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Manmohan Ghose
‐
Poet and educator who studied in England as a child
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Location(s)
Talgarth Street
Hammersmith, London
W14 9DJ
United Kingdom South Kensington Liberal Club
128 Cromwell Road
South Kensington, London
SW7 4TP
United Kingdom Christ Church College, Oxford
OX1 1DP
United Kingdom
Place of death
Calcutta, India
Date of time spent in Britain
1879–93
About
Manmohan Ghose was the son of Dhan Ghose and his wife, Swarnalata Basu. His younger brother was Sri Aurobindo (Aravinda) Ghose, the politician and spiritual leader.
Manmohan, a brilliant scholar, was educated at Manchester grammar school (1881–4), St Paul's School in London (1884–7) and won an open scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, which he took up in 1887.
Ghose became close friends with Laurence Binyon at St Paul's, bonding over their love for the Classics and Matthew Arnold. Binyon credited Ghose for introducing him to Indian literature, art and philosophy. Binyon joined Oxford a year after Ghose and they collaborated on the poetry publication Primavera, published in 1890. In the vacations he and his brothers stayed at 128 Cromwell Road, London, the office of the South Kensington Liberal Club. The Liberal Club's secretary was J. S. Cotton, editor of the Academy, who was born in India and whose publication reviewed Primavera. Ghose later met Oscar Wilde at the Fitzroy Street settlement, who reviewed Primavera in the Pall Mall Gazette with particular favour towards Ghose. During this time in London, Ghose met many other members of the Rhymers' Club set such as Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, who were both very fond of him. Dowson had wished for Ghose's work to be included in The Book of the Rhymers' Club that was published in 1892, but Ghose was unable to contribute as he could not pay his share of the expenses.
In 1893, after his father’s death, Ghose returned to India in mourning and took a series of teaching posts in Patna, Bankipur and Calcutta. In 1897 he was appointed assistant professor at Dacca College and full professor in 1901. After the death of his wife, Malati Banerjee, in 1918, his health deteriorated and he aged prematurely. For thirty years Ghose had cherished the dream of returning to England. In 1924 he booked a passage for himself and his daughters for a date in March, but he died in Calcutta on 4 January 1924 after a short illness, three weeks before his retirement from Presidency College.
Laurence Binyon, Arthur Cripps, Ernest Christopher Dowson, Aravinda Ackroyd Ghose (brother), Lionel Pigot Johnson, Stephen Phillips, Rabindranath Tagore (Ghose translated Tagore's 'Paras Pathar' into English), Oscar Wilde.
(with Laurence Binyon, Arthur Shearly Cripps and Stephen Phillips) Poems, by Four Authors (Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose, Arthur S. Cripps) (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1890)
Love-Songs and Elegies, The Shilling Garland 9 (London: Elkin Mathews, 1898)
Poem in The Garland of New Poetry by Various Writers (London: Elkin Mathews, 1898) [Other poems by Binyon, Image, Coleridge, Victor Plarr, A. Romney Green]
Songs of Love and Death, ed. with an introduction by Laurence Binyon, 3rd edn (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1968 [1926])
Collected Poems, ed. by Lotika Ghose, 4 vols (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1970–7)
Selected Poems, ed. by Lotika Ghose (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1974)
Boehmer, Elleke, Indian Arrivals 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
Flower, Desmond and Maas, Henry (eds) The Letters of Ernest Dowson (London: Cassell & Co., 1967)
Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006)
Ghose, Aurobindo, Life, Literature, Yoga. Some New Letters of Sri Aurobindo. (Reprinted from 'Mother India') (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1952)
Ghose, Lotika, Manmohan Ghose (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1975)
Gray, N., 'Friends of My Father, Laurence Binyon', Private Library 3rd ser., 8 (1985), pp. 79–91
Hatcher, John, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)
Krishnamurti, Gutala, 'Ghose, Manmohan (1869–1924)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/69875]
Presidency College Magazine 10.3 (March 1924)
Purani, Ambalal Balkrishna, Sri Aurobindo in England (Pondicherry, 1956)
Purani, Ambalal Balkrishna, The Life of Sri Aurobindo (Pondicherry, 1964)
Sharma, J. S., The National Biographical Dictionary of India (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1972)
Letters to Laurence Binyon, Loan 103 from Mrs Nicolette Gray, Manuscript Collection, British Library, St Pancras
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
