Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Father of Modern Indian Renaissance, Was Among India's First Liberals
Raja Ram
Mohan Roy Was One of the Greatest Reformers of India
Main
Points:
1. He was
behind the abolition of Sati.
2. He was
behind te establishment of Presidency College, Anglo-Hindu College and Scottish
Church College.
3. He founded
Brahmo Samaj.
4. He
translated Upanishads into Bangla.
-----
By
New Age Islam Staff Writer
24 May 2022
As
India grapples increasingly with changing social and religious circumstances,
Roy’s work in the sphere of women’s emancipation, modernising education and
seeking changes to religious orthodoxy finds new relevance in this time.
(Image/Wikimedia Commons)
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Raja Ram
Mohan Roy was born on May 22, 1772. During this period, Hindu society was
plagued by many social ills and superstitious beliefs. Dowry custom, Sati,
child marriage, polygamy and illiteracy was prevalent. Born into a Brahmin
family, he was pained at the high-handedness of Brahmins and upper caste Hindus
and the exploitation of the lower castes and the downtrodden. Therefore, he
undertook the task of reforming the Hindu society. His extensive knowledge of
different religions shaped up his religious philosophy. He realised that
monotheism was the core of all religions. Therefore, he translated Upanishads
into Bangla to make Hindus of their monotheistic roots.
To promote
monotheism among Hindus Raja Ram Mohan Roy along with Devendranath Thakur
founded the Brahmo Samaj. To bring about educational development among the
Indian, he helped in the establishment of the Presidency College, Anglo-Hindu
College and Scottish Church College. He together with Vidyasagar prevailed over
the British government to abolish the custom of Sati. Therefore, Raja Rammohan
Roy is rightly called the father of modern Indian renaissance.
---
By
Paromita Chakrabarti
May 23,
2022
One of the
most influential social and religious reformers of the 19th century, Ram Mohan
Roy, born on May 22, 1772 in what was then Bengal Presidency’s Radhanagar in
Hooghly district, would have turned 250 years today. As India grapples
increasingly with changing social and religious circumstances, Roy’s work in
the sphere of women’s emancipation, modernising education and seeking changes
to religious orthodoxy finds new relevance in this time.
In Makers
of Modern India (Penguin Books, 2010), a book that profiles the “work and words
of the men and women who argued the Republic of India into existence”, its
editor, historian Ramachandra Guha, writes, “Roy was unquestionably the first
person on the subcontinent to seriously engage with the challenges posed by
modernity to traditional social structures and ways of being. He was also one
of the first Indians whose thought and practice were not circumscribed by the
constraints of kin, caste and religion.”
Early
Life
Born into a
prosperous upper-caste Brahmin family, Roy grew up within the framework of
orthodox caste practices of his time: child-marriage, polygamy and dowry were
prevalent among the higher castes and he had himself been married more than
once in his childhood. The family’s affluence had also made the best in
education accessible to him.
A polyglot,
Roy knew Bengali and Persian, but also Arabic, Sanskrit, and later, English.
His exposure to the literature and culture of each of these languages bred in
him a scepticism towards religious dogmas and social strictures. In particular,
he chafed at practices such as Sati that compelled widows to be immolated on
their husband’s funeral pyre. Roy’s sister-in-law had been one such victim
after his elder brother’s death, and it was a wound that stayed with him.
The waning
of the Mughals and the ascendancy of the East India Company in Bengal towards
the end of the 18th century was also the time when Roy was slowly coming into
his own. His education had whetted his appetite for philosophy and theology,
and he spent considerable time studying the Vedas and the Upanishads, but also
religious texts of Islam and Christianity. He was particularly intrigued by the
Unitarian faction of Christianity and was drawn by the precepts of monotheism
that, he believed, lay at the core of all religious texts.
