22 Facts About Chandranath Basu

Chandranath Basu was born on 31 August 1844 in Kaikala in Hooghly district, Bengal Presidency, British India.

Chandranath Basu was the second son of Sitanath Basu, and had 3 sisters.

Chandranath Basu studied at the Hedore School, a missionary institute for a while, before dropping out due to a fear of being baptized.

Chandranath Basu then joined the Oriental Seminary because it had a teacher who took care of English pronunciation among the students.

In 1877, he was appointed as the official Translator to the Bengal government; Chandranath Basu served in this capacity till his superannuation in 1904.

Chandranath Basu served as the principal of Joypur College Of Education and held a seat in the Vernacular Textbook Committee.

Chandranath Basu was the temporary vice-chairman of the Bangiya Sahitya Parishad for a few months.

Chandranath Basu used to frequent Brahmo discussions during his days at Presidency and was even attracted to them for a short while despite his dislike of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose luminaries were borrowed from extensively.

Chandranath Basu went on to reignite theological debates between Christian and Brahmo intellectuals and advocated for a rigid abidance by religious scriptures.

Chandranath Basu rejected the positivist thought school and saw God through the prism of his creations, whereupon any challenge to traditional societies were equivalent of a challenge to the legitimacy and omniscience of the God, Himself.

Parallel to fellow Hindu conservatives and deriving from his own theses, Chandranath Basu went on to portray the Hindus as fundamentally superior to people of all other faiths, whose traditional social customs and practices in that they have survived centuries of thought-schools and hence were axiomatically superior to western culture and way of life.

Chandranath Basu was rigidly against religious conversions and insisted that India shall not be a homeland, for foreign religions like Islam and Christianity.

Chandranath Basu chose to integrate Tantra as a core part of Hinduism in that it represented an inherent Hindu manliness and vigor, which would have helped fighting the colonialists.

Chandranath Basu wrote two short but little known manuals on the ideal Hindu way of domestic life - Garhyastha Path and the Garhyastha Vidhi.

In 1901, he wrote Sabitri Tattva a comparative study on Savitri and Satyavan; Chandranath Basu proceeded with a similar outlook as in Shakuntala Tattwa and portraying Savitri as the ideal Hindu wife, held marriage as an institute that permeated death and any temporality.

Sen notes him to be the foremost spokesman of the orthodox view on Hindu marriage; Chandranath Basu essentially viewed the institution as a longstanding social ritual for the sole purpose of maintaining progeny and male hegemony, absent any locus of individual autonomy.

Chandranath Basu was a vocal supporter of the Indigenous Aryan hypothesis, having extensively argued for the superiority of Aryan race and that the Indian Hindus were true Aryans; Tapan Raychaudhuri commented of the thought-school as 'aggressive chauvinism'.

Chandranath Basu engaged in aggressive exchanges with contemporary intellectuals; Tanika Sarkar notes a polemical discourse with Rabindranath Tagore concerning Hindu marriage and Hindu diet.

Chandranath Basu conflicted with Nabinchandra Sen whilst voting against the inclusion of one of his plays, Palashir Yuddha in school-syllabus; in a letter to Sen, Chandranath inquires about why a Hindu ought to feel saddened at the defeat of a Muslim ruler.

An angered Sen penned a dismissive reply and in personal records, alluded Chandranath Basu of being a dovetail of Bankim Chandra who merely reproduced the latter's private opinions as his own, in a verbose manner.

At last, Sen submitted a revised version which went on to be included whilst Chandranath Basu wrote an apology letter, prodded by a mutual friend Gooroodas Banerjee.

Chandranath Basu heavily influenced Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, an important figure of the Bengal Renaissance.