ISWAR CHANDRA VIDYASAGAR 77 and efficiency he had emerged out of the poverty and obscurity of the countryside and risen to eminence, and this was possible in part because the British recognised the force of his personality and his merit. He had ridden himself of ancient superstitions and prejudices with the enlightenment of modern scientific knowledge* He naturally thought it selfish to enjoy the fruits of this enlightenment in private splendour and sought to disseminate them by spreading wide the benefits of education and a new humane morality. (Though Sen does not mention it, it is quite likely that he shared with some of the colonial rulers the Benthamite ardour of social reform through gradual application of reason.) But Vidyasagar's distrust of a radical pose, and his perspective of gradual reform imposed their own limitations on the effectiveness of his programmes. Since he tried to avoid the isolation of the Brahmos and the eccentric iconoclasm ofS ^oung Bengal', he had to depend on an appeal to religious sentiments he himself did not inwardly share. In his campaign for widow remarriage he was reduced to citing ancient and authoritative scriptures with a view to persuading a mass audience (pp 74-75). While one may hold with Sen that this was a tactical necessity, it certainly weakened the attack on orthodoxy. We come upon a similar concession to blind custom in his refusal to admit a suvarna-banik student to Sanskrit College (p 182). While he may not have had much choice in the matter in the environment of Sanskrit College, in the wider social setting this may well have had a regressive impact. As the author himself shows, there were at least some individuals like Akshay Kumar Dutta who advanced more secular arguments in support of their opposition to feminine bondage to widowhood (p 73). He was more concerned to relieve the suffering of child-widows than to abolish the oppression of women revealed in the condition of the widows (p 89). The superficiality of the reform itself is underlined by the fact that the Act of 1856 did not guarantee economic independence of widowed women (p 79). Thus, Sen provides the evidence from which we may conclude reasonably enough that the reforms launched by Vidyasagar were both superficial and ineffective. The question one has got to face is whether the perspective of gradualism in a colonial context is not self-defeating, whether it does not call for revolutionary action, whether social tinkering without a radical transformation of structure is of much use. Such programmes of reform would have been more meaningful had they been associated with a political campaign to liberate the peasantry, or even if they had a clear anti-imperialist edge