Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-1891) was an educator and social reformer in British India, born into a Bengali Brahmin family. He is often called the father of modern Bengali prose and was one of the leading figures of the Bengal Renaissance in the nineteenth century. What makes him significant is that he combined a deep grounding in Sanskrit learning with secular, rationalist and liberal ideas drawn from the Western Enlightenment.

Born in the village of Birsingha in 1820, he moved to Calcutta at the age of nine and lived in a household in Burrabazar. He studied for twelve years at the Sanskrit College in Calcutta, graduating in grammar, literature, philosophy and astronomy, and earned the honorific title "Vidyasagar", meaning ocean of knowledge. He worked as a teacher, headed the Sanskrit department at Fort William College, and served as assistant secretary of the Sanskrit College before a quarrel with the college secretary led him to leave and return to Fort William. Alongside his scholarly work, he simplified Bengali prose and rationalised the script and typography, which had barely changed since the first Bengali types were cut in 1780.

His social campaigning focused chiefly on the position of women. He was the most prominent advocate of widow remarriage among Hindus, petitioning the Legislative Council despite fierce opposition; the law passed in 1856 after Lord Dalhousie personally pushed the bill through. He also opposed child marriage and worked to widen education beyond the upper classes, though an 1859 letter in which he argued that "higher classes" should mean caste sits awkwardly with his reputation for equality. From 1873 to 1891 he lived in Karmatar, in what is now Jharkhand, where he set up a girls' school and a free homeopathy clinic.

His legacy survives in institutions such as Vidyasagar College in Kolkata and the Vidyasagar Setu bridge over the Hooghly. In 2004 the BBC ranked him ninth in a poll of the greatest Bengalis of all time.