A Man in ‘Forty’ Million

In 1891, shortly after the death of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “One wonders, how God, in the process of producing forty million Bengalis, produced a man.” Tagore, who famously termed Bengal as an enchanted mother keeping her seven crore children under the lid of Bengalis without actually allowing them to become humans (“Bangamata”, from Chaitali,