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Partition of Bengal, an upheaval of feeling so genuine and so wide-spread as that which swept through Bengal, in 1883. Public meetings of sympathy for me, and of protest against the judgment of the High Court, were held in almost every considerable town. So strong was the feeling that in some cases even Government servants took part in them and suffered for it. But these demon- strations were not of the evanescent order. They left an enduring impress on the public life of the province.
When the public mind has been roused by some great event, it struggles for expression in all directions, in melodious songs, in passionate utterances in the Press and from the platform, and in enterprises which bear on them the ineffaceable mark of daring and originality. This is illustrated in the great events of history. in the stimulus to national life and enterprise that was witnessed in the Elizabethan epoch. Poetry, original research, commercial and naval enterprise for the discovery of new worlds, all went apace. The soul of England was bodied forth in them all. The beginnings of such a stimulus, though on a much smaller scale, were witnessed in the upheaval that sprang from the Contempt Case. It gave an impetus to journalism. The Sulava Samachar had been started as a pice paper by the late Keshub Chunder Sen, but the movement for cheap journalism had languished. Now, however, it received an awakened impulse in the passionate desire for news. Babu Jogendranath Bose started the Bangabasi as a pice paper. His example was followed by Babu Kristo Kumar Mitter. The Bangabasi and the Sanjibani still continue to hold an important place in the journalistic world of Bengal.
As our public meetings now began to be attended by thousands, so our cheap vernacular papers for the first time counted their readers by thousands. But there were indeed wider developments which followed in the track of this great outburst of public feeling. One of them was an object for which I had striven so hard, and which educated India had begun to place in the forefront of its programme. The Contempt Case, as it was called, operated as a unifying influence, strengthening the growing bonds of fellowship and good feeling between the different Indian provinces. Meetings of sympathy with me in my misfortune were held in many of the great towns of India—Lahore, Amritsar, Agra, Fyzabad, Poona, and other important centres. A well-known writer under the nom de plume of Setji Sorabji thus referred to these demonstrations in an open letter addressed to Gup and Gossip of June 18, 1884: