Madhusudan_Das

162 Madhusudan Das:
Headmaster of the Garden Reach School in Calcutta. Then it will
be worth mentioning and he had mentioned that to me more than
once that having been the tutor of the late lamented Sir Asutosh
Mukherjee, he had the privilege of moulding his character not
only intellectually but morally. On one occasion when Sir Asutosh
was asked after a speech he delivered in English as to from whom
he had learnt the English, he said that it was from Mr.Madhusudan
Das. My Lords: in fact for the last 43 years he has been the life
and soul of Modern Orissa. "(I. C. L. T. 4)
MADHUSUDAN & RESURRECTED ORISSA
It is difficult for the present generation of youth to appreciate the
contribution of Madhusudan to the building up of a modern Orissa. Orissa
in the 19th century was a land of abject poverty and misery. As the official
Gazetteer shows in the District of Cuttack alone ten lakhs of starvation
deaths were reported through the then available sources in the famine of
1866. Flood, famine, pestilence coupled with the administrative
negligence obduracy in the fields of education, public health, agriculture,
communication industry presented an inconceivable state of affair under
which no leader without the spirit of complete self-denial, total selfeffacement
and unflinching self-control could work. As an industrialist,
educationist and politician Madhusudan inaugurated an age of
Resurrection and Renaissance in Orissa. In all his famous speeches he
referred to the "Mother in the Death Bed". To express in his own words
"he found only the heaps of dry bones, bones, bones nothing but bones,
he undertook the tremendous work to infuse life, to give muscles and
arms to his people with ammunition, without any help from anyone except
the Father above." As the great German philosopher has said, "A nation is
never grateful and the greatest teaching of History is that it teaches nothing.
" The contribution of Madhusudan the statesman, Madhusudan the
politician. Madhusudan the educationist. Madhusudan the industrialist
are about to be forgotten not only in the din and bustle of modern politics,
but by manifold developments and projects brought about by the
successive administrations in the Province since 1st April 1936. "
MADHUSUDAN AS A POLITICAL PROPHET
But even in the midst of national-forgetfulness, Madhusudan,
the poet and philosopher. Madhusudan the orator and spiritual leader of
the nation lives. He lives and is bound to live not only in the hearts of