-grade institution by 1883, apparently because of its unsatisfactory financial and academic performance. The college, incidentally, had had no fewer than eight principals – seven of them European – before Seal.  It managed to avoid a close-down but was put under a Board of Trustees in 1887 on the advice of the respected and socially influential, Swarnamoyee Devi, the Maharani of Cossimbazar. It was with the financial and moral support of the Maharani that the newly appointed Principal Seal set about putting matters right. Seal’s own reputation as an outstanding scholar helped retain and attract several capable academics to the college and their efforts bore fruit as the college soon regained its status as a first-grade institution. Its Law faculty, which was closed down, was also re-established. While these achievements bear testimony to Seal’s administrative skills, it is noteworthy that he never gave up classroom teaching. And his reputation as a versatile scholar ensured that he was called upon to teach a wide range of subjects and at all levels, as many of his students and colleagues of the time testify.

After nine very successful years at this college, Seal moved on to the Cooch Behar Victoria College in 1897 as its fourth, and first Indian, Principal. This college was founded in 1888 marking the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria’s reign, a year earlier. It was originally a private college, independent of government funding. Its founder Nripendranarayan, the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, was a Brahmo and a son-in-law of Keshub Chandra Sen, the prominent leader of the Brahmo Society. To make higher education available to all young and capable aspirants of his own (princely) state, regardless of their caste, creed or social status, the Maharaja took it upon himself to bear all the expenses of the college from his estate and no tuition fees were charged. The college was a first-grade institution from its inception, and it offered undergraduate postgraduate tuition in two subjects, English and Philosophy. It had a number of prominent scholars amongst its teaching staff. This, together with Seal as the Principal, gave the college a well-deserved reputation as an institution of academic excellence, a rare feat for a college located away from a main city. There are many anecdotes about this unconventional polymath’s daily life and his involvements at this college. Stories went around about how this Principal would regularly teach not just his students, but often his colleagues who were keen to drink deep at this fountainhead of knowledge in their midst, and about how this scholar would, at times, keep awake all night studying newly acquired books.

On Sundays or other days when the college would be closed, his ‘pupils’ would arrive at Seal’s home to listen to his discourses on varied topics around the theme of civilisations and cultures. On occasions, some of Seal’s visitors and houseguests, many among them eminent in their own right, would also join in. The celebrated political activist, orator, thinker and author Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) was reportedly a frequent attendee, staying with Seal over several weeks at a time and joining these informal lectures. The contents of one of Pal’s own books ‘The Soul of India’ reflects ideas learned from Seal’s teachings, according to some contemporaries who knew them both.

Although perhaps not voluminous, the quality and range of Seal’s writings and his occasional lectures helped his reputation to spread not just in India but internationally too. It was not easy in those days for scholars to travel distances to participate in international gatherings as arrangements for funding such travels within the institutions were yet to evolve. The generosity of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar helped Seal to travel to Europe to meet with scholars and participate in some prestigious scholarly gatherings. His first such visit was to Rome in 1899, to represent the State of Cooch Behar and participate in the XII International Congress of Orientalists. At this gathering of scholars, Seal made three presentations: The Test of Truth; The Origins of Law and the Hindus as Founders of Social Science, and A Comparative Study of Vaishnavism and Christianity.  They clearly cover a diverse range of topics from philosophy and law, social sciences and mythology to comparative religion, reflecting Seal’s intellectual versatility.  His originality of thinking was appreciated and much admired at the conference, as testified personally by Sister Nivedita, who also attended the conference and presented a paper.

Seal spent a few months in Europe in 1905, visiting universities and delivering lectures, but his next major international scholarly engagement took place in July 1911 when he was invited to not only attend but also to preside over his particular session of the Universal Races Congress held over four days at the University of London. This Congress attracted some 2100 delegates from over 50 countries and addressed a large number of issues around the overarching theme of interracial relations. In the context of the contemporary world of imperialism and its concomitant undercurrent of racial prejudice, the Congress promoted scholarly scientific discourse on racial science, geopolitics and empire. Seal’s paper ‘Race Origins’, which was later published under the title ‘Meaning of Race, Tribe and Nation’ was as wide-ranging in its coverage of race issues as it was original in suggesting new scientific and statistical methodologies for useful comparative studies involving selected characteristics of different races. Aspects of his contribution in the Congress’s deliberations are addressed in this essay later.

Professional career: 1913-30

Maharaja Nripendranarayan, Seal’s patron and financial benefactor died in 1911. Life at the college must have started changing without the assured support of the generous and enlightened Maharaja. Meanwhile, the University of Calcutta, essentially an accreditation body for undergraduate education hitherto, was embarking on a new and exciting phase. Under the leadership of its able, courageous and ambitious Vice-Chancellor (V-C) Ashutosh Mukherjee, the university was transforming itself into an institution of higher learning with a world-class research culture. Postgraduate teaching and research in several disciplines, including Philosophy, was initiated and eminent scholars were being invited to take up the newly established Chairs. No mean intellectual himself, the V-C Ashutosh invited Seal, whom he knew personally and by reputation, to the Chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy. Seal joined the university in 1913 as the first King George V Professor, a position he held for the next seven years. Under his inspired leadership, Philosophy and its related disciplines soon came to gain wide recognition and reputation. As some of his students of the time reminisce with affectionate reverence, Seal’s teaching was, characteristically, an eclectic mix of subjects which included Indian Philosophy, metaphysics and aspects of the dialectics as part of the discipline of logic. His self-effacing informal lifestyle and easy approachability made him, understandably, a respected and popular teacher and mentor. Seal left his distinctive mark also in a number of important initiatives of the university, discussed later in the essay.

