Madhusudan_Das

His Life and Achievements: 57
Utkal Tannery, he would have merited the gratitude of his race. They
were primarily intended as contributions to the industrial development
of Orissa and they certainly provided work to many Oriyas who would
otherwise have had to leave their homeland. The eventual failure in the
difficult post-war period came as a heavy blow to M.S. Das in his old
age. He struggled splendidly to rehabilitate them, and I think the
proudest moment of his life was when he was discharged from his
insolvency with the judge's expression of sympathy for his misfortune
and he proudly wrote to me that if he was poor he was at least without
a slur on his reputation. I have always felt the same sympathy for him
as for Sir Walter Scott in a similar financial embarrassment.
I should be ungrateful if I had failed to acknowledge the
assistance received from M.S. Das in the perennial struggle against
corruption in the mofussil Courts. He insisted that it could only be
eliminated whether as regards the ministerial staff, or as regards the
moral tone of the Bar against the less reputable members of the
profession who act as intermediaries.
M.S. Das was a great man in his day and generation. To him
pre-eminently is due the fact that Orissa, instead of remaining a
neglected province of Bengal with a sullen and discontented
intelligentsia, has become a province of the Indian Empire containing
the great majority of British Oriyas and looking forward with hope
and confidence to managing its own affairs and it is satisfactory to
know that though it is not given to him to be present as an honoured
guest at the inauguration of Orissa on the 1st April, 1936, he had
in his last days a near view of the promised land. In the days to
come Orissa will count this ardent, humorous, abstemious, patriotic
son among the chiefest of her benefactors.
• • •
(5)
A PIONEER IN MANY FIELDS
S.B. DHAVLE
Being on circuit, I was a member of the Bench before which
a reference was made to the death of Mr. Madhusudan Das by Rai