Reform and Revival: Brahmo Samaj Prarthana Samaj Ramakrishna and Vivekananda Arya Samaj

Reform and revival: Brahmo Samaj; Prarthana Samaj; Ramakrishna
and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj
Lesson: Reform and revival: Brahmo Samaj; Prarthana

Samaj; Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj
Lesson Developer: Dr. Charu Gupta, Associate Professor
College/ Department: Department of History, University of
Delhi
Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi

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Table of Contents

Background
Reasons for growth
Indigenous vs Colonial, Modernist vs Revivalist
Brahmo Samaj
Prarthana Samaj
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda
Arya samaj
An assessment and critique of social reforms

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Background
The socio-religious reform movements emerged largely in the 19th century

in colonial India. They started in Bengal, but soon spread to other areas.
These movements are important in the study of Indian nationalism, because
they contributed greatly to the imagining of the Indian nation. These
movements were confined, by and large, to one region or another and to
particular religions. They also emerged at different points of time in different
parts of the country. Yet they had certain similarities in their aims and
perspectives. All of them demanded changes in society through social and
educational reforms, ranging from the relatively limited approach of
defensive and self-consciously orthodox groups to radicals who articulated a
sweeping condemnation of the status-quo (Jones 1989:2). Their key arenas
of focus in the social realm were emancipation of women (which included
problems like sati, infanticide and widow remarriage), questioning of
casteism and untouchability, and spread of education. In the religious
sphere, they mainly raised concerns around idolatry, polytheism, religious
superstitions and exploitation by priests. In this lesson, we are broadly going
to talk of Hindu social reform movements. They attempted to reorder
society, its norms and behaviour and questioned established religious
authorities. These reforms rested on a charismatic leadership, largely male,
upper caste and middle class.
Reasons for growth
Some questions arise regarding the emergence of reform movements. Were

these reforms a result of the impact of the West? Were they a response to
challenges posed by colonialism? What were their indigenous roots? There
are no simple answers to this, as there were multiple reasons for the growth
of these movements in this specific period. Dissemination of English
education among the high castes, development of vernacular languages,
improved communications, and expansion of print culture helped in their
spread. Fears of conversions to Christianity due to the spread of polemical
tracts and preaching by professional missionaries strengthened the urge for
reforms from within. Christian missionaries were entering the sphere of
service like education, hospitals, orphanages and schools in a significant

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way, creating further anxieties among Hindus. Simultaneously, there was a

need felt by Hindu social reformers to seek changes in Hindu customs and
British policies. They further wished to eliminate social evils and certain
unreasonable and wrong religious beliefs from within, leading to an age of
definition and redefinition of religion. There reforms represented a contest
for moral authority and were a response of Hindu men and women to foreign
presence.
Indigenous vs Colonial, Modernist vs Revivalist
The early policy of the East India Company was of non-intervention in Indian
social matters. At the same time, Orientalist scholars were deeply interested
in learning about Indian culture. Gradually however, there was a move
towards cautious intervention in Indian social institutions, influenced by
ideologies of Evangelicalism, Utilitarianism and free trade thinking.
There were broadly two kinds of movements which emerged, one that
Kenneth Jones has described as transitional and the other acculturative.
The former had their origins, according to him, in the pre-colonial world and
arose from indigenous forms of socio-religious dissent, with little or no
influence from the colonial milieu. At the same time for the Indians of
various religions, the period of British rule was one of intense reassessment
of religion and society, mostly in response to the challenge of the West,
especially Protestant Christianity and Enlightenment thought. The
acculturative movements originated within the colonial milieu and were led
by individuals who were products of cultural interaction. In other words,
these movements were led mostly by people who had received a western
education or who had had much contact with Europeans. These people could
not reject the impact of Western Enlightenment thinking, but they wanted to
rediscover reason and science in their own civilization, and to produce a
modernization project within a cultural space defined by Indian tradition.
Further, the Orientalist project of the West systematized the study of Indias
past with chronologies and value judgements. For Indians, particularly
Hindus, this new knowledge of their ancient past had important
consequences once they began to encounter it in the new, western-style
colleges.
Reform movements among Hindus can further be divided into two broad
categories: modernizing or reformist on the one hand, and revivalist on the
other. Modernizing and reformist movements adopted basically Western
models for political and social change in India while the latter looked to the
ancient roots of Hindu religion and civilization and often invoked and upheld

