Surendranath Dasgupta - Career

Career

His career in teaching began with a short stint as a Lecturer in Rajshahi College. Later, he became a Professor of Sanskrit and Bengali in Chittagong College. After some time, he went back to graduate school and received a PhD from the University of Calcutta, and later went to England to work on his second PhD at the University of Cambridge.

Following his return in 1924, Dasgupta joined the Presidency College as Professor of Philosophy. Later, he became the Principal of Sanskrit College, and later joined the University of Calcutta as a Professor.

In 1932, he served as President of the Indian Philosophical Congress. His own philosophy was known as Theory of Dependent Emergence.

The list of his famous students includes scholars like Mircea Eliade and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya.

About 1941 or 1942 Dasgupta moved away from his wife Himani Madhuri Dasgupta and their six children, and he stayed with Suramā Mitra (1907 - June 12, 1998), his secretary and student, whom he married in 1945. Suramā Mitra held a PhD in philosophy, taught at Lucknow University, and authored a few books on philosophy. Dasgupta's relationship with Suramā Mitra caused enormous pain to his near ones and was strongly disputed by Dasgupta's family. Whilst Suramā Mitra claimed to be Dasgupta's wife, such claims were unjustifiable and illegal as Surendranath and Himani were never legally divorced and bigamy was a crime in British and Independent India.

The University of Warsaw made him an honorary Fellow of the Academy of Sciences. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Societe des Amis du Monde of Paris offered him a special reception, and M. Renou, Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Paris, wrote to him afterwards: " While you were amongst us, we felt as if a Sankara or a Patanjali was born again and moved amongst us." Kind and simple and gentle as he was, Dasgupta was always undaunted in challenging scholars and philosophers.

In the second International Congress of Philosophy in Naples, the thesis of Dasgupta's paper was that the philosophy of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) had been largely anticipated by some forms of Buddhism, and that where Croce differed, he (Croce) was himself in error. On account of internal differences Croce had no mind to join the Congress, but the fact that Dasgupta was going to challenge his philosophy and prove it to be second-hand in open congress, induced him to do so.

In the same way he challenged Louis de La Vallée-Poussin, the great Buddhist scholar, before a little assembly presided over by McTaggart. In the meetings of the Aristotelian Society Dasgupta was a terror to his opponents, his method of approach being always to point out their errors. He inflicted this treatment on many other scholars, particularly Fyodor Shcherbatskoy (Stcherbatsky) (1866-1942) and Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935).