He wrote
extensive tracts on various matters of theology, polity and human rights, and
translated and made accessible Sanskrit texts into Bengali. “Rammohun did not
quite make a distinction between the religious and the secular. He believed
religion to be the site of all fundamental changes. What he fought was not
religion but what he believed to be its perversion… (Rabindranath) Tagore
called him a ‘Bharatpathik’ by which he meant to say that Rammohun combined in
his person the underlying spirit of Indic civilisation, its spirit of
pluralism, tolerance and a cosmic respect for all forms of life,” says
historian Amiya P Sen, Sivadasani Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu
Studies, Oxford, UK, whose Rammohun Roy: A Critical Biography (Penguin, Viking,
2012), remains a definitive work on the man who was a key figure in India’s
journey into modernism.
Roy, the
First among Liberals
Even though
British consolidation of power was still at a nascent stage in India at the
time, Roy could sense that change was afoot. Confident about the strength of
his heritage and open to imbibing from other cultures what he believed were
ameliorative practices, Roy was among India’s first liberals. In the introduction
to his biography of Roy, Sen writes, “…his mind also reveals a wide range of
interests, rarely paralleled in the history of Indian thought. He was
simultaneously interested in religion, politics, law and jurisprudence,
commerce and agrarian enterprise, Constitutions and civic rights, the unjust
treatment of women and the appalling condition of the Indian poor… And he
studied matters not in the abstract or in academic solitude but with the
practical objective of securing human happiness and freedom. That made him a
modern man.”
In 1814, he
started the Atmiya Sabha (Society of Friends), to nurture philosophical
discussions on the idea of monotheism in Vedanta and to campaign against
idolatry, casteism, child marriage 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.
Abolition
Of Sati, Educational And Religious Reforms
During the
course of his time in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), a period of about 15 years,
Roy became a prominent public intellectual. He campaigned for the modernisation
of education, in particular the introduction of a Western curriculum, and
started several educational institutions in the city.
In 1817, 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. Roy argued for the property rights of women, and
petitioned the British for freedom of the press (in 1829 and 1830).
His Brahmo
Sabha, that later became the Brahmo Samaj, evolved as a reaction against the
upper-caste stranglehold on social customs and rituals. 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.
Perils
of Non-Conformism
As many
modern liberals discover to their peril, non-conformism brings with it its own
share of infamy. Roy, who was given the title of Raja by the Mughal emperor
Akbar II, was no exception to this. Among the first Indians to gain recognition
in the UK and in America for his radical thoughts, in his lifetime, Roy was
also often attacked by his own countrymen who felt threatened by his reformist
agenda, and by British reformers and functionaries, whose views differed from
his.
Would Roy’s
reformist agenda have met with equal if not more resistance in contemporary India?
After all, in 2019, actor Payal Rohatgi had launched an offensive against Roy
on Twitter, accusing him of being a British stooge who was used to “defame”
Sati. Sen says Roy’s legacy has not been celebrated enough for many historic
reasons, of which partisan reading by the Hindu right is one, but “His life and
message stands vastly apart from the spirit of contemporary Hindutva or
exclusionary, political Hinduism.”
Celebrations
Roy’s 250th
birth anniversary will see year-long celebrations in different parts of the
country. In West Bengal, the unveiling of a statue at Raja Rammohun Roy Library
Foundation, Salt Lake, by GK Reddy, Minister of Culture; Tourism; and
Development of North Eastern Region, will mark the inauguration of the Centre’s
celebration plans. The West Bengal state government has overseen repairs of
Roy’s ancestral house in Radhanagar, and is set to confer heritage status to
it. The Sadharan Brahmo Samaj in Kolkata has organised a three-day inaugural
programme from May 22 to May 24 that will see musical tributes and talks by
Rajya Sabha MP and retired diplomat Jawhar Sircar; eminent academics and
historians such as Suranjan Das, vice-chancellor, Jadavpur University;
Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor, Ashoka University; professor Arun Bandyopadhyay
of Calcutta University, among others.
A
philatelic exhibition on the Bengali Renaissance has been organised by the
Rammohun Library and Free Reading Room, set up in 1904. The organisation will
also publish a commemorative volume.
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