Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee - Activities at Kolkata

Activities At Kolkata

In 1838 was established the Society for Acquisition of General Knowledge which had 200 members in 1843. On 8 February 1843, Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee read in a meeting of the society his well known essay on Present Conditions of the East India Company’s Courts of Judicature and Police under the Bengal Presidency. “The delivery of the essay,” observed the Bengal Harkaru on 2 March 1843, “was interrupted, as our readers will recollect, by the Principal of the Hindoo College, on the ground of its seditious and treasonable tendency. The attempts made to throw ridicule upon the intelligent natives of their country, for their laudable efforts to acquire knowledge of the government under which they live, and to aid in the removal of its abuses, appear to us as most ungenerous and illiberal.”

While a student Mukherjee published the magazine Jnananneswan in 1831. The next year it became a bilingual magazine. He spoke against suppression of newspapers by the government. He was one of main initiators for the establishment of the British Indian Association and contributed regularly to the Bengal Spectator. He practiced as a lawyer and was the first Indian to be appointed as a collector of Calcutta Municipality. Later he also worked in the court of the Nawab at Murshidabad.

He had once given a loan of Rs. 60,000 to David Hare. As Hare was unable to pay back the loan, he gave Mukherjee some land in lieu of it. Mukherjee, in turn, donated that land in 1849 to John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune for the establishment of Kolkata’s first secular school for girls.