In 1831, the editor of the India Gazette wrote a report about a group he called the ‘Radicals’, ‘Ultra-Reformers’ or ‘the Ultras’, who were responsible for an unprecedented upheaval in social, religious and political thinking centred in Calcutta. Later named ‘Young Bengal’, these students of Henry Derozio at the Hindu College had embarked upon a collision course with orthodoxy and authority, generating scandal and sensation in equal measure.