Sarkar, Akshay Chandra

Sarkar, Akshay Chandra (1846-1917) a litterateur and a critic. He was born on 11 December 1846 in a Kayastha family in Chunchura in the district of Hugli. His father Ganga Charan Sarkar after taking BL degree worked as a Munsif and then as a sub-judge. Akshay Chandra Sarkar obtained his BA degree in 1967 and BL degree in 1868, and worked as a lawyer at Bahrampur. At that time bankim chandra chattopadhyay came to Bahrampur as a deputy-magistrate and Akshay Chandra Sarkar thus became familiar with him. And this familiarity turned into a deep friendship. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay edited Banga Darshan (1872), to which Akshay Chandra contributed as a writer. His first writing Uddipana was published in Banga Darshan. During that period, he also edited a weekly periodical titled Sadharani (1973) and continued editing it persistently for a long period of seventeen years.

The Bharat Shava was set up in 1876, and Akshay Chandra Sarkar was elected its first assistant joint-secretary. He became the vice-president of vangiya sahitya parishad three times ' first for two years successively in 1897 and 1898, and later in 1913. On 19-21 Falgun in 1318, Vangiya Sahitya Parishad organised the fifth Vangiya Sahitya Sammelan (Bengal Literary Conference). Akshay Chandra was made the President of its reception committee. In the following year on 9-10 Chaitra, the sixth Vangiya Sahitya Sammelan was held in Chittagong and he was elected the President of it.

Although Akshay Chandra Sarkar earned literary fame through writing in the Banga Darshan, three of his works actually made him most well known. These are: his editing of Prachin Kavya Sangraha (1874-77), Gocharaner Math (1880) and the newspaper titled Nabajibon (1884-1889). He co-edited Prachin Kavya Sangraha with Saroda Charan Mitra; the second one is a poetry book written by himself. The third work Nabajibon touched on important contemporary issues like society, culture, religion, politics and literary criticism, which were regularly discussed by poets and litterateurs like bankimchandra chattopadhyay, rabindranath tagore, Hemchandra Bandhopadhyay, nabinchandra sen, Akshay Chandra Sarkar. At that time, such discussion on society and religion was done chiefly with the mediation of the editor. While editing Nabajibon, Akshay Chandra Sarkar came to be known as a devoted disciple of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. Though in literary production he followed the symbolic order of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, he had his own distinctiveness, and there he stands out with his own uniqueness. His autobiographical work Pita-Putra (Father-Son) marks his distinctive use of language, as it documents contemporary social and literary history. Some other works of Akshay Chandra Sarkar are: Somaj-Somalochana (1874), Songkshipta Ramayana (1882), Sanatani (1911), Kavi Hemchandra (1912), etc. He died on 2 October 1917. [Muhammad Saiful Islam]