Ashutosh Mukherjee - Contribution To Education

Contribution To Education

Ashutosh Mookerjee had a vision of the kind of education he wanted young people to have, and he had the acumen and courage to extract it from his colonial masters. He set up several new academic graduate programs: comparative literature, anthropology, applied psychology, industrial chemistry, ancient Indian history and culture as well as Islamic culture. He also made arrangements for postgraduate teaching and research in Bengali, Hindi, Pali and Sanskrit. The diverse range of subjects offered by Calcutta University is largely a result of his labor. Scholars from all over India, irrespective of race, caste, and gender, came to study and teach there. He even persuaded European scholars to teach at his university. He was one of the first persons to recognize the worth of Srinivasa Ramanujan. He also established Asutosh College in South Kolkata in 1916.

Lord Curzon's education mission in 1902 identified the universities, and Calcutta University especially, as centres of sedition where young people formed networks of resistance to colonial domination. The cause of this was thought to be the unwise granting of autonomy to these universities in the nineteenth century. Thus in the period 1905 to 1935 the colonial administration tried to reinstate government control of education. In 1923, when Lord Lytton tried to impose conditions on his reappointment as Vice Chancellor, Mookerji indignantly refused the post. For his intransigence and academic integrity he was known as the Tiger of Bengal. For his contribution to education, the Govt. of India issued a stamp on him in 1964.