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a myth of a Hindu golden age in the past. This tended to sometimes impart
a conservative and retrogressive character to these movements. Within both
groups the ideological sphere was wide. Revivalism, for example, included
those who wanted to preserve the traditional social order as well as those
who wanted to do away with that traditional social order and replace it with
an imagined purer and more ancient Hindu model of society. Also, they
lamented the spectacle of division in Hindu society, either sectarian or caste-
based, and one of their main goals was to strengthen Hindu solidarity.
However the divisions between the revivalists and reformists were often
blurred as both came to impinge upon and influence each other.
Besides advocating reforms from within Hindu society, many of them also
sought change with social work and through legislative interventions by the
British state. Let us examine these movements in some detail.
Brahmo Samaj
The first major landmark of these movements began in Bengal with Raja
Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828. He
was the central figure of the early socio-religious reforms, and has been
referred to as the Father of Modern India because of the social, educational,
and political reforms he advocated. He defended Hinduism from missionary
attack, stating that Christianity too was laced with superstition and error. He
was against polytheism, idol worship, Brahman priests and their rituals and
womens subordination. He carried on a successful campaign for the
abolition of Sati (self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their
dead husbands).
Value addition: Did you know ?
Raja Rammohun Roy
Rammohun Roy represented a synthesis of the thought of East and West. As a young
man he had studied Sanskrit literature and Hindu philosophy at Varanasi and the
Koran and Persian and Arabic literature at Patna. He supported himself by money-

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lending, managing his small estates, and speculating in British East India Company
bonds. In 1805 he was employed by John Digby, a lower company official and
through him he was introduced to Western culture and literature. For the next 10
years Roy drifted in and out of the British East India Companys service. He
continued his religious studies throughout this period. In 1803 he composed a
Persian tract denouncing India's religious divisions and superstitions. As a remedy for
these ills, he advocated a monotheistic Hinduism in which reason guides the
adherent. He sought a philosophical basis for his religious beliefs in the Upanishads
and Vedas, translating these ancient Sanskrit treatises into Bengali, Hindi, and
English and writing summaries on them. The central theme of these texts, for Roy,
was the worship of the Supreme God, beyond human knowledge, who supports the
universe. He substituted scriptures for priests as the sources of proper knowledge.
His most dramatic act however was his consistent campaign against sati, citing
scriptural sources to justify his contention that sati was not required by Hindu law
and was instead an example of degenerate Hinduism. Finally in 1829, after much
hesitation, the British-Indian government outlawed sati.
Source: Original
Figure 6.2.1: Raja Rammohun Roy
Source:
http://www.havelshouseofhistory.com/Roy,%20Raja%20Rammohan.jpg

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Roys first organization, Atmiya Sabha, founded in Calcutta in 1815,

eventually took the shape of Brahmo Samaj in 1828. It emerged as a major
religious movement of the middle-class educated Bengalis, based on the
essential principle of monotheism. At this time there was no formal
organization, no membership, no creed, though it had weekly recitations
from the Vedas and Upanishads.
Value addition: Common misconceptions
Rammohun Roy a unitarian?
An assumption has long been that Rammohun Roy was secretly a Unitarian, and
that his socio-religious reform ideas were derived from a Western discourse coming
out of the Enlightenment and also an apologia to Western missionary critiques of
Hinduism. But a dissenting opinion by Bruce Robertson argues that Roys political
vision of a self-determining, modern, pluralistic society was founded on his reading
of the ancient Upanishads, and that he was a profound vedantic thinker, and was
following in a tradition coming down from Shankaracharya (the 8th century advaita
vedantic philosopher). This view places Roy within an indigenous tradition, without
much reference to the West. However, we also cannot ignore that Roy was
stimulated to go into these ancient Indian texts and find the basis for a society that
looked modern due to the challenge that the West presented.
Source: Robertson, Bruce Carlisle. 1995. Raja Rammohan Ray, The Father
of Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
After Roys death in 1833, the organization almost faded, but was revived by
Debendranath Tagore. He emphasized the superiority of Hinduism, and
though he was a Brahmo, he would not break with Hindu caste rules. The
Brahmo Samaj split at various times in the course of the 19 th century. There
were increasing conflicts within the Samaj between the conservatives or
cultural nationalists on the one hand and the liberals or modernizers on the
other, who split into two camps by 1866. The former included those who
believed in one God and discarded the worship of Figure 6.s, but did not
want to sever all connections with Hindu society, while the latter comprised
those who regarded popular Hinduism as too narrow and chafed at the
Sanskrit texts and the social practices which symbolized the religion. The
conservatives were led by Debendranath Tagore. On the other hand was