The next major step in Seal’s professional career took him away from Bengal as the Vice-Chancellor of Mysore University.  The rulers of the princely state of Mysore (Karnataka now) had the reputation of being enlightened, conscientious and socially conscious. The state was relatively prosperous and peaceful under their rule, with a well-educated population, but without a university. On the recommendation of two educational advisers commissioned by the Maharaja Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV (1884-1940), a university was set up in 1916. It was the first university to be set up in a princely state of India and the sixth anywhere in India. When its first Vice-Chancellor H. V. Nanjundaiah, a scholarly jurist, died in office in 1920, the Maharaja sent a personal invitation to Brajendranath requesting that he accept the position.  In making this request, the Maharaja had received advice from, among others, Sir Michael E Sadler, the British educationist and then Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, England. Sadler had spent time in India as the Chairman of a committee which was appointed in 1917 to examine the functioning of the Calcutta University and make recommendations for its overall improvement. He got to know Seal very closely as a member of this committee. Sadler wrote to the Maharaja recommending Seal very highly, saying that he could not think of any scholar in the East or the West who could match Seal ‘in respect of the range and depth of scholarship and originality of mind’.

Meanwhile, Seal at this time was happily ensconced in his hometown, amid his circle of friends and followers; so, he was at first reluctant to go to Mysore. But several of his friends, among them the English scholar-historian and old India-hand Edward John Thompson, who knew both Seal and the Maharaja well, prevailed upon him to accept the position as they considered that Seal’s wisdom, dedication and passion for academic excellence would be of immense benefit to this nascent institution. Seal eventually agreed, and Thompson writes how he himself posted Seal’s letter of acceptance to make sure that the dithering philosopher did not change his mind!

Seal took up the position in December 1920 and held it till February 1930 when failing health forced him to retire and return home, to Calcutta. Despite, reportedly, an unhappy initial phase, these nine years proved to be the most fruitful for Seal, both as the leader of a new university and also as an adviser to the Maharaja who sought and valued his counsel on various matters of the state. Again, some of these are taken up later in the essay. I focus below on some of Seal’s intellectual activities and publications.

Seal’s works

Literature and literary criticism: European literature

In reviewing Seal’s published work, it needs perhaps to be observed at the outset that, given Seal’s range of intellectual interests, his publications, in number, are relatively scant.  Added to that is the fact that a number of his published works are difficult to track down. What follows, therefore, is no more than a broad and somewhat sketchy overview of a selection of his better-known and accessible works, highlighting some of their distinctive features as I perceive them.

Seal’s research and publications reflect his discerning mind and versatility. They also reveal him as a rather unconventional scholar in the sense that he could not confine himself to a single intellectual discipline at any particular time and then move on to another, as many scholars do.  His writings, typically, have a wide focus. I have used subtitles to indicate the general subject area covered under them.

A booklet containing seven essays on art and literary criticism under the title New Essays in Criticism was published in 1893. In his preface, Seal explains that these essays had been written between1882-83 and 1890-91 and that two of the essays had previously been published in The Calcutta Review, a reputable biannual literary magazine of the time.

The essays cover a diverse range of topics starting with a critique of Friedrich Hegel’s (1770-1831) philosophy of art, going on to John Keats’s (1795-1821) epic poem ‘Hyperion’ and a three-part assessment of the mind and art of Keats. In two further essays around the theme of neo-romantic literature, Seal surveys the history of the literary art of selected European literature, and also, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the evolving Bengali literature which was yet to enter what has come to be known as the age of Rabindranath Tagore. It was these last two essays which he had published in the Calcutta Review in 1890-91.

In the European sections of his essay, Seal strides with amazing familiarity through the works of eminent literary figures from not just English, but French, Italian, German, Russian and Spanish literature too. He goes beyond literature to political economy and mentions in relevant contexts the works of Adam Smith (1723-1790), the British political-economy pioneer and the ideas of Francois Quesnay (1694-1774) of the French Physiocratic School of political economy. He finds literary parallels of the theory of evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin (1809-82) and the ideas of the French biologist, Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1774-1829). He demonstrates how history, including the history of literary art, can be treated more meaningfully, with the help of the methodology of both biology and fluxional mathematics, as a changing, evolutionary process, rather than a collection of discrete events.

These essays are also valuable in another important respect: it is here that Seal starts to break free from the ideas of Friedrich Hegel whom he had once accepted as his ‘early master’. Seal now re-assesses Hagel and considers ‘Hegel’s view of historic development as a unilinear series’ as untenable, and his three-fold classification of the art idea into oriental, classical and romantic art as ‘misnomers’. He finds Hegel’s approach ‘more or less narrow and provincial’, i.e. Euro-centric. Seal himself identifies three distinctive art-series or culture-history, which he terms the Egypto-Babylonian, the Graeco-Roman and the Indo-Sino-Japanese. He considers them as relatively independent of one another in origin and in development. Seal goes on to assert that this more elaborate and comprehensive classification of artforms shows up ‘the Hegelian conception of a punctual movement in a unilinear series’ as ‘obsolete’ from the standpoint of the methodology of history. In other contexts, too, Seal gradually departed from Hegelian thinking in significant ways. He challenged and rejected the condescending European attitude of the time which viewed Indian philosophical writings as ‘conjectural’, rather than based on sound logical arguments, and Indian concepts of knowledge and its sources as grounded in authority rather than enquiry based around deductive or inductive logical processes.

About the nature and quality of these essays, including the essay on Bengali literature, Edward John Thompson, himself a prolific writer of great elegance, in both English and Bengali, observed that they were ‘…written by a young man who had only just ceased to be an undergraduate. This young Indian student, in page after page of majestic English, with rarely the hint of a false idiom or faltering rhythm, put Bengali literature without apology and without nationalist strutting, alongside of other literatures’.

Literature and literary criticism: Bengali literature and the promise of Tagore foreseen

Seal’s masterful survey of Bengali literature is an astounding tour de force covering over five hundred years, going right back to the writings of Krittibas Ojha (1381-1461) and Kashiram Das (16^th century) the venerable translators of The Ramayana and The Mahabharata, respectively.  Seal points out that, in conception and poetic style, these works belong to a stage of literary evolution which precedes the neo-romantic stage.

