Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

“ We have cast away caste. We have outlived the absurdity of a social classification based upon the accident of birth. But we are not such ultra-radicals as to adopt for our watchword the impracticable formula of "Equality and Fraternity". ”

“ English civilization has pulled down the three hundred and thirty million deities of Hinduism, and set up, in the total space once occupied by them, its own tutelary deities, Comfort and his brother, Respectability. ”

“ That, in the outward circumstances of social and personal life, English-educated Bengalis are rapidly getting Anglicised, few English-educated Bengalis will deny. The stamp of the Anglo-Saxon foreigner is upon our houses, our furniture, our carriages, our food, our drink, our dress, our very familiar letters and conversation. He who runs may read it on every inch of our outward life. We build, and fit up, our houses, according to English ideas of architectural beauty, ventilation and general comfort. ”

“ It is the balance at the banker's which fixes a man's place in society; the cumulative humanities of a hundred generations are nothing to the purpose.
Such of us as are gifted with exceptionally disciplined minds and have appreciatingly imbibed the best and the most recent English teaching concerning individuality and non-conformity, eat, dress and condi^ct ourselves in society exactly like Englishmen, the usual allowance for the imperfection of a first attempt being, of course, made. ”

“ No enlightened human being can endure semi-barbarous restrictions concerning food—and drink, no enlightened human being can afford to forego the commonest comforts of life for finding means for the extravagantly expensive superstitions of benighted parents; no enlightened human being can find it in his heart to respect a man whose only claim to respect is founded on an old-fashioned ascetic purity of life, and an intimate acquaintance with a literature, full of false history, false geography and false physics ”

“ Your interest and your duty are so happily in unison in this same matter of fostering independence of character in your poor relations that you ought really to pause and consider what you are about. One thing is quite clear: this zeal for the formation of a national habit of self-reliance never shows itself, except in the sunshine of comparative prosperity. ”

“ We have received a High English education. Our culture is thoroughly English and we mean to reconstruct society according to English notions. Do you wish to know our definition of a respectable man? Here is one which will give you as correct an idea as any other. ”

“ You arc tearing asunder the only bond of social union in a society which has yet to learn the very first lessons in the art of co-operation. Or do you, after all, in spite of your petitionings and memorializings and the incessant outpourings of your newspaper press, really suppose that the 'Village Municipality' will, as a school of co-operation, supersede the antiquated joint Hindu family? ”

“ English education, administered with the most rigid economy and the example of Englishmen, wrapped up with the threefold covering of national, political and religious exclusiveness have, in a single generation, sufficed to work these changes in the external features of Bengali Society. ”

“ Our ancestors, in building houses of any pretension to grandeur, invariably postponed all considerations of the ease and comfort of the human inmates to a pious regard for the befitting accommodation of the various celestials during their thirteen appointed visits in the course of the twelve months. ”