Bengal National College: August 14, 1906

Great people behind Jadavpur University

History: To trace the history of Jadavpur University is to trace a part of India’s freedom movement, at least from the Swadeshi Movement onwards. It was 1905 -1906. Bengal stood divided. The times were feverish. The hegemony of the British establishment had to be challenged. Education had to play a new role in this changed scenario. It had to become a new form of resistance through which the emergent nationalist spirit could be propagated. With this in mind the National Council of Education (NCE) came into being.

Its primary aim was to impart education - literary, scientific and technical on national lines exclusively under national control. To achieve self-reliance, through education. The foundation of the NCE was made possible by the munificence - scholarly as well as monetary - of the likes of Raja Subodh Chandra Mallik , Brajendra Kishore Roychowdhury of Gouripur as well as Sir Rash Behari Ghosh (first President of NCE), poet Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh.

In 1910 the Society for the Promotion of Technical Education in Bengal which looked after Bengal Technical Institute (which later became College of Engineering and Technology, Bengal) was amalgamated to NCE. NCE henceforth looked after the College of Engineering and Technology, Bengal which by 1940 was virtually functioning as a University. After Independence, the Government of West Bengal, with the concurrence of the Govt. of India, enacted the necessary legislation to establish Jadavpur University on the 24th of December 1955.

Great Benefactors: Generous donations for the great cause of national education came from Raja Subodh Chandra Mallik, after whom the road on which Jadavpur University stands, is named, Brojendra Kishore Roy Choudhury, Maharaja Suryya Kanto Acharya Choudhury and others and National Council of Education (N.C.E.), Bengal proceeded with its programme. Subsequently came a princely bequest of Rs13 lakhs from Sir Rashbehari Ghosh, the legendary legal luminary. Calcutta Corporation under the guidance of its Mayor Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das leased out to N.C.E. the present site of Jadavpur Campus where its Engineering College was shifted in 1924. The Aurobindo Building, now housing the admin1istrative offices, used to be the venue of teaching of the Engineering College.

Great Masters: Sri Aurobindo was the first Principal of the Bengal National College and among the teachers were luminaries like Rabindranath Tagore, Sir Gurudas Banerjee, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Surendra Nath Banerjee, Ramendra Sundar Trivedi, Radha Kumud Mukherjee, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Sakharam Ganesh Deoskar and others.

Update: December 11, 2015

The Rainbow Bridge: A Comparative Study of Tagore and Sri ...

https://overmanfoundation.wordpress.com › 

Rabindranath and Sri Aurobindo were formally introduced to each other in 1906 at Calcutta. Soon they became colleagues at the newly formed National College (under the National Council of Education) at Calcutta; while Sri Aurobindo was associated with it as its first Principal and professor of history, Rabindranath served the college as the professor of Bengali. When Sri Aurobindo was arrested for the first time in 1907 for publishing seditious articles against the British Government in the Bande Mataram journal, Rabindranath wrote his famous poem Namaskar (Salutations) acknowledging the former’s profound sacrifice and expressing his own reverence for Sri Aurobindo. After Sri Aurobindo was released from imprisonment due to lack of evidence, Rabindranath paid him a visit at the residence of Raja Subodh Chandra Mullick in Wellington Square. As per reports available, he had embraced Sri Aurobindo and told him with a tender smile: “You have deceived me, Aurobindo Babu.” Sri Aurobindo answered: “Not for long, I assure you.” (Charu Chandra Dutta, My Friend and My Master, Sri Aurobindo Circle, Eight Number, p. 137, 1952)