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Keshub Chandra Sen who had much more progressive ideas. He was against
the caste system and supported inter-caste marriages. He took the
movement out of the limited elite circles of Calcutta literati into the district
towns of east Bengal.
Under the leadership of Sen, the newly started Brahmo Samaj of India had a
triumphant career. The inclusion of women as members and the adoption of
a moderate programme of social reform formed a new feature of the
rejuvenated society. It was chiefly due to its efforts that the government
passed the Brahmo Marriage Act of 1872, which abolished early marriage of
girls and polygamy, and sanctioned widow remarriages and inter-caste
marriages for those who did not profess any recognized faith such as
Hinduism and Islam. With the passing of the Act, which effectively declared
that Brahmos were not Hindus, and hence not subject to Hindu law, Keshab
Chandra Sens Brahmo Samaj of India underwent a split between radicals
and moderates, especially over the status of women. Sen, leading the
moderate faction, turned away from social change, and instead embraced
the study and reform of religion. Successive ideological rifts weakened the
movement, confining it to a small elite group.
Prarthana Samaj
Keshub Chandra Sen visited Bombay in 1864 and again in 1867 and this
generated great enthusiasm among the English educated elite of
Maharashtra. As a direct consequence of this, the Prarthana Samaj was
founded in Bombay in 1867. The main spirit behind it was Mahadev Gobind
Ranade. All the leading lights of this organisation were English educated
Chitpavan and Saraswat Brahmans. Like the Brahmo movement, the
Prarthana Samaj too preached monotheism, denounced idolatry, priestly
domination, caste restrictions, and supported widow remarriage and
womens education. It showed a syncretistic acceptance of all religions. Its
members drew upon Christian and Buddhist texts as well as different Hindu
scriptures when compiling their weekly services and the movement also
connected itself later to the Maharashtrian bhakti tradition.
In spite of the assistance and aspiration provided continuously to the

Prarthana Samaj by the Bengali Brahmos, it maintained its distinction from
it. The most notable difference was in its cautious programme in contrast to
the relatively more confrontational attitudes of the Bengali Brahmos. The
reforms it sought were to come gradually, not cataclysmically, and this made
it relatively more acceptable to the larger society. For example, while
supporting widow remarriage, it did not lead in this campaign. The Samaj

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opened branches in Poona, Surat, Ahmedabad, Karachi, Kirkee, Kolhapur

and Satara. Its activities also reached south India and by early 20th century,
eighteen of its branches existed in the Madras Presidency.
There was a rupture in the Samaj in 1875, when Dayanand Saraswati with
his Arya samaj visited Gujarat. A section of the Prarthana Samaj leaders,
lead by S. P. Kelkar, were attracted towards Aryan ideology and broke away
from the Samaj. Although they later returned to the Prarthana Samaj, it
marked the beginning of a different kind of religious politics in western India.
The Samaj however was successful in creating various institutions like free
reading rooms, libraries, schools, orphanages and programmes for
untouchable uplift, though it never directly attacked Hindu orthodoxy or
Brahmanical power.
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda
The weakening of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal in the 1870s was followed by
the emergence of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement in the 1880s.
Ramakrishna Paramahansa was a holy man, who claimed to have had
visions of the divine mother. Untouched by Western rationalist education, his
Hinduism was simple, and appealed to the emotions of educated Bengalis.
Value addition: Intrested details
Ramakrishna and his times: Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti
19th century Bengal witnessed a strange fascination of the Calcutta bhadralok for
Ramakrishna Paramahansa, a rustic Brahman and an obscure Dakshineshwar temple
priest. He barely knew any English, received little formal schooling, held rationalistic
argument in contempt, was disdainful of book knowledge, preached a timeless
message of bhakti, and asserted the futility of organized social reform. The
phenomenon of the Ramakrishna cult reflected a two-way crossing of social frontiers.
Firstly, a rustic Brahman became the guru of the city bhadralok. Secondly, the
bhadralok fell under the spell of an idiom, values and personality different from their
own.
The Western educated Bengali babus were tormented by their subjection to the
drudgery of petty clerical jobs in government offices. Ramakrishnas teachings offered
the possibility of an escape into an inner world of bhakti, despite the bondage and

