The Calcutta School-Book Society followed a similar path and helped Bengali prose writers achieve national and international acclaim.
The School-Book Society was set up with the coming of Western methods in education to India and henceforth, the rising demand for textbooks and dictionaries.
The Calcutta School-Book Society in the years after being set up in 1817, constituted of a managing committee of sixteen Europeans members and eight Indians.
Some eminent people included amongst others were Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Tarini Charan Mitra, Radhakanta Deb, Ram Comul Sen and Moulvi Aminullah.
Mrityunjay and Tarini Charan, who was also one of the secretaries along with Mr. F. Irving, were teachers at the Fort William College and Radhakanta Deb was a philanthropist from Calcutta.
Tarini Charan Mitra (c. 1772 – 1837) was a famous Bengali prose writer and the head munshi at the Department of Hindoostanee Language at Fort William College.
Radhakanta Deb and Ram Comul Sen collaborated with him to produce a translation of Aesop’s fables, titled Nitikatha, into Bengali.
Famous as a scholar, writer and lexicographer, Ram Comul Sen worked in Dr William Hunter’s Hindustanee Printing Press as a compositor in 1804 before becoming its manager in 1811.
Apart from these, Ram Comul Sen was instrumental in the systematic eradication of social traditions like drowning dying people in the Ganges and impaling others during Chadak.
Radhakanta Deb was also founded the Dharma Sabha (Association in Defence of Hindu Culture), a social conservatism body that opposed Lord Bentinck’s abolishing of Sati by a government law in 1829.
This lack of enthusiasm in the subscribers to the Society meant the publishing and writing of textbooks for the growing college and school market was funded by the government.
By 1821, the Calcutta School-Book Society had published as many as 1,26,464 books and pamphlets in several languages which included Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Sanskrit and English.