Raja Rammohun Roy

 Ram Mohan Roy was the founder of the Brahmo Sabha movement in 1828, which engendered
the Brahmo Samaj, an influential social-religious reform movement. Eroy was born into an
environment of diverse cultural influences. Roy learned Bengali as his mother tongue, but also
studied Persian in preparation for future employment and Sanskrit as befitted his priestly rank.
Young Roy questioned orthodox beliefs, and consequently came into conflict with his parents.

 The year after his father's death in 1803, Roy published his religious views in a Persian tract,
Tohfat al-Muwabhiddin (A Gift to Deists, 1804), making public his criticisms of idolatry and
polytheism.

Roy was drawn into the colonial milieu when he entered the world of private banking, for his
clients included several English officers. He began to learn English and spent nine years working
for the East India Company. He retired in 1814 and afterwards turned his energies to issues of
social custom and religious belief.

 The most dramatic question of Roy's varied career was the rite of sati, the immolation of
Hindu widows on their husbands' funeral pyre. Sati was not practised widely throughout the
Hindu community, but it was strong among the higher castes in Bengal. Roy cited scriptural
sources to justify his contention that sati was not required by Hindu law and was instead
an erroneous accretion; an example of degenerate Hinduism. Orthodox Hindus were
appalled such a condemnation. Englishmen, particularly Christian missionaries, joined in this
debate calling for a government ban on sati. Finally, in 1829, after much hesitation, the
British-Indian government outlawed sati. The law was challenged by orthodox Hindus and
placed before the Privy Council for final decision. Roy travelled to England to give evidence
in this case and also before Parliamentary hearings on the proposed Reform Act. It was on
this trip that he died and was buried in England. However, as a contemporary English
observer—herself a woman—pointed out, the legislation could not have been brought
about ‘but for the powerful though unacknowledged aid of the great Hindu philosopher
Rammohun Roy’. Roy’s great contribution towards this reform was to demonstrate that sati
was not a religious duty sanctioned or upheld by Hindu scriptural tradition.
 The other major role of his thinking revolved around the delineation of proper Hindu belief.
Roy's adherence to theism and his rejection of idolatry, Brahman priests, and their rituals,
sketched the basic outlines of his reconstructed Hinduism. Roy would return Hinduism to its
past purity. Once proper belief was re-established, erroneous customs such as sati, the
debarring of women from education, elaborate and useless rituals, idolatry and polytheism
would disappear.
 Roy based his vision of interpretation of Hinduism on the Vedas, Upanishads, and the
Vedanta-Sutra. His own writings elaborated on the validity of these texts and the revised
Hinduism they justified.
 Rammohun Roy substituted scriptures for priests as the sources of proper knowledge. This
doctrine stimulated the translations of the Upanishads and of the Vedanta-Sutras into the
vernacular languages as well as into English. It also meant an increased use of printing to
make these texts and his own writings available to all who might wish to read them. This
ended the prohibition against any but the first three varnas from reading the most sacred
of Hindu literature. Now women, peasants, untouchables, and non-Hindus could read and
study the sacred scriptures.
  He also attempted to legitimize his arguments on the basis of reason and social utility. For
Roy, religion could not be judged solely on its own internal scriptural evidence, but it must
also be measured by reason and shown to be free of contradiction and functioning to uphold
a beneficial social order.

After he moved to Calcutta, Roy became increasingly involved in literary and social work.

In 1815 he founded an Atmiya Sabha or ‘friendship association’ which was his first attempt to
establish an organizational base for his ideas when in 1815. This was a private society that held
weekly meetings at his residence. Members recited Hindu scriptures, sang hymns, and held
discussions on religions and social issues. Roy himself had now come to believe that the
‘omnipresent God, who is the only proper object of religious veneration, is one and undivided in
person’. He claimed this was the message of the Vedas, and of the Bible and the Quran as well.
Seeking to promote interreligious understanding, Roy wrote a book on the precepts of Jesus, and
began work on a fife of Muhammad. Roy and his circle were roundly abused by orthodox Hindus,
who derided them as sinful atheists and ‘modems blinded by passion’. However, the European
Christians in India did not warm to him either. They complained that he opposed conversion and
that his admiration for Jesus did not extend to acknowledging his divinity.

The society ceased meeting sometime in 1819.

Nine years later Roy organized the Brahmo Sabha that met for the first time on 20 August 1828. The
Sabha gathered every Saturday evening from seven o'clock to nine o'clock. The service consisted of
selections from the Upanishads first chanted in Sanskrit and then translated into Bengali, a sermon
in Bengali and the singing of theistic hymns. Anyone who wished to could attend, but those who did
were almost all Bengali Brahmans. On 23 January 1830, the Sabha began its tenure in a new
building erected by Roy and his supporters. A Trust Deed filed by Roy provided a sketchy statement
of principles for the Sabha. It included a reaffirmation of egalitarianism, Roy's concept of the deity,
'the Eternal Unsearchable and Immutable Being who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe', a
prohibition of all forms of idolatry and sacrifice, and a ban on criticism of other religious beliefs and
practices. Through the 1820s, Roy’s ideas were being propagated through his Bengali newspaper,
which was called the Sangbad Kaumudi, or the ‘Moon of Intelligence’.

Rammohun Roy's organization was revived by Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905), whose family
were also Brahmans who had worked for the Muslim rulers of Bengal, and became associated with
the British, and wealthy landowners as a result of the Permanent Settlement. After Roy's death in
1833, the leadership of the Brahmo movement was taken over by Debendranath Tagore who
provided the movement with a better organisational structure and ideological consistency.