He finds in Rabindranath Tagore, the first Bengali-language neo-romantic poet. In particular, in the collection of poems in Sandhya Sangeeta (1882) and Prabhata Sangeeta (1883), enthuses Seal, ‘Bengali poetry rises to the pitch of the neo-romantic lyric. And what a type of the latter! Two of the constituent elements, the criticism of life, whether negative or reconstructive, and the mythopoeia, are almost wholly wanting, and the third element, the transfiguration, is all in all.’ In explaining his assessment further, Seal himself waxes lyrical. He considers Tagore’s choice of the titles and the subjects of his poems, together with the majesty of their imagery, refreshingly new in Bengali literature. The ‘delicate, silver-lined analysis of subtly woven, variegated imaginative synthesis’ that these poems achieve have helped lift Bengali literature to a hitherto unachieved advanced stage, concludes Seal. Further refinement in the neo-romantic literary movement in Bengali, Seal finds in Tagore again, in his ‘imaginative reconstruction, under the pseudonym of Vanusimha, of the medieval loves of Radhika and Krishna on the banks of the Jamuna, sacred stream’. He finds their European parallels in the works of Keats and Browning, among others. It is worth considering that these poems or songs were published in the early 1880s when both Tagore and Seal were very young and virtually unknown as scholars or literary figures.  It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that Seal was not only familiar with Tagore’s works but had studied them deeply enough to assess their worth in comparative terms. In a footnote, he observes that Tagore’s ‘later works in prose, as well as verse, have carried the neo-romantic movement much further than is here depicted’.

Many years later, Seal summed up his evaluation of Tagore’s subsequent poetic achievement in an essay of tribute written for a collection published to mark then 70^th birth anniversary of the poet in 1931. In his essay, Seal observed: ‘In his consummate later art, he [Tagore] has … achieved the supreme mastery – the creation of a Personality with the individual scheme of life, an individual outlook on the Universe.’

Seal goes on in this exposition to assess the works of several other Bengali writers of prose and poetry, including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-94), the doyen of the Bengali literature of the time, whom he calls the ‘theologian and constructive thinker’. He credits Bankim as ‘the thinker who contributed to its [Bengal’s] literature of illumination’. He cites several of Bankim’s well-known essays on literary and religious topics and considers the author to be ‘the leader of the vanguard of emancipation and deliverance’. But, as history records, Bankim was also an early leader of what has come to be called ‘neo-Hinduism’ or ‘Hindu revivalism’, which sought to revive a sense of pride in Hinduism’s polytheistic belief systems and their associated religious literature. Bankim’s essay on religion and his exposition of the Bhagavatgita, ‘form the gospel of this new propaganda’, in Seal’s judgement. He detects the ideas of European thinkers like Mill, Spencer, Darwin and, especially, Auguste Comte, in ‘almost everything our author [Bankim] has to say on domestic social and political ideals and institutions…’ Bringing his comparative perspective to Bankim’s role as a  scholarly defender of the Hindu theological system, Seal comments quite scathingly: ‘a historic reconstruction of the origins of Hinduism is attempted by the Brahmin theologian; but in point of massive learning, power of intuition or divination, a disciplined historic sense and a comprehensive historic method, it is slight and beneath a moment’s comparison with the reconstruction of canonical writings, or of the Life of Christ by Strauss, Bauer or Renan’.

Sciences and mathematics

To understand Seal’s inspiration for, and intellectual engagement with, the sciences – an area, arguably, not among his primary scholarly focus – it would be helpful to consider the developing nationalist sentiment and sensitivities of the time, especially in Bengal. In the ‘age of imperialism’, all things outside of the dominant ‘Western Culture’ had come to be considered ‘inferior’ or unworthy of esteem. The prevailing European perception and pronouncement was that the Hindu, implying Indian, spirit was religious and speculative, and not based on scientific enquiry or formal logic. Such Eurocentric representation of India’s intellectual tradition influenced many English-educated Indians, who learnt automatically, if often unconsciously, to accept Western intellectual achievements to be necessarily ‘superior’ to their own. Ironically, this ‘silent indoctrination’ had been occurring with the arrival of the British rule in India even as some British (and other European) scholars such as William Jones (1746-94), linguist-Indologist and founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and Henry Colebrooke (1765-1837), Sanskrit-scholar, mathematician and the second President of the Asiatic Society, had been assiduously delving into relevant Sanskrit sources to learn about, publish and publicise India’s achievements in antiquity in language, literature, sciences, mathematics and the arts.

A sense of unease about this Western attitude of what may be termed ‘deprecation and condescension’ toward Indian intellectual traditions gradually started to inspire a section of the Bengali elite, who had studied science in the medium of English, to learn more about India’s past scientific achievements and place them alongside those of the West as an assertion of cultural nationalism and identity. One of the dedicated pioneers of this quest in the field of sciences was Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861-1944), an Edinburgh University doctorate in Chemistry, science-historian, nationalist and industrialist. Ray had encountered in the writing of the French scientist-historian Marcellin Berthelot (1827-1907), the idea that the knowledge of alchemy came to India from the Arabs who, in turn, had received it from the Greeks. He contested this and suggested that India’s own knowledge of alchemy and the use of mercury in therapeutic practices was older than the Arab influence in them.  Berthelot encouraged him to investigate the subject.  Ray himself also felt the need to find sound evidence of India’s past achievements in the physical sciences to counter the Western perception that ‘the Hindus have always been a dreamy metaphysical people, prone to meditation and contemplation’. ‘In ancient India,’ he claimed, ‘physical science found her votaries. India was the cradle of mathematical sciences, including algebra and arithmetic.’ Ray set up collaboration and regular interaction with some scholars who were well versed and well-informed in the Sanskrit texts pertaining to the relevant sciences. He himself devoted several years studying widely and deeply the classical Indian texts in what in Sanskrit is termed Rasayana (the way of the ‘rasas’), a subject dealing with the principles and practices of mercury and alchemy known to the Hindus in the past. His monumental work, A History of Hindu Chemistry, Vol.1, published in 1902, drew the scholarly world’s attention to India’s scientific endeavours and achievements in antiquity, rediscovered and narrated by a competent scientist.

Yet, Ray felt unfulfilled as a historian of Indian sciences. He observed that ‘the European historians of chemistry had always turned to Greece as the fountainhead of knowledge on this as on other subjects’, and lamented that ‘the Hindu atomistic school had not found an interpreter who could do full justice to it.’ Henry Colebrooke’s work on the subject, which he had used in his book, evidently, did not satisfy Ray’s perfectionist spirit. He considered Colebrooke’s treatment as ‘fragmentary’. ‘Not feeling equal to the task’ himself, Ray invited Seal because he considered that Seal’s ‘encyclopaedic knowledge was equal to the task of contributing the section devoted to the atomic theory of the ancient Hindus.’

