India, Oct. 18 -- In 1838, a scandal broke out in the then princely state of Burdwan (now, Bardhaman in West Bengal) when Basantakumari, one of the widows of the deceased king Tejchandra, eloped with Dakshinaranjan Mukhopadhyay, a Calcutta-based lawyer. Basantakumari had hired Dakshinaranjan to represent her in a property dispute. When the two of later married, they challenged multiple social and religious taboos. Hindu widows getting married was almost unheard of in the 1830s; it would find legal sanction only in 1856, under the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of the British East India Company. The sole credit for this reform is often assigned to Ishwar Chandra "Vidyasagar", while Dakshinaranjan and his comrades in the radical Young Bengal party, are ignored at best. "The tendency to deify Vidyasagar and vilify Young Bengal has little basis in history," writes Rosinka Chaudhuri, in her latest book, India's First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire. She shows that Vidyasagar's campaign for widow remarriage was not the result of the eureka moment of a "great man", but emerged out of numerous socio-political debates that unfolded in Calcutta over the previous decades, in which members of Young Bengal took an active part. Chaudhuri, in fact, demonstrates that many of the socio-political ideas later adopted by Indian nationalists had their origins in this radical group that has been largely ignored. In the Introduction, Chaudhuri writes: "Every historian of nineteenth-century India has heard the name 'Young Ben-gal'. is aware of the huge disruption to social and political order created by this group. Yet no serious analysis has been undertaken to document [it]." She argues that the scholarly apathy has been the result of certain trends and attitudes of Indian historiography, which has focussed on the lives of men such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar and, since the 1970s, on subaltern figures that include Dalits, Adivasis and women. The university- educated, professional middle classes, to which almost all members of Young Bengal belonged, "do not quite fit into these paradigms". Chaudhuri then makes the bold (and rather radical) claim that members of Young Bengal were not only the precursors of the Indian nationalists who emerged in the late-19th century, but were the catalysts of modernity in Indian society. Though the name Young Bengal was ascribed to the group only in the 1840s, their origin can be traced to the appointment of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a 17-year-old Anglo-Portuguese poet and journalist, as a lecturer in the newly established Hindu College in 1826. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and the Scottish Enlightenment, Derozio and his students challenged both the misrule of India by the East India Company and dogmatic traditionalism in Hindu society. Many of their activities were deliberately provocative. For instance, Sibnath Sastri notes in his 1903 book Ramtanu Lahiri O Tatkalin Bangasamaj how students from Hindu College would openly drink Madeira and eat beef in violation of caste taboos and jeer at Brahmins with tonsured heads, in the streets of the city. In 1831, Derozio was dismissed from his position at Hindu College for allegedly teaching atheism to his students, and later that year, he succumbed to cholera. However, even after his death, his students - including Dakshinaranjan, Krishna Mohan, Tarachand Chakraborty, Ramgopal Ghosh, Ramtanu Lahiri, Rasik Krishna Mallick, Peary Chand Mitra and Radhanath Sikdar - took up important positions in government or private service, edited newspapers and journals and formed the political party Ben-gal British India Society (BBIS) in 1843. Satirical accounts of the members of Young Bengal, both in English and Bengali, have focussed on their Western attire and intemperate actions. Now, Chaudhuri seeks to rescue the group from the smog of misinformation that has hidden it for more than a century and trace the extent of their influence. Drawing from the Indian philosopher Akeel Bilgrami's definition of secularism, she claims "secularism as a political doctrine in India was birthed quite clearly in two resolutions authored by (Young Bengal)". Though the word "secular" as a descriptor of the nation would be added to the Preamble of the Constitution only in 1976, it is perhaps in the writings of Young Bengal that we first find a conception of this radical inclusivity that is increasingly challenged by undemocratic forces in our times. Rescuing the group's legacy, as Chaudhuri has done, is then itself a radical act....