Nripendrachandra Banerji

“ The passing away of Sir Asutosh Mookerjee and Deshabandhu Chittaranjan Das—twin-souls, however contrasted and separated by accident and circumstance within a year’s swift interval, has been nothing short of a national tragedy. And yet adversity hath its uses and the secret of individual and collective progress is the capacity to transmute death into life. And thus India needs to be told from many an aspect of that in the life of both which can never die. ”

“ His soul was wrapt up in the coils of manly education for the upper and middle classes : and knowing as he did that Gokhale’s dream of universalising elementary education among the broad masses of India would not materialise for obvious reasons, he worked along other ways for the same ends. His dream was to create a band of intellectuals in the land whom sheer-hunger-urge would compel to descend into the arid plains of unlearned human dwelling and give of their best there. ”

“ In ancient India this man among men would have carved out a bigger Nalanda—in modern Europe he would have carved out a free republic like another Hindenburg. But in modern Bengal he could only fashion a semi-democratic oasis in the Desert of Autocracy.
And Chittaranjan! The tears for the Deshabandhu, the country’s devoted friend and the refuge of the poor, the depressed and oppressed are not yet dry in an admiring and mourning people’s eyes and to write about him without passion or prejudice, understatement or overstatement is hard indeed. ”