Seal accepted the invitation and contributed two chapters to the second volume of Ray’s History of Hindu Chemistry, which was published in 1909. One of the chapters deals with the ancient Hindu theories of physics, mechanics and chemistry, and the other with the methods of scientific investigation of the Hindus.

The label ‘Hindu’ in these contexts, incidentally, has no religious connotation; it refers to the intellectual and cultural tradition rooted in Sanskrit. Ray’s research – and Seal’s – included important contributions from Buddhist, Jain and other thinkers too.

Seal calls his works ‘a series of monographs’ covering a wide range of Hindu ideas in the positive sciences, i.e., the sciences based on observation, experiment and logical explanation of natural phenomena. His survey of the Hindu sciences covers a span of one thousand years – from 500 BC to 500 AD. In a preface to the chapter on science, Seal explains his aim as, to provide ‘a synoptic view of the entire field of Hindu physico-chemical science, so far as this reached the stage of positive science as distinguished from the prior mythological and empirical stages’.

In the Hindu tradition, all sciences are anchored in philosophical and metaphysical learning. The six traditional Hindu philosophical systems embody the major bulk of this knowledge. With regard to the theories of cosmic evolution, Seal elaborates the ideas of the Sankhya-Patanjala philosophical school, believed to be the earliest comprehensive account of cosmic evolution. The process of evolution as explained in this system is based on the conservation, transformation and dissipation of energy – a positive principle, not a metaphysical speculation.

In the field of physics, the chapter expounds ‘the Hindu conception of energy, potential as well as kinetic, and of molecular motion so far as they are applied to the elucidation of a physico-chemical nature, vis. the constitution of matter, the genesis of atoms and their infra-atomic constituents, and the chain of mechanical causation in the system of Nature’. He discusses the Hindu theories of light, heat and sound, as implying current or wave motion.

The Hindu concept of atomism is contained in the Nyaya–Vaiseshika philosophy which Seal uses to explain the theory relating to the formation of physical bodies from atoms (anu) and how the positioning of the atoms determines the nature and the properties of a physical body. These early ideas, it would be useful to note, had not come to be dismissed over the subsequent centuries as mere speculation. Indeed, in some significant ways, they may be considered to have anticipated the theories developed in the West many centuries later, as Seal has observed. He refers also to the Buddhist and the Jain ideas of atomism to affirm the existence, continuance and enrichment of the ideas in the scientific knowledge of India over long periods of time.

In chemistry, Seal elaborates ‘the chemical potions, including the Hindu account of the constitution of the fats and oils and the organic tissues in addition to Hindu inorganic chemistry’. To establish the links this knowledge of theoretical sciences had with the practical world, Seal mentions some of the chemical industries of ancient India which ‘secured them an easy pre-eminence in the manufactures for a thousand years’. The industries Ray specifically refers to include colour-fast dyes, extraction of blue pigment from the indigo plant and the chemical treatment for the hardening of steel. Seal cites evidence that the ancient Hindus possessed the knowledge to produce anaesthetic drugs which could be used to paralyse the sensory and/or the motor organs for medical or surgical treatment, for example.

The validity of scientific principles depends entirely on the quality of methods they follow in the investigation of the phenomena in nature to arrive at certain truths. It is, therefore, necessary to demonstrate that the Hindus had the right scientific methodology. And that is the task Seal undertook next.  It is the system of logic belonging largely to the Nyaya-Vaiseshika philosophical tradition that Seal uses in his elaboration of the Hindu scientific methodology (the word nyaya means rules) to establish that the Hindu system too had a sound logical structure. And the system, Seal boldly asserts, is ‘the outcome of Scientific Methodology which, in its formulation of the canons of the two Fundamental Inductive Methods, is more comprehensive as well as more original and suggestive than Mill’s, and which, as regards its Applied Logic of the Science (e.g. the logic of Therapeutics, Grammar etc.), is a standing testimony to the systematic completeness and rigour of the Hindu Scientific mind’. So, why does Seal invoke, specifically, the British political economist-philosopher Mill’s work in the context of outlining the methodology of Indian science? It is probably because John Stuart Mill (1806- 1873) in his celebrated work A System of Logic, published in 1843, enunciated the five principles of inductive reasoning, known as Mill’s Inductive Methods, which Seal uses as a point of reference. These methods are considered to be among the most refined and rigorous canons of the Western logical system which, as a tradition, go back to Aristotle (4^th century BC) and have been extended and enriched by the works of the ‘Enlightenment-thinker’ Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Seal had mastery over both Indian and Western philosophical ideas, so he could draw on both to compare the logical foundations of them. His judgement on the matter is quoted above.

It was a remarkable intellectual achievement, more so when one considers that Seal was living in Cooch Behar at the time, presumably without easy access to rich libraries or other scholars nearby. He was also employed full time as a college Principal and had to deal with all the responsibilities of the position.

The laborious task of researching and writing two technically dense chapters, instead of tiring the author out, seemed only to whet Seal’s appetite for investigating ancient India’s scientific knowledge further. In 1910, he submitted a version of the chapter he had written on the physico-chemical theories as his doctoral thesis and was duly awarded the degree by the Calcutta University.

As noted earlier, Seal moved from Cooch Behar and joined the University of Calcutta in 1913.  He continued his research into the ancient Hindu sciences, extending it to several other areas of scientific knowledge and published, in 1915, what must be considered his magnum opus, The Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus. The first six of its seven chapters deals with the mechanical, physical and chemical theories of ancient Hindus; Hindu ideas of mechanics, of acoustics, of plants and plant life, of animals, of physiology and biology – clearly an astonishingly wide range of topics from several distinct scientific disciplines. Two of the seven chapters of this book are his earlier work, reproduced from Ray’s book. The period covered in this book is also longer and the treatment of the topics often more extensive. The work does not include mathematical sciences because Seal thought the works of Colebrooke had covered that field, although he recognised the need to update it in some areas, especially Algebra.  Similarly, he mentions leaving out osteology because, in his judgement, the work on Hindu Osteology by Rudolf Hoernle (1841- 1918), the British-German Indologist, was a useful text covering the subject.

