As one of the legendary figures of the 19th century Bengal renaissance, Pandit Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar (1820 – 1891) is best known for his remarkable achievements in the spheres of academics and social reform. On the one hand, his vast erudition and analytical brilliance helped him develop the right perspectives for an educationist and a social reformer; on the other, his qualities of head and heart helped him become a humanist and a philanthropist.
All these qualities also found reflection in something about which Pandit Vidyasagar is not too well known – his pioneering role in the development of homeopathy as a system of medical treatment, mainly for the benefit of people of small means and others unable to bear the high costs of conventional medical treatment.
He realised quickly the vast potential of homeopathy in our country, and encouraged his youngest brother Ishanchandra to take up the study of homeopathy, telling him “Homeopathy alone is the poor man’s cure… allopathy is too expensive…” The two brothers treated the people of Birsingha, their ancestral village now in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district, and gave them the benefits of medical treatment they had never received earlier – all free of cost, with all incidental expenses incurred in treating them borne by Ishwarchandra.
While Ishanchandra continued to serve the people of Birsingha as a homeopath for 38 years till his passing away in 1903, Pandit Ishwarchandra concentrated on Kolkata – where the first accounts of his homeopathic practice could be traced to 1864 – and on Karmatanr, now in Jharkhand, where he spent the last eighteen years of his life from 1873 to 1891. His first patients were the students of the Metropolitan School and young people in its neighbouring areas; he not only treated them free of cost, he maintained a diary and sketchy documentation of all his patients, with a view to ensure that his treatment was based on careful observations and analysis. In Karmatanr, he offered free treatment to numerous poor people in Karmatanr and its surrounding areas, often walking long distances to attend to them in their villages, and maintained a diary.
Ishanchandra’s son Pareshnath Banerji (1891 – 1971) become a legend. Even though he had begun homeopathic practice at Kustia, now in Bangladesh, where he had stayed with his elder sister, his name is readily associated with Mihijam, also in Jharkhand, and near Karmatar where his famous uncle had been based. At Mihijam, where he commenced practice in 1918, and treated a few hundred patients per day within a year, his phenomenal success as a homeopath attracted thousand more, with the Indian Railways having to arrange for the stoppages of all major trains at Mihijam’s tiny railway station. Pareshnath treated his patients free of cost, charging them neither consultation fees nor the cost of medicines which was borne from the sales proceeds of his growing business in Lexin – the drug he had invented for treating snakebites – which had become popular not only in India, but also in South American countries. For patients who came from distant places, free meals were cooked and offered.
Pareshnath Banerji’s philanthropic bent of mind found reflection not only in his interactions with patients, but also in those with common people in Birsingha, his ancestral village. By virtue of being the best loved among his siblings, Pareshnath inherited almost the whole of his family wealth which included the extensive agricultural landholdings of Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar himself – over 160 acres of agricultural land and a 33-acre lake which had been specially dug up on Ishwsarchandra’s insistence with a view to ensure that the villagers of the drought-ridden area never suffered from a shortage of water. Even in his most difficult times, not for even on day did Pareshnath use any part of his inherited wealth for the benefit of himself or his own family. In fact, on the contrary, when land settlement operations were taken up in the 1950s, he directed his son Prasanta to arrange to register each plot of land in the name of the particular farmer who had been tilling it. He retained in his own name only the lake which was intended for use as a water reservoir by the people of Birsingha and its surrounding villages.
Pareshnath’s four sons, three of whom became homeopaths, continued to help people of small means in various ways. His second son, Prasanta (1933 – 2018), who started practice in Kolkata in 1960 after having assisted his father in Mihijam till then, established a free clinic which has been successfully run till today – with a daily footfall between 300 and 400 patients – since the early 1990s under Pratip, his son, and a fourth-generation homeopath in the Banerji family.