Bankim Chandra Chatterjee Birth Anniversary: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, or Anglicised Version Chatterjee, was a Bengali novelist, poet and journalist. With several serious, comic, satirical and scientific novels to his credit, the polymath earned the title of ‘Sahitya Samrat’ (Emperor of Literature) in Bengali. Bankim was born on June 27, 1838.
On his birth anniversary, we bring you some lesser known facts about the composer of India’s national song Vande Mataram:
- Bankim was born to Yadav Chandra Chattopadhyaya and Durgadevi in an orthodox Bengali Brahmin family in Naihati in West Bengal.
- He was married at the age of 11. After the death of his first wife, he married Rajalakshmi Devi, with whom he had three daughters.
- Bankim wrote the novel Anandamath – published in 1882 – containing Vande Mataram.
- He wrote the Indian national anthem before writing Anandamath – a political novel in which a sannyasin army is raised for the East India Company.
- Bankim was the first to honor Rabindranath Tagore as a Vishwakavi (universal poet).
- He founded Bangadarshan, a monthly Bengali literary magazine, in April 1972.
Durgeshnandini (1865) and Kapalkundala (1866) were his first two novels that were widely appreciated and translated into other languages. - Bankim served as the Deputy Collector of Jessore before taking over as the Deputy Magistrate. He retired as a civil servant in 1891.
- Rajmohan’s Wife was his first fiction work in English and has the distinction of being the first Indian novel to be written in English by an Indian.
- The novel Bishabriksha (The Poison Tree, 1873) was his first work to be published serially in Bangadarshan.
- His popular novel Krishnakantar Vil – first published in 1878 – is an eponymous film adaptation in Bengali.
- Bankim was one of the first two graduates of the University of Calcutta.
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