In addition to the theoretical sciences, Ray’s scholarly enquiry delves into the Hindu knowledge and practices in the areas of medicine and surgery as part of his discussion of chemistry and physiology. Seal observes that ‘the empirical side of Hindu philosophy was dominated by concepts derived from physiology and philology just as Greek philosophy was dominated by geometrical concepts and methods.’ The Hindu medical system dates right back to the Vedic times (1500 BC – 600 BC) and is referred to, generically, as Ayurveda – the science of life or the science of rejuvenation – with Dhanvantari as its legendary divine figurehead.  Two familiar names in this area are those of Charaka and Susruta whose compendia on medicine and surgery (Charaka-samhita and Sushruta-samhita) contain much of ancient India’s knowledge and practices in these two important fields. Seal deals with them both, elaborately and critically, and often comparatively, with other early systems and knowledge about human anatomy, physiology, medicine and surgery. The exact historical periods when these two men lived is indeterminate. Seal proceeds with caution in the matter and only observes that they ‘cannot be later than the 6^th century of the Christian era’. He observes further that Charaka and Susruta’s works, important as they are, ‘are both redactions of original authorities’, implying that the extant Hindu knowledge and traditions in these areas are even older.

Seal concedes with modesty that ‘the difficulties of [his] task have been formidable’. But the dedicated scholar also proudly proclaims, ‘I have not written one line which is not supported by the clearest and most authoritative texts’ and ‘I have gone back to the origins, and studied the authorities at first hand, being resolved to eschew all second-hand sources of information’.  His command of the Sanskrit language must have been as strong as his knowledge of the sciences he is writing about. He speaks effusively about the richness of the language, ‘Fortunately, the Sanskrit philosophic scientific terminology, however difficult from its technical character, is exceedingly precise, consistent and expressive.’ The English text of Seal’s book is replete with copious quotations from the relevant Sanskrit texts. It also has four elaborate indices, three of which are in Sanskrit.

For a single author to attempt this task is ambitious indeed. In the final, seventh, chapter of the book, reprinted from his earlier work, Seal deals with the doctrine of scientific methods as developed and practised by the Hindus. The objective here, as explained above, is to demonstrate that the alleged non-rigorous and speculative nature of the Hindu mind is inaccurate and to establish that the Hindu ideas of logic were as sound as the European and, in some respects, exceeding it.

‘The Hindus, no less than the Greeks have shared in the work of constructing scientific concepts and methods of investigation of physical phenomenon as well as building up a body of knowledge which has been applied to industrial technique …’, writes Seal in the Preface to the book.

The discussion in the section above is, admittedly, a rather superficial and sketchy overview of Seal’s work in the field of positive sciences.  But a more thorough account would probably not be easily intelligible to most of us. However, a couple of interesting additional points which Seal has made, almost in passing, may merit a mention.

First, Seal alludes to the early Hindu ideas anticipating Newton’s differential calculus. In his explanation of the Hindu measures of time and space, as expounded in Bhaskaracharyya’s works (12^th century AD), Seal points out that the astronomical unit of time called, truti, measures about the thirty-four-thousandth part of a second. ‘This is of special value,’ notes Seal, because it helps establish, ‘Bhaskara’s claim as a precursor of Newton in the discovery of differential calculus as well as its application to astronomical problems and computations’. A British physicist-mathematician, William Spottiswoode (1825 -1883), who had earlier considered and acknowledged the importance of Bhaskara’s contributions in mathematics, had judged his claim as a pioneer in the ideas of differential calculus to be an ‘over-statement’.  In contesting Spottiswoode’s judgement, Seal cites the translated work of Bhaskara’s treatise, The Siddhanta Shiromani, by Bapudeva Sastri (1821-1900), mathematician and Sanskrit scholar, on this issue. Sastri points to Bhaskara’s use of the concept of instantaneous motion and the methods of determining it, claiming that they demonstrate Bhaskara’s familiarity with the principles of differential calculus. Seal reinforces this claim by further pointing out that the distinction Bhaskara makes between sthula-gati and sukshma-gati, translated, respectively, as velocity-roughly-measured and velocity-accurately-measured, shows that he is conscious of the idea of the ‘infinitesimal’ as used in Newtonian calculus. The word sukshma, in these contexts, has a reference to anu, an extremely small constituent of matter, reminds Seal. As a careful mathematical historian and no mean mathematician himself, Seal goes on to state that the concepts of the ‘limit’ and ‘infinitesimality’ are not indispensable to calculus and that these concepts became part of the calculi later. He does, therefore, place Bhaskara as a pioneer in the field of differential calculus, if only of an earlier phase of its development.

The second interesting point Seal makes relates to the system of numerical counting, generally referred to as the Hindu-Arabic system. The proficiency of the Hindus in matters numerical is usually acknowledged in informed circles. Attributed to Albert Einstein, for example, is a statement to the effect that ‘Indians taught us to count, without which no serious scientific work would have been possible’. With ten integers – 1 to 9 and zero – the system enables counting without a limit, or ad infinitum.  This is possible because a number is assigned an absolute value and a position value. The system also enables considering non-integer, i.e. fractional numbers which, in turn, translate to the decimal system, a system of counting based in 10. The word decimal is derived from the Latin word decimus, meaning tenth; dasham, in Sanskrit. After an elaborate discussion on the matter, Seal concludes, ‘The decimal system was known to the Hindus when the Vyasa-bhashya was written, i.e., centuries before the first appearance of the notation in the writings of the Arabs or their Greco-Syrian intermediaries.’

Both Ray and Seal have observed that the spirit of scientific enquiry of the Hindus as a race was ‘arrested’ at an early stage. Ray states it more eloquently, ‘The history of the past thousand years tells us that the Hindus have been living all these years in stupefaction like so many opium-eaters…’ He goes on to speculate on the possible reasons for this, but that is not within the scope of this essay.

