Dhan Gopal Mukerji (; Dhan Gōpāl Mukhōpādhyāy) (6 July 1890 – 14 July 1936) was the first successful Indian man of letters in the United States and won a Newbery Medal in 1928. He studied at Duff School (now known as Scottish Church Collegiate School), and at Duff College, both within the University of Calcutta in India, at the University of Tokyo in Japan and at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University in the US.

Biography

Early life in India

Dhan Gopal Mukerji was born in a Bengali Brahmin family on 6 July 1890, in a village near Calcutta on the edge of a jungle called Kajangal. His father was a lawyer who gave up his practice due to ill health and studied music instead, while also officiating as priest at the village temple. Dhan Gopal describes his childhood and adolescence in the first part ('Caste') of his autobiography, Caste and Outcast (1923). Caste details Dhan Gopal's induction into the Brahminical tradition of his ancestors, and his experiences of wandering for a year as an ascetic, as was the custom for boys in strict priestly households. However, disillusioned with the traditional role and impatient of the backward-looking element in strict Hindu society, he left the ascetic life to study at the University of Calcutta. Here, in the circle of his brother Jadugopal Mukherjee's friends, he came in contact with the ideas of the Bengal resistance. Jadu Gopal was subsequently jailed without trial from 1923 to 1927. Dhan Gopal later wrote a memoir about Jadu Gopal, titled My Brother's Face.

Dhan Gopal's family sent him to Japan to study industrial machinery and textiles in 1910. He became deeply disillusioned by the assembly line method of production and proclivity towards sheer efficiency which he viewed as dehumanizing, degrading and debasing. He was particularly shocked by how assembly line workers who had suffered serious accidents were quickly replaced by other workers, without consideration by the factory owners or employers for either their medical recovery, health benefits or adequate compensation. After a short stay in Japan, he boarded a ship for San Francisco.

In the San Francisco Bay Area

Barely out of his teens, Dhan Gopal had absorbed enough revolutionary ideology from his peers to have been well on the way to following in his brother's footsteps, and may not have left India entirely willingly. Dhan Gopal took his ideology with him to America where he fell in with a number of dirt-poor 'anarchists' like himself. His experiences among them, in San Francisco and New York, are detailed in 'Outcast', the second section of his autobiography.

In 1910, he enrolled at University of California, Berkeley but transferred to Stanford University, where he eventually received his A.B. degree in philosophy in 1914.

The details of his later life are hazy, but there is some evidence to believe that relations with his wife entered a difficult phase at the end of his life. In spite of his many friends he felt isolated and marginalised in America, as he could do very little, beyond raising funds and entertaining visiting celebrities, to further the cause of the Indian independence movement. The choices he had made in life prevented him from ever returning permanently to India. The unhappiness of his final years drove him further into spirituality, fuelled his interest in the spiritual heritage of his motherland and gave urgency to his desire to interpret and explain India to the West.

Death and legacy

On 14 July 1936, his wife discovered Mukerji had hanged himself in his New York City apartment.

  • Ghond, the Hunter (Dutton, 1928), illus. Boris Artzybasheff
  • A Son of Mother India Answers (Dutton, 1928)
  • The Chief of the Herd (Dutton, 1929), illus. Mahlon Blaine
  • Devotional Passages from the Hindu Bible (Dutton, 1929)
  • Hindu Fables for Little Children (Dutton, 1929), illus. Kurt Wiese
  • Visit India With Me (Dutton, 1929)
  • Disillusioned India (Dutton, 1930)
  • Rama: The Hero of India (Dutton, 1930), illus. Edgar Parin D'Aulaire
  • The Song of God: Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita (Dutton, 1931)
  • The Master Monkey (Dutton, 1932), illus. Florence Weber
  • Fierce-face, the Story of a Tiger (Dutton, 1936), illus. Dorothy P. Lathrop

References

  • Dhan Gopal Mukerji materials in the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)