Socio-Religious Reform Movements in Colonial India

Introduction

The major social problems which came into the purview of these reform
movements were the emancipation of women in which sati, infanticide,
child marriage and widow re-marriage were taken up, casteism and
untouchability, and education for bringing about enlightenment in
society and in the religious sphere idolatry, polytheism, religious
superstitions, and exploitation by priests. The movement described as the
“Indian Renaissance” or “Indian Awakening” grew in enormity in the
latter half of the century.

Kenneth W Jones proposes a definition of ‘socio-religious movements’

and elucidates that the term ‘socio’ implies an attempt to reorder society
in the areas of social behaviour, custom, structure or control. All socio-
religious movements demanded changes, ranging from the relatively
limited approach of defensive and self-consciously orthodox groups to
radicals who articulated a sweeping condemnation of the status quo. The
term religious refers to the type of authority used to legitimize a given
ideology and its accompanying programme. This authority was based on
scriptures that were no longer considered to be properly observed, on a
reinterpretation of doctrines, or on scriptural sources arising from the
codification of a new religious leader’s message. Kenneth Jones put
forth two distinct types of movement within the period of British rule,
‘transitional’ and ‘acculturative’ which emerged because of the uneven
development of a colonial milieu and the persistence of indigenous forms
of socio-religious dissent. Transitional movements had their origins in
the pre-colonial world and arose from indigenous forms of socio-
religious dissent, with little or no influence from the colonial milieu,
either because it was not yet established or because it had failed to affect
the individuals involved in a particular movement whereas acculturative
movements, originated within the colonial milieu and was led by
individuals who were products of cultural interaction.

Page | 1
The Brahmo Samaj

The Brahmo Samaj, an acculturative movement among Bengali Hindus,

was led by members of the English-educated elite and supported by them,
opines Kenneth W Jones. It originated within the colonial environment
of Calcutta and flowed out to other cities, then towns, following a line of
Bengali emigrants north-west to Punjab. It was carried to the South and
West as well by Brahmos leaders. Kali Kinkar Datta traces the spiritual
parentage of Brahmo Samaj to Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), who
appeared as the herald of a new age and ‘the father and patriarch of
modern India’ during a period of transition marked by contact and the
mingling of old and new values and ideas of the East and West. Roy first
attempted to establish an organizational base for his ideas when in 1815
he founded the Atmiya Sabha (Friendly Association). Nine years later
Roy organized the Brahmo Sabha that met for the first time on 20 August
1828. A Trust Deed filed by Roy provided a sketchy statement of
principles for the Sabha which 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. 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. 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.

Page | 2
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay states that 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 some
amount of radicalism into the movement, by attacking the caste system,
focusing on the question of women’s rights, promoting widow
remarriage and inter-caste marriages etc. But this radicalism also brought
the first rift within the Brahmo movement. 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. The former, in 1866, established their
Brahmo Samaj of India, while the latter sought to retain their identity
under the rubric of Adi (original) Brahmo Samaj.

The acculturated ideology of Brahmoism with its reinterpreted

Hinduism, western organizational forms of a voluntary religious
association with congregational meetings, society officers, missionaries,
a creed, printed literature and bank accounts, also reached the far South
and to the west coast through the travels of its leaders. Thus, the Brahmos
provided a new Hinduism and a model of a religious organization to
others within the colonial milieu. Their own movement split into three
different directions, the Adi Samaj back towards the parent religion, the
New Dispensation towards a cult centred on the person of Keshab
Chandra Sen and focusing on elements of the bhakti past, and the
Sadharan Samaj that held to the original teachings of Rammohun Roy.

The Prarthana Samaj

According to Jones the establishment of a new society dedicated to

changing the religious and social life of Maharashtra came from the
internal heritage of the Paramahansa Sabha and from the external
influences brought primarily by Keshab Chandra Sen. In 1867 Dr
Atmaram Panderung (1823-98), and a small circle of friends, created a
new organization, the Prarthana Samaj (Prayer Society) ‘with aims of
rational worship and social reforms’, points out Sivanath Sastri.