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discipline of alien jobs. Though his teachings hardly referred to colonial rule directly,
they offered a rejection of the values imposed by Western education and the routine
life of a clock-bound, ill-paid job or chakri. This was correlated to the evils of
Kaliyuga, a world of calamity, denoted by loss of manliness, assertive lower castes
and disorderly women. Through Ramakrisha, the city bhadralok imagined themselves
to be reaching back to lost traditional moorings in the countryside and simple faith,
and total surrender to the Shakta mother goddess, while at the same time preserving
rural hierarchies.
Source: Sarkar, Sumit. 1997. Writing Social History. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 282-357.
Figure 6.2.2: Vivekananda

Source: http://madhuwebm.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/sv.jpg
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) has been regarded as Ramakrishnas most

important disciple, who nonetheless modified his teachings in significant
ways. Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission, in the name of his
guru. He was a brilliant student, a rationalist and an intellectual. He shifted
the emphasis from bhakti towards a high Hindu spiritual quest through
Vedantic knowledge and karma, redefined as social service rather than
ritual. He induced a missionary zeal in the Mission as it dedicated itself to
social uplift and spiritual education. While taking its inspiration from the
ancient culture of India, the Mission recognised the value and utility of later
developments in natural sciences and technology.

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Vivekananda combined patriotic and spiritual impulses, and wanted to uplift

the manhood of Indians, with a view to restoring the country to its proper
place among the nations of the world. He believed that the present warring
world can be saved by spiritual teachings which India alone can impart, but
before it can do this it must enjoy the respect of other nations by raising its
own status. Instead of the apologetic tone and the sense of inferiority which
marked the Indian attitude towards European culture and civilization, a
boldness and consciousness of inherent strength marked the utterances of
Vivekananda.
A significant thing that he did for the Hindus self-esteem was that he
attended the world parliament of religions in Chicago in 1894, and impressed
the western world with his presentation of Hinduism, which was considered
to be a major national achievement. He also planned a programme for the
regeneration of his people. They must be taught to rebel, he argued, against
malpractices, social and religious customs which weakened individuals as
well as society. His ideal of nationalism rested on four rocks: the awakening
of the masses; development of physical and moral strength; unity based on
common spiritual ideas; and a consciousness and pride in the ancient glory
and greatness of India. The issue of becoming physically strong and
restoring their masculinity was important particularly for the Bengalis, as the
British had caricatured them as effeminate and weaklings.
Vivekananda passionately tried to project a utopian figure of Bharatvarsha

rooted in an ideal Hinduism but this was contradicted repeatedly by the
harsh realities of contemporary Hindu society. He made systematic
philanthropy and serving the daridranarayan (God embodied in the poor
folk) the central thrust of the Mission. Vivekananda was to become a patriot
prophet for a whole generation of Swadeshi supporters, revolutionary
terrorists and nationalists. To see him as a mere revivalist would be to
ignore the universalistic aspect of his teachings. But the Bharat of
Vivekanandas dreams essentially remained Hindu. He drew inspiration from
Vedantic tradition, followed some of the orthodox Hindu rituals and had a
deep faith in the glories of Hindu civilization. This made it possible for the
revivalists to appropriate him, who conveniently forgot his trenchant
criticism of the evils of Hinduism. Thus in certain ways he was also one of
the founders of 20th century Hindutva, a unified, muscular and aggressive
Hinduism.
Arya samaj

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The Arya samaj was founded in 1875 by Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1883)

in Bombay, but its most visible and significant impact was felt in Punjab and
the United Provinces. Dayanandas motto was Back to the Vedas, the most
ancient of Hindu texts. He claimed that any scientific theory or invention
which was thought to be of modern origin actually derived from the Vedas.
He not only disregarded the authority of the later scriptures like the Puranas
but also had no hesitation in declaring them to be the writings of selfish,
ignorant men. It appears that Dayananda was trying to project Hinduism too
as a religion of the book, like Christianity and Islam.
Figure 6.2.3: Dayananda Saraswati
Source:
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/1800_1899/hin
duism/dayananda/dayananda.jpg
Dayananda was radical in his social reformism. Like other reformers, he too
attacked idolatry, polytheism and ritualistic religion dominated by the
Brahman priests. While running down other religions and asserting
Hinduisms superiority to them, the Hinduism which Dayananda defended
discarded much that everyone understood as Hinduism, including orthodox
Hindus. In fact, Dayananda rejected the term Hindu itself, and opted
instead for Arya (noble). He advocated the practise of havan and singing of
bhajans. He made caste, or varna, contingent on behaviour and knowledge,
not birth. At the same time, in his practise, he often upheld the fourfold
varna division, thus retaining the core of the Indian social organization. He
encouraged female education, condemned child marriage, and argued for
permitting widow remarriage within certain limits. While upholding Vedas as
the true bearers of knowledge, the Arya samaj could not escape the

