The topics addressed by Dutt in his Essays are hard-hitting: “Young Bengal; or, the Hopes of India”; “Women in India; their Condition and Character”; “Hindu Caste; its Nature, Origin and Tendency”; “Hindu Female Education”; and so on. OCLC shows just four copies worldwide: BL, Brown, and Western (ON).

A career civil servant in the East India Company (rising from ‘kerani’ (clerk) to Rai Bahadur and Head Assistant of the Bengal Secretariat over the course of 34 years), As his further publications attest, Shoshee was evidently interested in religious and social reform movements. According to an inscription on the title-page, he presented this copy of his Essays to fellow EIC employee Hodgson Pratt (1824-1907), a secular, reform-minded pacifist who became an important figurehead upon his return to England in 1861. Pratt, however, seems to have swiftly offloaded the book onto the Unitarian missionary Charles Henry Appleton Dall (1816-1886), who had arrived in Calcutta in the summer of 1855. Four years later, Dall shipped the book back to the American Unitarian Association in his native Boston, where it then circulated among further Unitarians.

Shoshee Chunder Dutt’s anti-colonial sentiments ultimately forced him to resign his government post. Rather subversively, he adopted several different “white” pseudonyms later in life such as ‘Horatio Bickerstaffe Rowney’ and ‘J. A. G. Barton’, under which he wrote journal articles such as “Shankar—a Tale of Indian Mutiny”, deeply critical of the administration’s actions.

Provenance:

1) presentation inscription by Dutt “To Hodgson Pratt Esq with the author’s respects / Care of D. Miles”

2) “H[odgson]. P[ratt]. to C[harles]. H[enry]. A[appleton]. Dall, Sept. 2? 1855”

3) “C. H. A. Dall to the Library of the A[merican] U[nitarian] A[ssociation] No 21 Bromfield St. [Boston], [from] Calcutta July 1859”; “(Note) The young man who wrote these Essays (& wrote them in English) is a brother of Hur Chunder Dutt the writer of ‘Stray Leaves’ - &c. Is there not some good stuff here to work upon? C. H. A. D.”

4) [Boston abolitionist] James Freeman Clark (1810-1888), bookplate presenting the book to the Meadville Theological School, a Unitarian seminary in Pennsylvania.

5) mid-20th century ex-libris markings of the Meadville Theological School (“Withdrawn”) on pastedown

As noted above, OCLC shows a single copy in US libraries, at Brown.