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Surendranath Dasgupta
present. He took his M.A. degree from Sanskrit College, Calcutta, in 1908. His fellow-students noticed with interest his habits and peculiarities. He took no care of his clothes and hair; he studied on a mat with a pillow for his table; and his place was littered with books and papers. Though he did not talk very much, he already had a reputation for scholarship when he was an M.A. student at the Sanskrit College. His scholarship in Pāṇini was so great that when even his teachers had differences of opinion about a grammatical matter, he was called out of his class to solve it. His first research work on Nyāya, which was written while he was in the Sanskrit College, was read out before the Pandits, and was very highly appreciated by them and the then Principal, the late Mahamahopadhyaya H. P. Sastri. Incidentally it may be noted that Nyāya was not one of the subjects of his M.A. curriculum. After his childhood, both as a student and as a young man, he had many striking religious and spiritual experiences, which were known to a group of his intimate friends and admirers.
One of the peculiar traits of Dasgupta was that he seldom wished to learn anything from others. He had an inner pride that led him to learn everything by his own efforts. He never wanted any stimulus from outside. Whenever he took up any work, he threw his whole soul and being into it. He passed his M.A. in Philosophy in 1910, as a private candidate, summarising all the prescribed books in his own way. He was twice offered a state scholarship to study Sanskrit in a scientific manner in Europe, but as he was the only child of his parents, he refused out of consideration for their feelings. He began his service at Rajshahi College as an officiating lecturer in Sanskrit. He was soon provided with a permanent professorship at Chittagong College, where he worked from 1911 to 1920 and from 1922 to 1924.
Chittagong was to him like a place of banishment, being far away from the great libraries of Calcutta. The College was newly started and had none of the facilities that it possesses now. But Dasgupta had taken the resolution that he would dedicate himself to the study of the Indian “Šāstras” in their entirety. For him to take a resolution was to accomplish it, and while many of his colleagues enjoyed club life in an easy-going manner, he continued his studies for fourteen hours or more a day, in spite of the teasing of his friends. At this time Maharaja Manindra Chandra Nandi of