Statistics

As a field of academic study, statistics is relatively recent. The world’s first university department to teach statistics was created in the University College, London in 1911. The first Indian university to start teaching the subject was the Calcutta University, in 1941. However, an informal body known as the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) had come into existence in 1931 under the initiative mainly of one individual academic, named Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, PCM, (1893-1972).  PCM was a professor of physics at Calcutta’s Presidency College, and the ISI as a registered body was based at this college too. Earlier in his life, as a student of Cambridge University, PCM was introduced by one of his tutors to the journal Biometrika, in the discipline of biometrics. Biometrics is the study of people’s physical and behavioural characteristics with the help statistical data. Leafing through a few of them, PCM was so fascinated that he bought a whole a set of the journal, brought them to India and started studying them. PCM had returned to India in 1915.

Seal, meanwhile, in his address before the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, had suggested that to compare different racial or ethnic groups, ‘It is necessary to adopt biometric methods in studying characters and variations, and to find the mean or means by coordination and seriation…’ He was clearly familiar with the subject and conversant with some of the statistical tools needed in the analysis of anthropological data.  He referred to the works of Karl Pearson, a leading figure in the discipline of biometrics and a founder of the journal Biometrika.

In 1917, Seal, as the Chairman of a committee for examination reform at Calcutta University, sought the help of PCM, whom he knew personally and professionally, for conducting a systematic statistical analysis of examination results. He outlined the contours of the investigation, which were wide-ranging, and gave PCM detailed instructions on the statistical methods to be used to obtain the results he was seeking. Years later, PCM acknowledged Seal’s influence on his own growing interest in statistics in these words, ‘In your address before the Races Congress, you had pointed out very clearly and emphatically, the need of using n-dimensional hyper-space for the representation of racial types. You had also discussed this idea with me on many occasions…’

Although the particular work Seal was asking PCM to undertake did not proceed any further, PCM’s interest and researches in statistics grew stronger and more extensive over time, and he came to gain an international reputation as an applied statistician of great distinction. Probably, the work for which PCM is particularly well known is referred to as the ‘Generalised Distance between Statistical Groups’ – in short, the Mahalanobis-distance; or, in a slightly more technical language, the D-squared Statistic.  The conceptual origins of this idea too can be traced to Seal’s Race Origins expositions referred to earlier.

PCM had conducted extensive theoretical and empirical research with anthropometric data and also with data on climate and published a number of important papers over many years from an idea he first picked up from Seal’s 1911 presentation alluded to above. In a personal letter to Seal, written in 1935, PCM acknowledged this. ‘I may say broadly that I owe to you the entire background of my statistical knowledge, especially in its logical aspects.’ Mahalanobis was a physicist by training and an academic by profession, but he was an intellectual with many interests and accomplishments within and outside academia. His interest in statistics stemmed primarily from the conviction that it is useful to society. Seal’s pursuit of scholarship also had the aim of making the world a better place, so they were very much intellectual allies and peers in spirit, in the venerated Indian tradition of a master (guru) and his disciple.

Social and political sciences

Seal lived in an era which was marked by political and social upheavals both in Bengal and elsewhere in India. Seal participated in some of them, contributing both as a thinker and as an activist. His thinking on many of the social issues of his time remains rather scattered in the form of his writings and public lectures and in his participation as an expert member of various committees which were set up from time to time to examine issues in specific social, academic or administrative domains.

First, let us consider one of his major contributions as a scholarly academic. There is probably no other single document that captures better the range and depth of Seal’s command over, and his thinking of, the social sciences than his well-researched paper at the 1911 Congress in London, alluded to above. Under the title ‘Race Origins’, Seal’s lengthy presentation covered the issues of race, tribe and nation. The paper, later published under the title ‘Meaning of Race, Tribe and Nation’, was as wide-ranging in its coverage of race issues as it was original in suggesting new scientific and statistical methodologies for useful comparative studies involving selected characteristics of different races. Seal would have been one of the few delegates with mastery over both the physical and the social sciences. So, his introductory observation that ‘modern science, first directed to the conquest of Nature, must now be increasingly applied the organisation of Society….’ is especially significant.

His presentation cuts through the conflicting defining features of physical anthropology, with its emphasis on anatomical features; cultural ethnology with its distinct zones of ethnic culture, and the philosophy of history with its identified evolutionary stages, to suggest that a ‘synthetic view of race’ is necessary and possible. He recommends considering the race issue not as a static but as a dynamic entity – plastic, fluent, ever growing and energetic. He calls it ‘genetic anthropology’ which ‘studies races and racial types as radicles, their growth and transmutation into ethnic cultural units (classes, tribes and peoples) and finally, in the course of their evolution, into historic nationalities’, as the eminent sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887–1949), one of Seal’s younger contemporaries, summarised it. A chronicler of the proceedings of the Congress, Helen Tilley, makes a point of noting especially that ‘only Brajendranath Seal referred to genetics in his remarks’.

It is useful to recall that the science of genetics, especially evolutionary human genetics, although in its early days at that time, had been put to use by the promoters of Eugenics, for example, in a controversial, often sinister, manner. The debates between the monogenists and polygenists continued right through the 19^th and well into the 20^th century. Seal was offering a synthetic view of race which would enable considering race as not just a static biological idea, but a social one too, which adapts to the changing system and procedure of Nature. A historical study of race-developments attest to this view of human societal organisation, claims Seal.  ‘Social life survives’, observes Seal, ‘as the best aid to the maintenance of the individual as well as the species. And the social instincts, thus, evolved have left their impress on the physical type’. As the human species has evolved from family to tribe to clan and, finally, nation, the bio-sociological characteristics have been subsumed within the ‘National Ideal’, with a ‘Social Personality’. The State as the embodiment of that ideal tolerates and respects the personality of its members, regardless of racial, or ethnic or other identities, in Seal’s thinking. And it’s (the nation-state’s) legitimacy derives from ‘the free consensus of the members themselves, whether in an explicit form or as implied by continued membership of the state’, he concludes. But the Nation State is ‘only a halting stage in the onward march of Humanity’, in Seal’s judgement. That march is ‘towards the one far-off divine event, a realised Universal Humanity’, Seal envisions. This idea or ideal of ‘Universal Humanity’ was a recurring theme in Seal’s philosophy of life, as will be evident in the discussions below.

