Pandit Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar spent the last 18 years of his life from 1873 to 1891 at Karmatanr, now in Jharkhand, which is about 57 kilometres from Asansol on the main line of the Asansol – Sitarampur – Jasidih – Patna route of the Eastern Railway. Lying between Madhupur and Jamtara, Karmatanr’s railway station now bears his name – ‘Vidyasagar’.
Even though he was one of the legendary figures of the 19th-century Bengal renaissance as a social reformer, educationist, humanitarian and philanthropist, his life in Kolkata had been full of stresses and strains… with the society’s opposition to his endeavours aimed at the well-being of women causing the greatest distress. Moreover, there was a breakdown in his health too, following a serious liver injury sustained in 1866 in a horse carriage accident. He wanted to retire to some place outside Kolkata where he could rest, live in solitude and get mental peace, and wrote about his decision to all his near and dear ones.
In 1873, he bought a house with an orchard in Karmatanr, where he stayed for the next 18 years, going to Kolkata only when necessary. Karmatanr was a small tribal hamlet with a mixed population comprising Hindus, Muslims, Kahars, Mandals, Suris, Ghatwals and Santhals who formed the majority. Even though he got some rest and peace of mind, he was far from being inactive. Based on the efforts of some individuals and bodies the members of which had great respect for him and collected and documented data on his stay in Karmatanr, it is possible to get a fairly clear idea about what he did to promote the well-being of tribal people with regard to health, education, livelihoods and also a happy social environment based on amity, cordiality and fellow feeling among its inhabitants, always bearing in mind their extreme poverty, lack of education and ignorance in matters relating to health and hygiene.
At ‘Nundun Kanun’, his house with an orchard in Karmatanr, he ran a free day school for girls and a free night school for adults, making the best possible use of his Bengali and Hindi books in teaching them, and also bringing books for them from Kolkata. He had mango, jackfruit, and rose-apple trees in his orchard, and gave the villagers seeds for whatever they could grow… the soil of Karmatanr and its surroundings had low-level fertility and only maize and some vegetables could be grown.
Haraprasad Shastri, who spent a day with Pandit Vidyasagar at ‘Nundun Kanun’ in 1878, has written that villagers came and sold to him all their unsold maize cobs at whatever prices they fixed, and that Vidyasagar distributed the very same maize cobs to hungry villagers who came to him later in the day with nothing to sell and also nothing to eat! Even for the sellers, Karmatanr had few buyers, and Madhupur and Jamtara – where they could find buyers – were both 20 miles away! One finds Haraprasad Shastri’s second memorable experience more interesting! During his brief, one-day stay, he suddenly realised that Pandit Vidyasagar had disappeared… he was nowhere to be found, and, on scrutiny, only the back-door to his house was found open. When he returned after a few hours, he said that he had gone to treat a patient whose nose bleeding had stopped after taking only one dose of a homeopathic medicine; he also said that compared to patients in Kolkata, his patients in and around Karmatanr responded much better to his treatment because of their lower overall intake of medicines and lower resistance. This visit required a walk of at least 3 miles, and even though Pandit Vidyasagar attended to most patients at his dispensary at ‘Nundun Kanun’, he often had to walk distances longer than 3 miles, spend sleepless nights and even nurse patients who required his care and attention; very often, he even carried food for them. He clearly realised that Karmatanr and its surrounding offered no facilities for medical treatment, and that their poor inhabitants could not in any way afford visiting Madhupur, Jamtara or Deoghar and avail of the facilities for medical treatment these three towns offered. His third brother, Shambhuchandra Vidyaratna, who visited him in 1875, wrote: “From early morning till 10 am, elder brother (Vidyasagar) attends to Santhal patients and treats them by the homeopathic system and he supplies himself their diet of sago, light fluffed sugar (batasa) and sugar-candy. After his mid-day meal, he would inspect the plants in the garden and would transplant young plants from one spot to another as he felt necessary. Later, he would sit down to write his books. In the afternoon, he would visit the cottages of the Santhals who were ill and do supervision, as he would reach their huts, they would say, “O, you have come” with the most cordial welcome. Elder brother (Vidyasagar) was so fond of their words and expressions. He told me at that time “It is so pleasant, I like so much better visiting the huts of these people than going to the houses of big men; their nature is so pure, they never tell lies, for all these reasons I so much love to live here”.
Even taking into account Pandit Vidyasagar’s excellent qualities of head and heart, it is remarkable that he took pains to walk long distances to attend to many of his patients, in spite of the adverse effects of the serious liver injury he had sustained to 1866.
Pandit Vidyasagar’s love for the poor and the underprivileged inspired his nephew Pareshnath Banerji (1891 – 1971) who, based in Mihijam, near Karmatanr since 1919, became a legendary homeopathic practitioner attending to thousands of patients daily. He treated his patients free of cost; for patients who came from distant places, he offered free meals.
The findings of Krishnachandra Ghoshal of Patna, who had served as the Postmaster at Karmatanr’s post office in the 1940s in this article ‘Vidyasagar O Karmatanr’ in the Bihar Bengali Samiti’s ‘Sanchita’ magazine of November 15, 1973, corroborated by the Samiti’s own findings and interactions with local people when it took over the ‘Nundun Kanun’ in 1974, and finally, the experiences of those present there in 1993 when the Vidyasagar Smritiraksha Committee installed a bust of Pandit Vidyasagar, all reveal clearly a bonding based on the deepest love and intimacy between him and Karmatanr’s tribal people who treated him like a god. While they gave Pandit Vidyasagar all that they could – vegatables and other garden produce and lentils from time to time – the Pandit used to get them from Kolkata drugs and medicines, clothes including sarees and warm clothing for winter, kitchen utensils and crockery, rice, dal, sweets, cakes and dates, combs, mirrors and other gifts.
When, in 1993, the Vidyasagar Smritiraksha Committee installed a bust of Pandit Vidyasagar at the ‘Nundun Kanun’, and after the official function had been completed and all invitees had left, a very large of tribal people came in droves, dressed in their best clothes, offering flowers on the platform in front of the bust, and presenting lively dances as their sincere and heartfelt tribute to someone who had passed away 102 years ago! They had never seen Vidyasagar themselves, but the respect for Vidyasagar had been passed on by their forefathers for three or four generations.
A humorous anecdote: Pandit Vidyasagar, being of a diminutire height, used to have difficulty in boarding and alighting from trains because of the Karmatanr Railway Station’s low platform. After several requests to the railway authorities were unheeded, numerous tribal people came with their bows and arrows, sat on the railway tracks, staged protests and held up trains. This resulted in the elevation of the platform. The station today is named after him.