Dipankar Panda
Recently, I visited Jamtara to attend a marriage ceremony and paid a visit to Karmatand. I had read in a book “Those Days” by Sunil Gangopadhyay that Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar stayed there for some time. And yes, the house still stands there. Some renovation has been done by the district administration but sadly, the old heritage look inside the building is practically gone. The original floors, walls are now tiled and distempered which is sad. It is a heritage building and the originality should have been retained.
Vidyasagar came to Karmatar in 1873 and spent more than 18 years of his life here. He had set up a girls’ school and a night school for adults on the premises of his house, which he called Nandan Kanan.
If you ask the present generation of Karmatand, no one knows about this house and have no idea about the importance of this house. This campus is commonly known as Mali Bagan. The railway station is called Vidyasagar Station but locals have no idea why it is called so.
The Jharkhand Government named Karmatand block after Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar on September 26, 2019 as a mark of respect on the birth anniversary of the great social reformer.
I was told that hundreds of tourists come every year and stay in the guesthouses inside the premises. And if you see the guest houses, it will give you creeps. No maintenance, no ambience…In fact the impression I gathered is that the crux of the problem lies between the rivalries of two groups, Bihar Bengalee Association and Jharkhand Bengali Association. Both put forward their claim on this heritage property. If these societies are not in a position to maintain and run the place, they should ask the government to take it over. I strongly believe that the Deptt of Art and Culture should take a call on this heritage property and along with Tourism Deptt, should develop it as a centre of excellence while maintaining the heritage ambience of this monumental and historical building.
Vidyasagar initiated the concept of widow remarriage and raised concern for the abolition of child-marriage and polygamy. To prove, his compassion for widows he married his own son off to a widow. On 26th July 1856 the ‘widow marriage’ was legalized by the then Government.
He also opened the doors of the colleges and other educational institutions to lower caste students, which was earlier reserved only for the Brahmins. For his immense generosity and kind-heartedness, people started addressing him as “Dayar Sagar” (ocean of kindness).
The long association of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar with Karmatand had gone into oblivion and people had forgotten that the great Bengali renaissance leader lived here till the Bihar-Bengalee Association searched it and purchased the house in 1974 by paying Rs 24,000 to its then owners.
The purpose was to repay the debt of the ‘Guru’, as Vidyasagar was reverently called, and save the sprawling Nandan Kanan spread over 3 acres and 19 decimal of land. The Bihar-Bengalee Association collected funds for its purchase by selling one rupee coupons. The then chief minister of Bihar, Abdul Ghafoor, had graciously donated Rs 15,000 for the purpose.
In 1993, a marble bust of Vidyasagar was laid on an erected pedestal at the place where Vidyasagar used to sit in the evenings. The bust was installed by noted advocate of the Patna High Court late Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and unveiled by the then Chief Justice of the Patna High Court, Bimal Chandra Basak.
Notably, Jharkhand (erstwhile Bihar) is witness to the origin point of so many luminaries of 19th & 20th century Renaissance movement like Vidyasagar, Rabindra Nath Tagore, Sharat Chandra Chatterjee, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Bibhuti Bhushan etc and places like Ranchi, Deoghar, Jamtara, Madhupur, Ghatshila, Hazaribagh, Daltonganj can become huge centres of attraction. Jharkhand needs to discover its potential to become a hub of cultural tourism.