Just as Seal had kindled Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis’s interest in statistics, he inspired and encouraged Benoy Kumar Sarkar to study ancient India’s societal ideas and institutions. Sarkar, a professor in the Economics Department of Calcutta University, was a pioneering sociologist and political scientist. As alluded to above, Seal and Sarkar interacted socially and intellectually with each other, Sarkar treating Seal as a versatile senior scholar and mentor. He assisted Seal in many day-to-day tasks, and it was with his help that Seal’s book The Positive Sciences, reportedly, got published. Like Seal, Sarkar also applied his scholarship to confront and to refute the claim of intellectual superiority of the West, in his case, in the social sciences. Seal had given Sarkar the unpublished manuscripts of the two chapters he contributed to in the second edition of Ray’s book. Sarkar eagerly took up this idea of ‘positivism’ and applied it to study the ancient and extant Hindu societal ideas and institutions. In at least two scholarly books and several articles, Sarkar examined these issues within an overarching umbrella of positivism. He challenged the view that Western ideas in the social sciences necessarily had a more positive scientific foundation than the Eastern, including Indian ones.

Biographies

Seal’s reputation and easy approachability that many contemporaries attest to made it inevitable that he would be called upon to speak at specialist public gatherings and write about people of eminence. I select three of his biographical writings here shedding light, in brief, on how he viewed the personalities in question. This selection is somewhat arbitrary and is dictated mainly by the availability of the materials, not necessarily by the importance of the personalities involved.

Swami Vivekananda
As mentioned before, Seal and Naren (the future Swami) were classmates and close friends since their college days in the early 1880s. Sister Nivedita, a close disciple of Swamiji, also knew Seal well and they interacted socially. It was at Nivedita’s request that Seal wrote an essay of reminiscences of Swamiji for the Probuddha Bharat, a magazine of the Ramakrishna order, founded by Swami Vivekananda in 1896. The essay was published in the April issue of 1907.

In this essay, Seal speaks of a young Naren as ‘a gifted youth, sociable, free; … a sweet singer, … a brilliant conversationalist, somewhat bitter and caustic… an inspired Bohemian but possessing what Bohemians lack, an iron will’. He detects too that Naren was spiritually restless as he was trying to reconcile his ‘boyish theism and easy optimism’ with the demand that reason and the causality of events and natural phenomena make. He spoke to Seal ‘of his harassing doubts and his despair of reaching certitude about the Ultimate Reality’.

Seal gave him a course of readings which included poet Shelley’s, Hymn to the Spirit of Intellectual Beauty. Shelley’s ‘vision of a glorified millennial humanity moved him [Naren], whereas, the arguments of the philosophers had not’, notes Seal. Seal states that his own mind, at the time, was seeking to fuse into one, the three essential elements, viz. the pure monism of the Vedanta, the dialectics of Hegel and the message of liberty, equality and fraternity of the French Revolution. He spoke to Naren of a ‘higher unity than Shelley had conceived, the unity of Para Brahman as the Universal Reason’. While Naren could intellectually accept the sovereignty of Universal Reason, he was struggling to gain mastery over passion and the senses, with the help of reason. He ‘wanted a flesh and blood reality visible in form and glory; above all, he cried out for a hand to save, to uplift, to protect – a shakti or power outside himself… a Guru or master who, by embodying perfection in the flesh, would still the commotion in his soul’.

It was in this state of Naren’s mental torment and his spiritual quest for someone he could turn to for its resolution, that the two friends paid a visit, on a summer afternoon, probably in 1882, to the Paramhamsa Ramakrishna of Dakshineswar. Seal would, of course, have known of Ramakrishna by reputation, but had never met him. His ‘attitude towards [Ramakrishna’s] cult of religious ecstasy and Kali worship’ was not one of sympathy. It ‘appeared to me an uncouth, supernatural mysticism, … a riddle my philosophy of pure reason could scarcely read at the time’, observed Seal. He considered Naren’s hankering after spiritual assurance as ‘his defection’.

For Naren, this was not the first meeting with the Paramhamsa. His first meeting had probably occurred in November 1881, at the home of Suresh Mitra, a north Calcutta elite, who lived not far from Naren’s own home in the Simulia or Simla locality of Calcutta. Naren was encouraged by the host to sing at the gathering and Ramakrishna reportedly uttered words of praise for the young man’s musical talent and invited him to visit his home in Dakshineswar.

Seal speaks of spending ‘the greater part of a long summer day in the shady and peaceful solitude of the Temple-garden,  returning amidst the whirl and rush and roar and the awful gloom of a blinding thunderstorm, with a sense of bewilderment as well moral as physical and a lurking perception of the truth that… faith is a Saving Power ab extra’, Latin for ‘from-the-outside’.

As legends inform, Swami Vivekananda’s encounter with Ramakrishna had been life-changing for him, but it was not immediate. His doubts about the nature of Ramakrishna’s advice and guidance, not to mention his unconventional emotional behaviour, persisted. Seal being the only eyewitness of one of these encounters, his recollections are of particular value. He had observed this struggle in the Swami’s spiritual world both before the Dakshineswar visit and after it, ‘I watched with intense interest the transformation [of Naren] that went on under my eyes’, notes Seal.  This is not to suggest that Naren came away from that visit ‘fully converted’, but the visit had certainly further kindled his interest in Ramakrishna’s spiritual certitude and his daily life of devotion. He kept going back to Dakshineswar, as recorded by various contemporaries. Naren’s scepticism probably persisted as he wrestled in his own mind to make sense of what he was experiencing before finally surrendering and accepting Ramakrishna as his spiritual guide and guru.

Seal’s reminiscences conclude with this personal testimony, ‘…Vivekananda, who, after he found the firm assurance he sought in the saving Grace and Power of his Master, went about preaching and teaching the creed of the Universal Man, and the absolute and inalienable sovereignty of the self.’

Seal and the Swami had, of course, gone their own ways in life after their college days.  But they must have kept in touch, although no firm records seem to exist of their interactions; only anecdotal accounts of mutual friends. But the record does exist of Swamiji sending his brother Mahendranath to Seal in 1902 with a personal letter in which he sought Seal’s help in preparing a plan for organised social work.  Brajendranath agreed to his friend’s request; but before he could prepare one, the Swami passed away.

