Nil Ratan Sircar

Early life

Son of Nandalal Sircar, a native of Jaynagar Majilpur, he was born in the house of his maternal uncle in Netra village of South 24 Parganas district, on 1 October 1861. His father came from an impoverished family in Jessore and later settled in Jaynagar. His mother Rebati Bani hailed from Pantihal village. However, as his mother often suffered from ill health, Sircar and his siblings spent much of their growing years with their maternal family in Netra village and subsequently moved there. His mother died in Pantihal while he was still a child from what was later believed to be cancer. Sircar was reported to have shared with grandchildren that it was this early loss of his mother to an unknown disease that led him to study medicine, as he wanted to know the cause of her death.

Education

Sircar passed the entrance examination for Chatra Nandalal Institution in Hooghly and matriculated there. Despite the family's modest means, Sircar moved to Calcutta to pursue his career in medicine. His efforts caught the attention of an Englishman who sponsored his study at the Campbell Medical College in the formative years from where he obtained vernacular diploma in medicine in 1879. Later, he went on to win a scholarship, and earned the M.B. degree in 1888. The following year he earned his M.A., and in 1890 he obtained the M.D. degrees from the University of Calcutta.

Educational endeavours

Aside from his contribution to the field of medicine, Dr Sircar also contributed greatly to the causes of education, commerce, and politics during his lifetime. He was directly or indirectly involved in the foundation and administration of various national institutes of science in Bengal.

Dr Sircar soon grew a large practice and was, for many years, a leading Indian consulting physician, travelling far and wide to treat some of his patients, who included the ruling heads of state in neighbouring countries.

In 1888, Sircar married Nirmala, daughter of Girishchandra Mazumdar of Barisal, a scholar and a Brahmo missionary, and became a member of the Brahmo Samaj. The couple went on to have six children, five daughters (Nalini Basu, Arundhuti Chatterjee, Shanta Sen, Meera Sen and Kamala Chatterjee) and one son Arun Prakash Sarkar.

This was also a time of enormous political turmoil in the Indian subcontinent. The Independence movement was slowly but surely gaining momentum and here too, Sircar was at the helm of affairs. He was closely associated with several leading luminaries of that time, including Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Motilal Nehru, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. He was a member of the Indian National Congress between 1890 and 1919, Sircar also served as a member of the Bengal Legislative Congress under the reform scheme.