Page | 3
Bandyopadhyay suggests that although its founder president was
Atmaram Pandurang, the real spirit behind it was Mahadev Gobind
Ranade, who was ably assisted by Bhandarkar and N.G. Chandavarkar.
CF Andrews observes that ‘the last, and, in many ways, the most
enduring aspect of the new reformation in India……. is linked most
closely with the name of Justice Ranade’. All the leading personalities in
this new organisation were Western educated Marathi Brahmans. As for
its philosophy, like the Brahmo movement, the Prarthana Samaj also
preached monotheism, and denounced idolatry, priestly domination and
caste distinctions. K.K. Datta states that instead of speculations on
religion the samaj devoted itself to salutary social reforms through night
schools for working people, a Depressed Classes Mission for elevating
the spiritual and social condition of the depressed classes, a Ladies’
Association for the education of girls and several other institutions for
social service and education. Later it developed a syncretism and
connected itself to the Maharashtrian bhakti tradition. A section of the
Prarthana Samaj membership who were attracted to Aryan ideology and
were excited by Dayananda, led by SP Kelkar, broke away and founded
the Brahmo Samaj of Bombay in the mid-1970s.

The Prarthana Samaj maintained its distinction from the Brahmo

movement of Bengal. The most notable distinction was in its cautious
approach in contrast to the relatively more confrontational attitudes of
the Bengali Brahmos. “The peculiar feature of the movement in
[Bombay] Presidency”, M G Ranade pointed out, was that its goal was
“not to break with the past and cease all connection with our society”. It
was this gradualist approach, which made Prarthana Samaj relatively
more acceptable to the larger society opines Bandyopadhyay.

The Prarthana Samaj retained its intellectualized vision of religious and

social questions, and while it strove to change customs in both areas, it
did not have the use of powerful emotional concepts and symbols to
sustain its efforts and its followers argues, Jones. The Samaj did attempt
to provide education to all classes of the society and sought changes in
four areas: they wished to end the ban on widow remarriage, abandon all

Page | 4
caste restrictions, abolish child marriage, and encourage the education of
women.

Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Vivekanada

Sumit Sarkar refers to Ramakrishna Paramhansa as the saintly

Dakshineswar priest who cast a spell over Calcutta’s sophisticated
intellectuals precisely through his eclecticism and rustic simplicity.
Jones suggests that Ramakrishna did not teach a structured set of ideas.
Two themes, however, ran through his discussions, the universality of all
religions - all were true and led to God, and a corresponding logical
conclusion that beliefs and rituals of Hinduism should be preserved. If all
religions were true there existed no reason for criticism or conversion.
The teachings of Ramakrishna were popularized by Keshab Chandra Sen
after 1875 when the two met for the first time.

The message of Ramakrishna was carried to all parts of India through his
most ardent and beloved disciple, Narendranath Datta who became
famous throughout the world as Swami Vivekananda. ‘He was’, remarks
Valentine Chirol in “India”, ‘the first Hindu whose personality won
demonstrative recognition abroad for India’s ancient civilisation and for
her new born claim to nationalism.’ In the 1890s, Vivekananda leapt to
fame after a memorable appearance at the Chicago Congress of
Religions. According to Sumit Sarkar, Vivekananda was very far from
being an obscurantist or revivalist in any crude sense. One major effect
of his work still was to weaken social reform further by condemning it
(no doubt with considerable justice) as elitist and inspired by alien
models and replacing it with the ideal of social service, and the
Ramakrishna Mission founded by him in 1897 has proved an efficient
philanthropic organization with no claims to social radicalism.

Vivekananda was, indeed, a patriot from the core of his heart, with faith
in the evolution of Indian civilisation, an intense zeal to revive all that
was good and great in her civilisation and to serve it in all possible ways
for her onward march, quotes K.K Datta. Vivekananda’s vision of

Page | 5
Hinduism was deeply divided between its glorious past and a degenerate
present. In this, he shared the perceptions of Rammohun Roy and other
Hindu thinkers of the nineteenth century. Hindus were filled with
superstition, with the trivia of elaborate rituals, rent by jealousy of anyone
who might attempt to provide leadership or direction, and ‘possessing the
malicious nature befitting a slave’, cites Eknath Ranade in “Swami
Vivekananda’s Rousing Call to the Nation”.

To counter this depressing description of contemporary life Vivekananda

offered a complex set of ideas. To Vivekananda, the one universal
religion was Vedanta, an expression of Hindu spiritual supremacy. He
linked this concept to a dualistic division of the world between East and
West. Vivekananda labelled the West as materialistic and contrasted it
with a spiritual East by which he meant India and Hinduism. The restored
Hinduism that Vivekananda wished for was not based on social criticism,
but on selfless action by the dedicated followers of Ramakrishna, who
would find their salvation through social service, and at the same time
prove the superiority of their beliefs. Begun with the teachings of a
traditional sanyasi, this socio-religious movement drew into its young
members of the English-educated elite thus creating an acculturative
movement. It also proved to be successful among non-Hindus of the West
under Vivekananda’s leadership and in so doing was the first Hindu
movement to explore a totally new source of support. When Vivekananda
died, he left his ideas, plus the less structured teachings of Ramakrishna
and a social service organization. The major pieces existed, but only in
the twentieth century would this fuse together and create a successful
socio-religious movement, infers Jones.

