Place · college · India
Presidency College, Calcutta
Also known as Presidency College, Hindu College Calcutta, Presidency University
India's first modern Western-style college, founded as Hindu College in 1817 by Rammohan Roy, David Hare and others, renamed Presidency College in 1855 and the central institution of the Bengal renaissance. The faculty included Henry Louis Vivian Derozio in the 1820s, Alexander Duff and Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar; alumni include Jagadish Chandra Bose, Prafulla Chandra Ray, Subhas Chandra Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose and generations of Bengali public intellectuals. Made Presidency University in 2010.
- Date
- 1817–None
- Function
- Learning & scholarship
- Patron dynasty
- British Raj
- Tradition
- Presidency University records; Bengal renaissance scholarship.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 22.575, 88.364
Worth knowing
The Derozian or Young Bengal movement that developed around the college in the 1820s was the first substantial Indian secular-rationalist public culture, with members publicly eating beef, drinking wine and criticising both Hinduism and the Mission.
Connections (3)
- Site withinKolkata
Presidency College sits in the heart of College Street in central Kolkata, the one square kilometre of the city that holds the Hindu College founding, Hare School, the Indian Museum, the Asiatic Society, the Senate House, Sanskrit College and the Calcutta University headquarters — the entire institutional geography of the Bengal renaissance within one neighbourhood. The college and its surrounding bookshops, publishers and coffee houses are the city's intellectual anchor; Kolkata without College Street would be a different city.
- FoundedRammohan Roy
Rammohan Roy co-founded Hindu College at Calcutta in 1817 with David Hare, Prasannakumar Tagore and others — the subcontinent's first modern Western-style college and the institutional centre of the Bengal renaissance. Roy's own argument for the college was that English-language learning and Western science and reason were the pedagogical instruments through which Hindu society would reform itself; the college later renamed Presidency College in 1855 remained his most consequential institutional legacy.
- Educated atC. V. Raman
C.V. Raman received his B.A. and M.A. from Presidency College Madras between 1902 and 1907, graduating at nineteen with the highest marks in physics the Madras University had awarded. His first paper, on diffraction, was written as an undergraduate and published in the Philosophical Magazine of 1906. Presidency College's physics department under Alexander Pedler shaped the questions he carried for the next sixty years, including the one that led to the 1928 scattering discovery at Calcutta.