The Socio-Religious Reform Movements

Raja Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) — scholar of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Greek and Hebrew — founded the Brahmo Sabha (1828) to worship one formless God, attacked idolatry and polytheism from scripture itself, and campaigned until Governor-General Bentinck, with Roy's advocacy, abolished sati in 1829 — the first great legislative victory of Indian reform. Historians call him the father of the Indian Renaissance.

Bengal's ferment produced Henry Derozio's Young Bengal radicals; Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, whose widow-remarriage campaign bore fruit in the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856; and Debendranath and Keshab Chandra Sen, who carried Brahmoism across India.

In Bombay, the Prarthana Samaj (1867) spread theist reform; Jyotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) to fight for the Shudras and women, and with Savitribai Phule opened India's first schools for girls and the oppressed castes — the bottom-up radicalism that later fed the Dalit movement. In Maharashtra, Ranade and Gokhale made reform a patient social science.

Swami Dayananda founded the Arya Samaj (1875) on the call 'Back to the Vedas', rejecting post-Vedic accretions, idolatry and caste by birth, and launching shuddhi — reconversion — as a militant defence of the faith. At the other pole, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa of Dakshineswar taught that all religions were rivers to one sea; his disciple Swami Vivekananda carried that gospel to the Parliament of Religions at Chicago (1893) and founded the Ramakrishna Mission (1897), making service ('shiva jnane jiva seva') the new asceticism.

Among Muslims, Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan's Aligarh Movement — the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College (1875) — sought to reconcile Islam with modern science; among Sikhs the Singh Sabha movement, and among Parsis the reform of Zoroastrian law marched in step.

The reformers' methods — scripture cited against custom, and English law pressed into Indian service — created the public sphere in which nationalism would grow; their schools, presses and associations trained the Congress generation. Their limits were real: they spoke largely to the urban educated, and revivalist strains could sharpen community lines — but the age of reform first taught Indians to regard their own society as something that could be argued with, changed and modernised by Indians themselves.