_The Second Move of the Bengalees: The National University._ The Bengalee leaders then put their heads together and resolved to start a National University, wherein education would be given independent of government control. The educational policy of Lord Curzon had already set people to thinking along that line. The measures now adopted to strike at the boycott movement by punishing the students who participated therein “accentuated the need and called forth actual measures to meet it.” This movement also, like the boycott, met the universal support of United Bengal. The actual leadership of it fell on Sir Gurdas Bannerjea, late Judge of the Calcutta High Court, who had been vice-chancellor of the Calcutta University for some time and whose loyalty and moderation had never been questioned by friend or foe. Besides, he had sat on the University Commission appointed by Lord Curzon and had written a note of dissent from the policy recommended by the majority of its members. “Under his guidance, the Bengal Council of National Education proposed to work, independent of, but by no means in opposition to, the Government Education Department. And this independent activity was justified on the ground that the education hitherto imparted under official supervision lacked a vital reference to the thoughts, the sentiments, the traditions, the religions, and even the outer physical and biological environments of the people. The object of the new movement was to organise a thoroughly national system of education, both scientific and literary, as well as technical, on _national lines_ and under _national control_.”
Besides making an ample provision for literary, scientific, and technical education, the National Council of Education at once reduced English to the status of a secondary language, the first place being given to Bengalee and Sanskrit, and in the case of Mohammedans to Urdu, Persian, and Arabic.
The National Education Movement in Bengal was in no way an anti-government movement. Though it owed its “initiation to the threats of the Government to close the doors of the official schools and colleges and universities against those who would take any part in, even to the extent of simply attending, any political meeting or demonstration, the National Education Movement in Bengal sought to avoid all open causes of friction with the authorities and proposed to work _independent of_, but not in _opposition to_, the Government. Political in its origin, it tried to avoid all conflicts with the authorities by assuming an absolutely non-political attitude.”