One of these is that he mastered the entire 4-year high-school mathematics curriculum in the first year and that he would often help solve difficult mathematical problems with much greater ease than his fellow students and, sometimes, even his teachers. Anecdotes abound about his prodigious academic abilities. A brilliant student overall, Brajendranath’s favourite subject was mathematics. Progressing on to the secondary stage of this school, Brajendranath passed the University Entrance Examination in 1878 with a scholarship. Education and careerĪfter spending a short time in a single-teacher primary school ( pathsala), Brajendranath joined the primary section of the General Assembly’s Institution (later, the Scottish Church Collegiate School). But, when his maternal grandfather also passed away soon after, Seal’s elder brother Rajendranath had to give up his studies to support Brajendranath and himself. Both his parents died before Seal was 9 years old, so he was cared for at his maternal grandfather’s family.
Bengal experienced a devastating storm around the time of his birth, and Seal came to acquire the unflattering sobriquet, ‘Jhoro’, the ‘stormy’, or ‘troublesome’ one! His father, Mahendrnath Seal was a successful lawyer practising at the Calcutta High Court and his mother Radharani Devi was, by all accounts, a devoted mother and loving homemaker. Seal was born in north Calcutta on 3 September 1864. A more thorough and critical appreciation of the achievements of this versatile genius must await the labours of another author. I attempt this as a broad overview of Seal’s thoughts and works, mostly from secondary sources. In this essay, I discuss Seal’s life, his scholarly pursuits and some of his other involvements. He is better known as a ‘philosopher’, probably because no other single description could capture his versatility adequately. Seal’s range of intellectual interests spread across almost the entire field of knowledge, encompassing humanities and the sciences education and aesthetics language and literature arts and architecture sociology and anthropology mathematics and statistics, and music. Acharya Brajendranath Seal (1864-1938), scholar, thinker, educational administrator and reformer. Somewhat surprisingly, the name of one of the most versatile of these luminaries has been largely forgotten. The cultural and intellectual horizon of the 19 th century Bengal was illumined by a whole galaxy of outstandingly gifted personalities whose influence gradually spread to the rest of India and contributed to a societal and cultural resurgence which has come to be known as the Bengal, and the Indian, Renaissance. This article on Acharya Brajendranath Seal is relevant in this context. In such a context, the knowledge of the work of some earlier Indian academics, which cuts across disciplines and is rooted in the limited academic circumstances that prevailed then in India would be useful. The segregation of disciplines also corrodes the intellectual wholesomeness and social usefulness of academic work. Yet another challenge is to enhance the participation of academics from various countries in the organic production of useful knowledge. These articles discuss (a) the difficulty in addressing the specific social issue of these countries in the curriculum and pedagogy of higher education (b) the irrelevance and the challenges in enhancing the reputation of universities/colleges in all countries on the basis of a common scale. Polymath Extraordinaire: Life and Works of Brajendranath Sealīy Srikanta Chatterjee Editors' Note: University Practice-Connect has published a set of articles describing the challenges of higher education, especially in countries like India.
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