The Arya Samaj

The Arya Samaj was formally started in Kathiawar, on 10 April 1875, by

Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824-1883) whose admirable work,
Satyartha Prakash, expounded his unique doctrines. His motto was ‘Back
to the Vedas’. He invoked the authority of the vedas as the most authentic
Indian religious texts and sought to purge Hinduism of all its post-vedic

Page | 6
accretions, opines Bandyopadhyay. However, Van der veer in
“Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India” argues that it is
difficult to ignore the Western Orientalist touch in his discourse that tried
to project Hinduism as a “religion of the book”, like Christianity and
Islam. Macdonald in “The Government of India” suggests that Swami
Dayanand wanted to reform society on the basis of the vedas by ‘a
pruning of all the engrafted shoots upon the vedas.’

Swami Dayanand claimed that the Vedas alone contained “scientific

truths”, and therefore, the religion based on these texts was superior to
Christianity and Islam, points out Gyan Prakash. K.K Datta remarks
that he opposed polytheism, idolatry, caste restrictions, child marriage
and the prohibition of sea voyages and supported female education and
the remarriage of widows. He also denounced untouchability and
repudiated the caste system but at the same time, he upheld the fourfold
varna division, thus retaining the core of the Indian social organisation,
suggests Christophe Jaffrelot

In 1893, the Arya Samaj split on the two issues of meat-eating vs

vegetarianism and Anglicized vs Sanskrit-based education. The moderate
‘College’ faction led by Hans Raj and Lajpat Rai hence forward
concentrated on building up a chain of ‘Dayanand Anglo-Vedic’
colleges, and also developed a somewhat sporadic interest in Congress
politics as well as a more sustained involvement in swadeshi enterprise.
The more openly revivalist and militant ‘Gurukul’ faction founded by
Lekh Ram and Munshi Ram started the Hardwar Gurukul in 1902
(unaffiliated to the official educational system, unlike the D.A.V. and
based on principles of brahmacharya and Vedic training). They
emphasized proselytization through paid preachers and shuddhi. Within
both groups, however, the general trend was towards a shift ‘from Arya
Dharm to Hindu consciousness’ (Jones)—and consciousness quite often
openly communal and anti-Muslim.

Sarkar attributes the success of Dayanand’s message to its very

ambiguity, for it combined sharp criticism of many existing Hindu

Page | 7
practices with an extremely aggressive assertion of the superiority over
all other faiths, Christianity, Islam or Sikhism, of purified Hinduism
based on Vedic infallibility. The specific goals of the social reformers
were thus absorbed into a dominant pan-Hindu revivalist framework.

Jones argues that drawing its leadership and members from educated
Hindus, primarily of the upper castes, the Arya Samaj adopted an
imported organizational structure and parliamentary procedures. The two
wings of the Samaj created a wide variety of institutions, offered new
forms of worship, introduced proselytism, including paid missionaries, a
conversion ritual, and reduced their teachings to a fundamental creed.
Commitment to Aryan ideals focused the energies and wealth of their
devotees on a variety of fields. It also provided the necessary
psychological strength to publicly oppose existing rituals and customs.
The ideals of the Samaj were not only preached but put into action. The
Samaj with its aggressive defence of Vedic Hinduism reinforced the lines
drawn between Hindus and other religions. They also created escalating
religious conflict. In the process, Aryan Hinduism had become a creedal
religion, repeatedly defined and explained through a system of
proselytism and conversion.

Deoband

A pattern of clear-cut reformist-revivalist conflict with the first tending

to be a loyalist and the second, anti-British, seems at first to be evident
in late-nineteenth-century Indian Islam, the two poles being represented
by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh movement and the Deoband Darul-
Ulum or seminary. The Deoband school, based on the broad support of
the ashraf Muslims, provided an effective Islamic educational system that
promoted their ideas of a return to proper Islamic practice and created the
foundation of a revived class of ulama who could function without the
patronage or power of a Muslim state. Rigidly orthodox, unlike the
Wahhabis, and hostile to Sayyid Ahmed for his theological innovations
and political loyalism alike, Deoband attracted relatively poor students
who could not afford Western education, remained influential through

Page | 8
the madrasah teachers it produced and in the twentieth century provided
fairly consistent support to Congress nationalism, opines Sarkar. Two
major figures in the founding of the Deoband school were Muhammad
Qasim Nanautawi (1833-77) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829-1905).
Both had their homes in towns of the Doab, came from families of the
‘ulama class, and were influenced by the intellectual life of Delhi. In 1867
they opened a madrassah at the Chattah Masjid in Deoband. They wanted
their school to be a separate institution and not merely an appendage to
the local mosque. The casual and personal teaching style used for
centuries was replaced by permanent teaching staff. Students enrolled in
the school studied a defined curriculum with annual examinations. Much
of the organizational form was adopted from British institutions and then
modified to fit the needs of Deoband.

