Publisher's Synopsis
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 24. Chapters: A.F. Salahuddin Ahmed, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Barun De, Brajendranath De, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri, Jadunath Sarkar, Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Muhammad Mohar Ali, Niharranjan Ray, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Papiya Ghosh, Rajat Kanta Ray, Ramaprasad Chanda, Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Ranajit Guha, Romesh Chunder Dutt, Sugata Bose, Sumit Sarkar, Susobhan Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Tapan Raychaudhuri. Excerpt: Brajendranath De Esq., ICS, (Bengali: ) was a civil servant and orientalist. He was born at his maternal grandfather's home at 123, Manicktala Street, Calcutta. His father's family, originally from Uttar Rarh in Bengal, belonged to the newly emerging middle class of Calcutta. He describes them as Kayastha bhadraloks in his unpublished memoir. According to family elders, his ancestor Baidyanath Deb Sarkar (Dey) was a member of a branch of the same family to which Ramdulal Dey (Deb Sarkar), Ashutosh Dey (Deb Sarkar) (alias Chatu Babu) and Pramathanath Dey (Deb Sarkar) (alias Latu Babu) belonged. These three men were considered to be the doyens of Bengali business in the eighteenth century, having brought Waneham Lake ice from America to India for the first time. From Brajendranath's memoir it emerges that his paternal ancestors had lived in Bhowanipore from the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and owned a number of houses there, of which only 31, Gobinda Bose's Lane remained at the time of his birth. Bhowanipore, built on the land where the village Gobindapur had earlier existed was, at the turn of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, one of the newest and most modern suburban localities of Calcutta where affluent families, arriving from either the south of the city or from North Calcutta built their homes. One of Brajendranath's close paternal uncles was Babu Nilmadhab De, who became a...