We have plenty of synoptic histories of India but sadly lack local and regional studies like the Victoria County History. India is a mosaic; the contour and colour of whose various prices are still unknown. We are satisfied with the general image and never bother that it may reflect a loose generalisation or a distorted view. We emphasize the theme, ablinons that variations are fundamental to the understanding of its development. The foundation of national integration can be truly laid only by a detailed scientific study of each district or region.
For each district possesses a character Midnapore typifies frontier character of in the sense of F. J. Turner. It is frontier where the north and the west, met the south and the east, the Aryan, the Dravidian and the Proto Austroloid, the Bengalee, the Oriya and the hill-people of Bhum, the Pathan, the Mughal and the Maratha. On a native stock of study peasant and fishermen (officially segregated into a schedule) was grafted an adventurous upper caste from northern India, out to explore fresh fields and pastures new and determined to reach the line of the sea. Open to the Bay of Bengal, it was once the bustling scene of foreign trade and the gateway to foreign ideas. The low alluvial land, often reclaimed from the sea, rises in the west, red and wooded, to high hillocks. One cultural pattern contends with another, different religions systems confront and their conflicts and compromises give rise to a vigorous and flexible, rich and rugged, individualist and democratic, nonconformist and dedicated type, which is not afraid of life in the raw, which takes isolent changes in its daily strides and has the infinite capacity for taking pains to outgrow its environment it has accepted the perpetual challenge that is frontier life and has perfected instant responses to meet it. Here man is primitive-not a sleek, sophisticated man about town-a child of nature, who stands fair and square against fate with unflinching courage and faith in himself, which he draws from the Soil and the Sea. And woman? None can better Bankimchandra's Kapalkundala. The inner resources of the people of Midnapore are a mystery which centuries struggle with nature and decades of struggle with the British have failed to fathom.
While the rest of Bengal was learning polite culture from the West, the sons of Midnapore were turning up the virgin soil of the Sundarbans, fighting the impenetrable forest, the royal Bengal tiger, the python, the crocodile and no less dangerous than these, disease. I know of no other internal colonisation movement of recent times than that of the Midnapore people in the Sundarbans. Nature could not have been more hostile, climate more foul, work more rigorous. Yet they never sighed for "Albion's Distant Shore", they went out like Drake and Raleigh to win new horizons.
And when they settled down at last to participate in the grand debate with the West they could show a Vidyasagar. Vidyasagar alone stood like a rock against the headlong rush for the imitation of the West which the Derozians started and Madhusudan precipitated. While they went mad over Shakespeare, Milton & Byron, Vidyasagar turned his eyes to Kalidasa, Bhababhuti and Harsha. He would not, be a vassal to an alien civilization, however rich. But he would not spurn it either. While others utilised Western knowledge for personal glorification or gratification, he utilised it for common welfare, for the widow and the illiterate, the poor and the downtrodden. It is for him that, to-day, Midnapore, the poorest district of West Bengal, heads in literacy. Like the district he held his head high against things false or arrogant or inhuman.
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