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rationalism of the present age, and it appropriated the Western intellectual

discourse of reason and science. This was clearly reflected in the field of
education, where one school supported a more traditional system, while
another section recognised the value of English education and was inclined
to a more liberal programme. The social and educational work done by the
Arya samaj has had a wide impact. The reach of Dayananda and the Arya
samaj was much wider than other movements, and they proved to be a
dynamic force in Hindu society. The Arya samaj drew many leaders, militant
Hindus and nationalists, including Lala Hansraj, Pandit Guru Dutt, Lala Lajpat
Rai and Swami Shraddhananda.
The Arya samaj was an aggressively proselytizing movement, and

contributed greatly to the rise of a militant Hindu consciousness in the 19th
and 20th centuries. The moderate group within the Samaj, who had chosen
to focus on education and community work were gradually marginalized by
1893, and the militant voices became more dominant and aggressive. The
Hindu service communities, particularly Kayasthas and Khattris, were strong
in the Arya samaj. Its membership often included shopkeepers, traders,
lawyers and teachers. The Samaj used an effective network of updeshaks
and pracharaks for the spread of its ideas. These people inserted themselves
into the public domain of north India as the voice of Hindus and used print
extensively and powerfully. Prominent members of the Arya samaj controlled
many of the important publishing houses and newspapers being published in
north India.
As part of their community and nation making rhetoric, the Arya samaj
launched the programmes of sangathan and shuddhi. The latter was a
proselytization movement that involved the reconversion of those who were
lost to the religions of Christianity, Sikhism and Islam. The Arya samaj also
became intensely involved in the cow protection movements and the
advocacy of standardized Hindi in preference to Urdu in the late 19 th
century, moving decisively from reformism to revivalism. The Arya Samajs
stridency against Christianity and Islam and their belief in the superiority of
ancient Hinduism was often reflected in their writings. This to an extent was
the genesis of what later came to be known as Hindutva, a Hindu
nationalism based on identification with Hindu culture.

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Figure 6.2.4: Sangathan

Source: Vyanga Chitravali. 1925. Kanpur: Prakash Pustakalya, 2
An assessment and critique of social reforms
These reform movements made a significant contribution to the evolution of

modern India. It cannot be denied that they launched a significant attack on
a number of social and religious evils. They advocated abolition of the caste
system and stressed the need to improve the condition of women. However,
within these movements also lay certain inherent contradictions limitations.
These reforms largely came from above. There was never any attempt in
them to develop a modern social consciousness from below. Reformers
never tried to take the reforms to the people, and their language mostly
remained incomprehensible to the uneducated peasants and artisans. Most
of the reform movements 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. Most of them were upper
caste Hindus.
While attacking caste rigidities, many of them simultaneously upheld caste

hierarchies. It is not insignificant for example that many of the leading
members of the Arya samaj were also active members of various caste
associations. Many of these movements thus revealed caste tensions, as
they were uncomfortable with certain questions. In practice, the lower
castes were not entitled to wear the sacred thread, to learn the Vedas and to
inter-dine. Similarly on the womens question, most initiatives were taken
largely by men, and they mainly addressed problems of upper caste, middle
class Hindu women only. Further, they hardly ever took womens own voices
into account.

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Lacking a broad social base, most of the reform movements exhibited an

intrinsic faith in the benevolent nature of colonial rule and relied more on
legislation for imposing reform from above. Equally important is the colonial
character of the reforms, as the Indian reformers positions in a significant
way mirrored the colonial mind and therefore the ambivalence of the colonial
policy planners.
A sharp tradition/modernization dichotomy is not intellectually conducive to

an understanding of the process of reform in 19th century India. The
ambivalences in the position of reformers were an outcome of a colonial
context. Christophe Jaffrelot states that 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. More importantly,
many of the Hindu reform movements drew implicit links between Hindus
and the nation, leaving themselves open to more conservative and revivalist
appropriations

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What were some of the main reform movements discussed in the document?

What were some of the main reform movements discussed in the document?

What were some of the reasons cited for the growth of these reform movements?

What were some of the reasons cited for the growth of these reform movements?

Reform and revival: Brahmo Samaj; Prarthana Samaj; Ramakrishna

and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj

Lesson: Reform and revival: Brahmo Samaj; Prarthana

Institute of Lifelong Learning, University of Delhi