Young Bengal: India’s First Radicals and Their Areligious Modernity

Column. Young Bengal was a band of teenagers in 1830s Calcutta. They questioned caste, priests and censorship. Nearly two centuries later, they still sound modern.

Historian Rosinka Chaudhuri revisits them in India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire. In an interview published by The Daily Star on Thursday, she described what made them different.

What Young Bengal fought for

The group grew out of Hindu College in Calcutta. Their teacher, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, was only 18 when he was appointed in 1826. His students were barely younger. He died in 1831.

They read Locke, Hume, Bacon and Bentham. They read Byron and Shelley too. Chaudhuri says they read more outside the syllabus than inside it.

Their causes were bold for the age. They opposed caste and Brahminical power. They backed education and equality for women. They defended a free press and free speech for all. Chaudhuri says they even founded India’s first political party.

Why “areligious modernity” matters

Here is the part freethinkers should notice. Unlike the reformer Rammohun Roy, Young Bengal founded no religious platform at all. They focused only on social and civil affairs.

Chaudhuri coins the phrase “areligious modernity” for the public sphere they built. It was not a new church. It was a space where faith was simply not the organising principle.

That idea is quietly radical. Much secular politics still negotiates with religion on religion’s terms. Young Bengal just stepped around it. They argued about rights, not revelation.

Chaudhuri also warns against judging them by today’s standards. They lived before mass politics, before nationalism, even before liberalism. Some members later converted or grew conservative. That does not erase what they started.

She notes the echoes today. Free speech and free association “need to be fought for again,” she says, as sedition laws return.

The same struggle runs through modern South Asia, where blasphemy laws silence the non-religious. Young Bengal’s lesson is simple. A public life does not need a pulpit.

Read the full Daily Star interview.

This is an opinion column. Fact basis: The Daily Star interview with Rosinka Chaudhuri (24 Sept 2026); her book India’s First Radicals (Penguin Random House India, 2025).