Debendranath Tagore and a number of his friends joined the Brahmo Sabha in 1842 , but it was a
year later that he began to restore the Sabha by bringing to it a degree of structure and ideological
coherence. He wrote the Brahma Covenant, a creedal statement that listed the basic obligations of
membership and changed the name to the Brahmo Samaj. On 21 December 1843, ne took an oath
to accept the Covenant along with twenty of his friends. In 1850, he released a volume of scriptures,
the Brahma Dharma, for use in public and private worship. Finally in 1861, Tagore revised the Hindu
life-cycle rituals, giving them a particular Brahmo form; however, he did not deviate significantly
from the Hindu sacraments already in existence. Under Tagore's leadership and through the
dynamism introduced by a new generation of Bengali youths, the Brahmo Samaj began to expand
out of Calcutta into the cities of eastern Bengal. In 1846, a branch of the Samaj was opened in Dacca
and during the next two decades the Brahmos continued to spread throughout the East.
But the movement was actually taken out of the limited elite circles of Calcutta literati into the
district towns of east Bengal by Bijoy Krishna Goswami and Keshub Chandra Sen in the 1860s.
Goswami bridged the gap between Brahmoism and the popular religious tradition of Vaishnavism,
while Sen's specific focus was to reach larger numbers of non-Westernised Bengalis in the eastern
Gangetic plains and to take the movement outside Bengal to other provinces of India. If missionary
activities had been one major contribution of Keshub Sen to the Brahmo movement, the other
contribution was a renewed attention to social reforms. He brought in some amount of radicalism
into the movement, by attacking caste system, by focusing on the question of women's rights, by
promoting widow remarriage and inter-caste marriages, and by raising the issue of caste status of
the Brahmo preachers, a position hitherto reserved for the Brahmans alone.

In 1862 Sen and his followers secretly celebrated an inter-caste marriage, but in 1864 they
sponsored an inter-caste marriage that was also a widow remarriage and did so publicly. The more
conservative Brahmos were shocked and orthodoxy horrified. Two years later Sen embarked on a
grand tour of Madras and Bombay where he disseminated Brahmo ideology to members of the
English-educated elite in these two major cities. His success as a dynamic leader brought the Samaj
to new heights of expansion, and also to the edge of internal conflict.

On 5 October 1864, the Samaj building was damaged by a cyclone and weekly meetings were shifted
to the Tagore residence. Debendranath Tagore allowed those conducting the services to wear their
sacred threads. Sen objected and in 1865 withdrew with his section of the Samaj. This division
along generational and ideological lines was formalized on 15 November 1866, when Sen organized
the Brahmo Samaj of India. Those loyal to Tagore grouped themselves into the Adi (original) Brahmo
Samaj.

The Adi Samaj depended on Tagore's leadership and reflected his own values. He saw the Samaj as
strictly a religious organization defined by ritual and theology. He had little or no interest in social
reform and devoted much of his attention to the defence of Hinduism from missionary criticisms.
With its conservative orientation, the Adi Samaj objected to the proposed Brahmo Marriage Act of
1872. The law legalized Brahmo marriages but did so by declaring that Brahmos were not Hindus and
so were not subject to Hindu law. Such an action illustrated one of their constant fears, namely that
they might be estranged from the community of Hindus.

Basically, as Meredith Borthwick has shown, it was a schism between Keshub's followers, for whom
social progress and reform were more important than anything else, and the followers of
Debendranath, who preferred to maintain their identification with Hindu society. Sen himself later
retreated from his radical position

The social radicals had fought for this since it provided both a civil marriage freed from Hindu rituals,
as well as a legalization of intercaste marriages. The controversy generated by the marriage bill was
accompanied by other points of conflict, as radicals attempted to introduce further changes in the
role of women. One such radical, Durga Mohun, proposed that women be allowed to sit with their
relatives during services at the Brahmo temple. Sen argued against this and, following this debate,
turned away from his advocacy of social change.

After 1875 Sen demonstrated a new interest in strictly religious issues by organizing a seminar to
study different religions and their prophets. Here he found Brahmos from the ascetic faction who
gladly joined in this project.

By 1875-6, Keshab Chandra Sen had begun to focus on a new type of Brahmoism that contained
elements of ecstatic religious experience and shaktism (the worship of female power). In 1881 Sen
formed his Naba Bidhan (New Dispensation) and started mov- ing towards a new universalist
religion. He met Ramakrishna Paramahansa, a Bengali mystic who may have furthered his
involvement in devotional worship. So, the rift deepened between Sen, who had drawn closer to the
ascetics within the Samaj, and the social activists.

Tensions erupted in February 1878 when he announced the marriage of his daughter to the
Maharaja of Cooch Bihar. This marriage violated the Brahmo Marriage Act because of her youth and
the proposed use of idolatrous ritual.

On 15 May 1878, the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj was founded by Brahmos who rejected Sen's
leadership. Sen continued to move in the direction of bhakti and of a universalistic religious ideology.
In February 1880, he called upon his supporters to create a religious revival and underscored his
message by leading a procession through the streets of Calcutta. Equipped with flags, musical
instruments and singing hymns, Sen and his disciples marched in the fashion of Chaitanya's
devotional Vaishnavism. Sen's ideas moved towards an attempt to synthesize the world's
religions, blending elements of different faiths into a single set of rituals and beliefs. But by this
time successive ideological rifts and organisational divisions had weakened the Brahmo movement,
confining it to a small elite group. And then it succumbed to a neo-Hindu aggressive campaign for
"revivalism", rather than "reformism", as a bold assertion of Hindu identity vis-a- vis the West