As we celebrate the 250th birth anniversary of Raja Rammohan Roy, let’s have a quick look at all that he did to move into into modernity approx 200 yrs ago.
RRR was one of the earliest major forces driving India towards the abolition of Sati & Child Marriage and the promotion of widow-remarriage & global education in India. He also worked towards ridding society of the ‘group identities’ of kin(nepotism), caste and religion, and building a truly meritocratic society.
Being born a brahmin, his family’s affluence made the best in global education accessible to him. A polyglot, Roy knew Bengali and Persian, but also Arabic, Sanskrit, and later, English. He spent considerable time studying the Vedas and the Upanishads, but also religious texts of Islam and Christianity. His exposure to the literature and culture enabled him to see both the orthodoxy & religious dogmas of them all as well as the progressive & good practices.
He questioned some of the orthodox caste practices he saw around him in the early 1800s like sati, child-marriage & polygamy and the ban on widow-remarriage. He himself had been married more than once in his childhood. His revulsion at sati compounded after his sister-in-law had been forced to committing sati after his elder brother’s death.
He was supremely confident about the strength of Bharatiya heritage but was open to imbibing from other cultures what he believed were good practices. He believed the Hindu religion to be progressive at its core. What he fought was what he believed to be its perversion. Rabindranath Tagore called him a ‘Bharatpathik’ by which he meant to say that Rammohan combined in his person the underlying spirit of Indic civilisation, its spirit of pluralism, tolerance and a cosmic respect for all forms of life.
In 1814, he started the Atmiya Sabha (Society of Friends), to nurture philosophical discussions on sati, child marriage, casteism and other social ills. The Atmiya Sabha would make way for the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, set up with Debendranath Tagore (Rabindranath Tagore’s father). The Brahmo Sabha, then later became the Brahmo Samaj. During the Bengal Renaissance, it ushered in sweeping social changes and birthed the Brahmo religion, a reformed spiritual Hinduism that believes in monotheism and the uniformity of all men, irrespective of caste, class or creed. Followers of the Brahmo Samaj exist till today in India.
Roy campaigned for the modernisation of education, in particular the introduction of a Western curriculum and started several educational institutions in Kolkata. He collaborated with Scottish philanthropist David Hare to set up the Hindu College (now, Presidency University). He followed it up with the Anglo-Hindu School in 1822 and, in 1830, assisted Alexander Duff to set up the General Assembly’s Institution, which later became the Scottish Church College.
It was his relentless advocacy alongside contemporaries such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar that finally led to the abolition of Sati under the governor generalship of William Bentinck in 1829.
That said, he ran into the same British (Christian) othodoxy when he argued for the property rights of women but was not given heed.
He was also one of the earliest petitioners to the British for freedom of the press (1829-1830).
His approach was not without its troubles. He was particularly keen on the ‘unitarian’ aspect of religion under which he attempted to use religion as the instrument to make-equal all individuals (all Hindus are the same, all Christians are the same, etc etc), rather than via humanity (all humans are equal). He was also influenced by the Abrahamic faith to push for monotheism in religion. He also pushed for abolition of idolatry, being influenced by that aspect of Islam. The last two got major pushback from all Indians, given that Hinduism is by core a polytheistic religion and believes in murti worship.
All-in-all, Raja Rammohan Roy was one of India’s greatest social reformers, atleast a century ahead of his time. Let’s always remember his great contribution to Indian modernity, nearly 200 yrs ago…
