Rajendra Lal Mitra 

Ramakanta Samantaray and Sailen Routray

Rajendra Lal Mitra (1824-1891)

In the year 1868 the London-based Royal Society of Arts sent in a request to the Government of British India. It placed a large sum of money at the disposal of the government and solicited that this amount be used for getting casts of the more important sculptures of ancient India. 

A part of this grant was then transferred to the Presidency of Bengal, of which the districts of Cuttack, Puri and Balasore were then a part. When the Lieutenant Governor Sir William Gray started executing the work, he began with taking the opinion of learned Indologists. 

It was at this juncture that Rajendralala Mitra (15 February 1824 – 26 July 1891) made the suggestion that the group or modellers and moulders who were about to depart for Orissa should process straight to Bhubaneswar. According to Mitra it was at this temple town that the most interesting, ancient and beautiful sculptures of Eastern India were to be found.

Mitra’s suggestions were accepted and he himself was selected to lead the team and conduct the assignment in Orissa. This work took place in the winter of 1868-69, nearly 150 years earlier. 

The  documentation of this work was later produced in the two-volume ‘Antiquities of Orissa’ (published in 1875 and 1880) and profusely illustrated with lithographs and photographs. These images contain the first extensive visual representations of Bhubaneswar’s architecture and sculptures and still frame our imaginary of the built heritage of Bhubaneswar. 

A view of Lingaraj Temple (Source - 'Antiquities of Orissa')

Mitra was a key intellectual shaping the Bengal Renaissance of the 19th century. Born to a Kayastha family, he was an autodidact proficient in languages such as Bangla, English, Persian, Hindustani, Sanskrit, and had a working knowledge of French, German and Greek. 

He joined a major centre for Indology, the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta as its librarian, at a young age of 22 in 1846. He contributed more than 114 papers to the Society’s journal, rose through the ranks, finally becoming its first Indian president in 1885. 

He was a significant figure in the growth of history and archaeology as modern human scientific enterprises in India as well. As the first modern Indian Indologist, he played a key role in the collection of Sanskrit manuscripts and translated some key Buddhist texts such as ‘Lalitha Visthara’ and ‘Prajna-Paranitha’ into English. 

For this indological work, he was admired by scholars such as Max Muller. He took an active interest in the fledgling Indian National Congress, and delivered the welcome address in its second annual conference. 

In Odisha, Rajendralala Mitra is now remembered chiefly for his stray, disparaging remarks about Odias made during a critical period in the Odia movement in the 19th century. But seeing him through this prism, not only distorts our image of this interesting and important  member of the Indian reawakening of the 19th century, but occludes his real and substantial contributions towards documenting Bhubaneswar’s and Odisha’s culture.