Deobandis conceived of Islam as having two points of focus, Shariat (the

law, based on scriptures and religious knowledge), and the tariqah (path,
derived from religious experience) points out Jones. Thus, they accepted
Sufism with its forms of discipline and the role of the ulama in
interpreting the four schools of Islamic law. The Qur’an, hadith, qiyas
(analogical reasoning), and ijma (consensus) provided the foundation of
religious knowledge, but understanding them required the ulama as
guides. The Deobandis, while accepting Sufism, rejected numerous
ceremonies and the authority of pirs who claimed sanctity by their
descent rather than by their learning. Knowledge granted authority and
not inheritance. Pilgrimages to saints’ tombs, and the annual death rites
of a particular saint (the ‘urs), also lay outside acceptable Islamic
practice.

Aziz Ahmad in “Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan”, states that

their syllabus focused on Islamic texts, covering ‘Arabic and Persian
grammar, prosody and literature, history of Islam, logic, Greco-Arab
philosophy, kalam, dialects, disputation, medieval geometry and
astronomy, Greco-Arab medicine, jurisprudence, the hadith and tafsir
(Commentaries on the Qur’an)’. In time Persian was de-emphasized;
instead, the seminary utilized Arabic as the language of the scriptures and

Page | 9
Urdu as the language of north-Indian Muslims. The Deobandi curriculum
was designed to prepare students for their role as members of the ulama
and in doing so to strengthen that group as the link between Islamic
religion and culture, and the Muslim population.

The impact of Deoband as a school and a transitional socio-religious

movement, according to Jones, grew first from its new style of Islamic
education with an appointed staff, fixed curriculum, and regular
examinations. This structure, as well as the methods used to raise funds,
was adopted from the English model of education and the organization
of voluntary associations. The Deobandis gained widespread respect and
influence in the North and beyond through their students and the
numerous fatwa on questions of proper religious practice. They also
inspired the founding of schools modelled after the Deoband ul-’Ulum,
debated with opponents of Islam and with those Muslims who rejected
their vision of Islam. The Deobandis were not products of the colonial
milieu, but of the living tradition of Indo-Muslim thought and practice.

Aligarh Movement

Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh movement succeeded in ‘rousing to new

life the whole of Indian Islam and it brought to light a New Islam with
exponents like Maulavi Chirag Ali, Syed Amir Ali, Muhammad Iqbal,
AM Maulavi etc. opines KK Datta. He tried to convert upper-class
Muslims of western U.P. to the virtues and benefits of English education
through a Scientific Society (1864), a modernistic Urdu journal Tahzib
al-aklilaq (1870), and the Aligarh Anglo-Muhammadan Oriental College
(1875). According to Sarkar his interpretation of Islam emphasized the
validity of free enquiry (ijtihad) and the alleged similarities between
Koranic revelation and the laws of nature discovered by modern science.
Sayyid Ahmed had always stressed the need to import Western education
to upper-class Muslims as Muslims, and to thus foster in them a sense of
corporate unity. He brought a new message to the members of his
community. As an ‘apostle of reconciliation’ he advocated changes in the

Page | 10
political, religious, educational and social ideas of the Muslims in India
by producing harmony between the old faith and the modern rationalism,
oriental learning and modern education, in short by bringing about, as
Macdonald remarks in “The Government of India”, ‘a working
agreement between East and West.

For Sayyid Ahmad the answer to the present dilemma of the Muslims lay
in an education that disseminated elements of English knowledge within
an Islamic context. In June 1875, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental
College of Aligarh opened its doors. ‘He had’, remarks Dr Titus in
“Indian Islam”, ‘a vision of an Indian Muslim Oxford, which should train
young men of character and capacity in all that is best in Occidental
learning’. The institution enrolled students at the elementary levels,
studying the standard government curriculum under an English
headmaster, but doing so in a carefully constructed Islamic environment.
Jones suggests that Sayyid Ahmad envisioned the college as preparing
men to serve the quam. It would supply educated, honest, public-spirited
leaders able to work with the English government, and to protect the
Muslim community. In time this elite would lift the Muslims into a
cooperative dominance, ruling India in partnership with the British. In
1886, he founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental Educational
Conference to popularize and encourage the fusion of English and
Islamic education, states Aziz Ahmed.

