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Surendranath Banerjee

(1848 – 1925) – (West Bengal)

Sir Surendranath Banerjee (Aged 77), born on 10 November 1848 in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, belonged to a Kulin Brahmin family. His father, Durga Charan Banerjee, was a doctor who had a profound influence on Surendranath’s liberal and progressive thinking. After graduating from the University of Calcutta, Surendranath travelled to England in 1868 with Romesh Chunder Dutt and Behari Lal Gupta to take the Indian Civil Service examinations.

Although Surendranath cleared the competitive examination in 1869, he was barred due to a claim that he had misrepresented his age. However, he cleared the exam again in 1871 after arguing in court that he had calculated his age according to the Hindu custom of reckoning age from the date of conception rather than from birth. He was then posted as assistant magistrate in Sylhet.

Surendranath was dismissed from his post for making a serious judicial error and went to England to appeal his discharge. However, he was unsuccessful in his appeal due to what he believed to be racial discrimination. Upon his return to India in June 1875, Surendranath became an English professor at the Metropolitan Institution, the Free Church Institution, and at the Rippon College, which he founded in 1882 and is now known as Surendranath College.

He founded the Indian National Association, a nationalist organization through which he led two sessions of the Indian National Conference in 1883 and 1885, along with Anandamohan Bose. Later, Surendranath became a senior member of the Indian National Congress, although he repudiated the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, which led him and many liberal leaders to leave Congress and form a new organization named the Indian National Liberation Federation in 1919.

Surendranath condemned the racial discrimination perpetrated by British officials in India through speeches all over the country, which made him very popular. He passed away on 6 August 1925 in Barrackpore, Kolkata, West Bengal, India.