Socio-Religious Reform Movements of 19th-Century India — Part 2: Bengal — Rammohan Roy and Young Bengal
Part 2: Bengal as the epicentre of reform — Rammohan Roy, the Brahmo Samaj (1828), abolition of sati (1829), Vedanta College, and the Young Bengal movement under Henry Derozio.
Modern India — Part 4 of 5
2. Bengal: The Epicentre
Bengal was the first region where the reform impulse manifested with greatest intensity, shaped by its early exposure to British administration and Western education.
2.1 Rammohan Roy and the Brahmo Samaj (1828)
Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) has been aptly described as the Father of Modern India. A multifaceted personality, he touched upon nearly every aspect of national life and struggled for the regeneration of the Indian nation. He published his first philosophical work, Tuhfat-ul Muwahhidin (A Gift to Monotheists) in 1805, analysing major world religions in the light of "reason" and "social comfort." He denied that religion was a matter of faith outside reason and attempted to expose the myth of miracles.
Rammohan's reform activities accelerated after he settled in Calcutta in 1814, when he started the Atmiya Sabha — the forerunner of the Brahmo Samaj. He denounced idolatry and advocated monotheism, blaming Brahmin priests for perpetuating religious evils by keeping people ignorant of the true teachings of indigenous scriptures. He published Bengali translations of the scriptures and wrote profusely in defence of monotheism, thereby promoting the Bengali language.
In 1828 he established the Brahmo Sabha (later known as the Brahmo Samaj), with the primary purpose of ridding Hinduism of its evils and preaching monotheism. It incorporated the best teachings of other religions and served as a powerful platform for humanism, monotheism, and social regeneration.
On the social front, Rammohan launched a crusade against sati — the burning of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. His sustained agitation bore fruit in 1829 when Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, enacted a law abolishing sati. He condemned polygamy and early marriage, and related the inferior status of women to the root cause of denial of property rights. He supported female education as an effective method of liberation from social stagnation. Notably, however, his solution for living widows was not widow marriage but ascetic widowhood — a position superseded by later reformers.
Rammohan provided enthusiastic support to David Hare, who helped found the Hindu College in 1817. He himself established the Vedanta College in 1825, offering both Indian and Western learning. He stressed India's need for Western scientific knowledge — mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, and anatomy — seeking the fusion of the best in the East and the West.
Beyond religion and society, Rammohan championed political causes: Indianisation of services, trial by jury, separation of executive and judicial powers, freedom of the press, and judicial equality between Indians and Europeans. He attacked the rigidities of the caste system as the source of disunity among Indians, holding that it created inequality and division and "deprived them of patriotic feeling." Rammohan was a progenitor of nationalist consciousness. He died in 1833 in Bristol, England.
2.2 Young Bengal and Henry Derozio
About the same time, radical ideas were propagated by a group of young Bengali intellectuals known as the Young Bengal movement, largely initiated by Henry Vivian Derozio (1809–1831), an Anglo-Indian teacher at Hindu College. A free thinker and rationalist, Derozio promoted a critical outlook among his students who questioned all authority, loved liberty, and worshipped truth.
The Derozians — prominent among them Dakshinaranjan Mukherjee, Ram Gopal Ghose, and Krishna Mohan Banerji — attacked old and decadent customs and traditions, questioning the whole fabric of Hindu society and religion. They measured everything with the yardstick of reason. They were highly influenced by regenerating new thought from the West and displayed an uncompromisingly rational attitude towards social problems. Derozio was dismissed from Hindu College in 1831 because of his radical views, and died of cholera at the young age of 22.
A major weakness of the Derozian method was its failure to draw upon India's cultural traditions — making it too unorthodox for the newly emerging Bengali middle class to accept. Despite this limitation, the Young Bengal movement represents the most radical stream within the 19th-century reform movement.