Madhusudan_Das

V
MADHUSUDAN DAS :
HIS CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICAL THOUGHT
SRIRAM CHANDRA DASH
1
Political thinkers are the products of their time and circumstances.
Persons belonging to the same country at an interval of even fifty years
have thought differently about the institutions and tendencies of the
country as was seen in the case of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, both
of whom belonged to England in the seventeenth century but because
Hobbes had experienced the civil War and Locke, the Glorious Revolution,
their ideas on the individual and the state are fundamentally at variance.
Likewise political thinkers of England and Germany at the end of the
eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century like Bentham and
Kant have nothing in common in their thought. Contemporary Indian
political thought is based on the reaction to the circumstances prevailing
in India and every one, no matter to whichever part of the country he
belonged, reacted almost in an identical manner subject to minor variations
dependent upon his education and foreign contact. Till the first world
war, Indian thought was coloured by the liberal thought of England, as
Indians had more intimate contact with England and the British political
literature. It is only after the war that Indian thinkers had a wider field of
contact with countries other than England and many of our leaders came
in closer contact with U.S.A., Soviet Union, Germany. France and Asian
countries.
Orissa was a neglected part of India. She had no political identity
of her own: the Oriya-speaking areas had been scattered in me erstwhile
Presidencies of Madras and Bengal and the Province of Central Province
and Berar. Coastal Orissa was a division in Bengal till 1912 when the Lt.
Governor's Sub-Province of Bihar and Orissa was created and it was only
in 1936 that Orissa was made a separate Province with a few areas taken
from Madras, Bihar and Orissa and Central Province and quite a large
number of Oriya speaking tracts still remained in Bengal and the aforesaid
Provinces. Orissa came under the British rule in 1803 whereas Bengal
was brought into the East India Company's domain in 1757 after the
Battle of Plassey and even though for administrative convenience, Orissa
was tagged to Bengal, the Oriyas were not as much advanced as the