K. K Datta remarks that though not in agreement with the Congress and
opposed it during its early days, Sir Syed was an ardent nationalist with
some liberal views. He advocated social reforms like the abolition of
purdah, education of women, etc., and organised vigorous propaganda
through his magazine Tahjib-ul-akhlaq.

According to Jones the efforts of Sayyid Ahmad Khan to defend and then
strengthen the Muslim community marked a sharp break with previous
attempts to purify Islam and return it to its past glory. Sayyid Ahmad
envisioned the creation of an administrative elite which would govern in
cooperation with the British rather than focus its attention on the ulama.

Page | 11
He incorporated western knowledge including science, looked to a new
type of education as the prime tool of his campaign, and justified this
through his own system of scriptural interpretation. Sayyid Ahmad was
concerned with the fate of the Muslims as a religiously defined
community. This concentration on Muslims as a group of people rather
than on proper religious practice led him to reject the Indian National
Congress, oppose aggressive Hinduism, and to lay the foundation for a
consciousness that evolved into religious nationalism. He was opposed
by Muslim movements that did not accept his inclusion of western
learning into Islam.

Conclusion

Within nearly a century of British rule over the South Asian subcontinent,
socio-religious movements reshaped much of the social, cultural,
religious, and political life of this area. Three civilizations provided
models for movements of dissent and protest that sought to ‘purify’ and
restructure contemporary society. New associations, techniques, and
forms of group consciousness came into being during these years as
religious change encountered increased politicization and competing
nationalism. The historic process of internal dissent and cultural
adjustment was dynamic as the traditions of the past flowed into the
colonial milieu and were increasingly altered by that environment. At the
same time, we also witness a widening the gap between Hindus and
Muslims both at the level of the elite and of the peasant masses as the
‘modernistic’ trends like the Brahmo or Prarthana Samajas or the more
secular movements of Young Bengal or Vidyasagar had not only been
entirely Hindu in composition; with few exceptions, they too had
operated with a conception of ‘Muslim tyranny’ or a ‘medieval’ dark age
from which British rule with its accompanying alleged ‘renaissance’ or
‘awakening’ had been a deliverance as well as the emergence of similar
movements in Indian Islam.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay draws our attention to some of the special

features of these social and religious reform movements of the nineteenth

Page | 12
century, which made such transformation possible. These movements,
first of all, had remained confined to a narrow social space, as the
reformist spirit appealed only to a small elite group, who were primarily
the economic and cultural beneficiaries of colonial rule. In Bengal, the
reform movement involved only a small number of Western-educated
elite who were known by the general term bhadralok (gentlefolk). The
reformers never even tried to take the reform to the people, as the
language of reform, the chaste Sanskritised Bengali prose of Rammohun
Roy for example, remained incomprehensible to the uneducated peasants
and artisans. Similarly in western India, the members of the Prarthana
Samaj were the English educated Chitpavan and Saraswat Brahmans,
some Gujarati merchants and a few members of the Parsi community.
And in the Madras Presidency, where English education made much
slower progress and caste domination of the Brahmans remained
unshaken, the reform ideas took longer to appear. Lacking a broad social
base, the reformers of the early nineteenth century thus exhibited an
intrinsic faith in the benevolent nature of colonial rule and relied more on
legislation for imposing reform from above. There was very little or no
attempt to create a reformist social consciousness at the grassroots level,
where religious revivalism later found fertile ground.

Equally important is the colonial character of the reforms, as the Indian

reformers’ positions in a significant way mirrored the colonial mind and
therefore also the ambivalence of the colonial policy planners. The
dominant colonial assumption of the time was that religion was the basis
of Indian society and this religion was encoded in the scriptures. The
civilising mission of the colonial state was thus seen to lie in giving back
to the natives the truths of their own little read and even less understood
shastras.

However, although Indian modernisers looked towards the colonial state

for support and direction and post- Enlightenment rationality shaped their
visions, they could neither leave their tradition nor forget their Indian
identity. The Indian modernisation project therefore always felt a
compulsion to construct modernity that would be located within the

Page | 13
Indian cultural space. To summarise their position in Christophe
Jaffrelot’s words, they “undertook to reform their society and its
religious practices in order to adapt them to Western modernity while
preserving the core of Hindu tradition.” It was through this project that
the cultural essence of Indian nationhood, its difference from the
colonising West, was gradually imagined by the Indian intelligentsia.

Page | 14