Raja Rammohun Roy
In many ways, Seal and Rammohun were kindred spirits, both versatile scholars and believers in universal humanism and syncretism in religious beliefs. Seal had written several essays around the turn of the century about Rammohun and his place in India’s cultural revival. He returned to the theme when invited to speak at a meeting organised in Bangalore in September 1924 to observe Rammohun’s death anniversary. Very often, speeches at these type of gatherings tend to be mundane affairs; an occasion more to socialise than learn and contribute. But, evidently, not when a serious scholar like Seal is the speaker. In a long, prepared speech Seal dealt with Rammohun’s life, his intellectual quests and attainments and his pioneering role in India’s cultural re-awakening. A succinct summary, in his own words, of how Seal viewed Rammohun is the following, ‘Rammohun Roy, the precursor and in a very real sense the father of modern India, sought the Universal Religion, the common basis of Hindu, Moslem, Christian and other faiths. He found that each of the national religions was based on this common faith with a certain distinctive historical and cultural embodiment.’

He explained how Rammohun drew inspiration from his deep study of the entire Hindu religious literature including the Upanishads, the Puranas and the Tantras, and how his own personal religion and philosophy of life was influenced by the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras, with Sankara’s commentary, and the Gita.

Rammohun drew attention also to the free thought and universalist outlook of the Mohammedan rationalists and Mohammedan unitarians. These are among the subjects on which he had written and published two pamphlets. One of these was in Persian, with a preface in Arabic, under the title Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (A Gift to Monotheism); and the other Manzarat-ul-Aidyan (Universal and Communitarian Faiths), in Arabic.

Rammohun’s study of and familiarity with Christianity and Judaism was equally deep, Seal points out.  He learnt Hebrew, Syriac and Greek and studied the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek. He also studied the Talmud, the Tarjums and other Rabbinical writings of the Jewish faith to trace the origins and the development of the Jewish and Christian doctrines and to lay the foundations of Comparative Religion, which, incidentally, was one of the missions of Seal’s life too.

Rammohun was among the founders of the Unitarian Society in Calcutta based on the idea of universalism not just of all the Christian creeds but of all faiths. He developed the creed of Neo-theophilanthropy, a new love-of-god-and-man, which proclaims essential commonality of all belief systems. It is this idea – which Rammohun came to live by – that makes Rammohun himself the Universal Man, Seal postulates. It was also an idea that Paramahamsa Ramakrishna embodied, observes Seal in another context, as noted below.

This speech was published as a booklet at the time. He returned to the theme of Rammohun’s life and his place in the history of modern India once again when the centenary of the Raja’s death was observed with a week-long congregation in Calcutta in 1933. Both Seal and Tagore were among the many distinguished speakers from around the world. The speeches Tagore and Seal delivered were published as separate booklets. Seal re-emphasised Rammohun’s philosophy of the historic synthesis of different religions as the basis for a humanist faith, a tolerant, humane model for life.

Paramhamsa Ramakrishna
Ramakrishna was among the personalities whose life and historical role Seal spoke and wrote about. A year-long celebration marking the centenary of Ramakrishna’s birth was organised in Calcutta over 1936-37. It was called the Parliament of Religions. Seal was to be the Convenor and the main speaker of the final session starting on 1 March 1937. He had been in poor health around that time but had accepted the invitation, quite possibly out of respect for the Paramahamsa. However, he felt seriously unwell before the session could get underway and had to be taken away from the gathering.  Swami Abhedananda took over the task of opening the session. Seal’s written essay of tribute was read out as the inaugural message.

Seal recalled in this presentation, his Dakshinesswar visit in the company of his friend Naren all those years ago. He told the audience how bewildered he had felt after witnessing the interactions between Naren and Ramakrishna and how the thunderstorm they had been caught up in on their return trip matched his restless state of mind. Then, he went on to contrast that experience with his feeling at the centenary celebration, ‘This afternoon in the calm dispassion of the evening of my life, I deem it a privilege to be able to share… the centenary celebration of one who in his sojourn on earth was above time and above space’.

He proceeded to elaborate on how Ramakrishna chose to practise different religions, complete with their daily routines and rituals, before preaching his own message ‘as many pathways to god as there are faiths’. ‘…such was the Paramhamsa’s syncretism. …. Ramakrishna was thus, a cosmic humanist and not a mere nationalist’, observes Seal.  On Ramakrishna’s worship of the Kali idol, which many educated Bengalis (including Seal in his youth) found distasteful, Seal now had this to say, ‘… he reconciled Sakar with Nirakar Upasana. For him, there was nothing in the material form of the deity, but God manifesting Himself. The antagonism between matter and spirit did not exist for him.’

The visionary in Seal went beyond the ‘immediate objective’ as embodied in the Parliament of Religions to what he called, ‘A larger Parliament, the Parliament of Man … to seek to establish a synthetic view of life conceived not statically but dynamically as a progressive evolution of humanity’.

Seal’s other writings

Seal’s other writings covered areas such as mathematics, history, education, politics, psychology and music among others, which are not all readily available any longer. But a major work of a somewhat different genre which is still available is an epic poem called, The Quest Eternal. This long poem captures in its allegorical style human-beings’ quest for truth. Although published by the Oxford University Press in 1936, the poem had had a long gestation. The early parts of it were completed by 1883, when Seal was still in his teens. This poem is sometimes compared with T S Elliot’s much-acclaimed, long poem, The Waste Land, both seeking to express the struggle the seeker after truth faces between the individual and the universal in the mundane everyday life.

The end

After his retirement from Mysore University for reasons of poor health, Seal settled back in Calcutta. On 4 December 1938, Seal died at his daughter’s residence in Bhowanipur in South Calcutta. Tributes flooded in from far and near. Even though Seal was among the brightest of India’s renaissance luminaries, he has now perhaps faded from most people’s memory. While this may be sad, it is not altogether surprising when one considers that Seal’s appeal is to the intellect and the minds of people and not to matters of everyday life. Seal’s creative works bearing the stamp of his vast learning and original mind are no doubt a valued part of India’s national storehouse of learning and will draw the attention of scholars looking for authentic source material on India’s intellectual and cultural achievements down the millennia.

AUTHOR

Srikanta Chatterjee is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Economics and Finance, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Featured image by Antoine Dautry on Unsplash