Raja Ram Mohan Roy
Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian reformer and writer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a socio-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He has been dubbed the "Father of Indian Renaissance." He was given the title of Raja by Mughal emperor Akbar II.
His influence was apparent in the fields of politics, public administration, education and religion. He was known for his efforts to abolish the practices of sati and child marriage. Roy wrote Gaudiya Vyakaran which was the first complete Bangla grammar written book.
Early life (1772–1796)
Ram Mohan Roy was born in Radhanagar, Hooghly District, Bengal Presidency. His great-grandfather Krishnakanta Bandyopadhyay was a Rarhi Kulin Brahmin. Among Kulin Brahmins descendants of the five families of Brahmins, migrated from Kannauj by Ballal Sen in the 12th century as per popular myththose from the Rarhi district of West Bengal were notorious in the 19th century for living off dowries by marrying several women. Kulinism was a synonym for polygamy and the dowry system, both of which Ram Mohan campaigned against. His father, Ramkanta, was a Vaishnavite, while his mother, Tarini Devi, was from a Shaivite family. He was a great scholar of Sanskrit, Persian and English languages and also knew Arabic, Latin and Greek. One parent prepared him for the occupation of a scholar, the Shastri, while the other secured for him all the worldly advantages needed to launch a career in the laukik or worldly sphere of public administration. Torn between these two parental ideals from early childhood, Ram Mohan vacillated between the two for the rest of his life.During his childhood Ram Mohan Roy witnessed the death of his sister-in-law through sati. The seventeen-year-old girl was dragged towards the pyre where Ram Mohan Roy witnessed her terrified state. He tried to protest but to no avail. She was burned alive. The people chanted "Maha Sati! Maha Sati! Maha Sati!" over her painful screams.
Ram Mohan Roy was married three times. His first wife died early. He had two sons, Radhaprasad in 1800, and Ramaprasad in 1812 with his second wife, who died in 1824. Roy's third wife outlived him.
The nature and content of Ram Mohan Roy's early education is disputed. One view is that Ram Mohan started his formal education in the village pathshala where he learned Bengali and some Sanskrit and Persian. Later he is said to have studied Persian and Arabic in a madrasa in Patna and after that he was sent to Benares to learn the intricacies of Sanskrit and Hindu scripture, including the Vedas and Upanishads. The dates of his time in both these places are uncertain. However, it is believed that he was sent to Patna when he was nine years old and two years later he went to Benares.
Ram Mohan Roy's impact on modern Indian history was his revival of the pure and ethical principles of the Vedanta school of philosophy as found in the Upanishads. He preached the unity of God, made early translations of Vedic scriptures into English, co-founded the Calcutta Unitarian Society and founded the Brahmo Sabha, precursor to Brahmo Samaj. The Brahmo Samaj played a major role in reforming and modernising the Indian society. He successfully campaigned against sati, the practice of burning widows. He sought to integrate Western culture with the best features of his own country's traditions. He established a number of schools to popularise a modern system of education in India. He promoted a rational, ethical, non-authoritarian, this-worldly views and social reforms in Hinduism. His writings also sparked interest among British and American Unitarians.
Christianity and the early rule of the East India Company (1795–1828)
During the early years of East India Company rule, Ram Mohan Roy acted as a political agitator while employed by the company.In 1792, the British Baptist shoemaker William Carey published his influential missionary tract, An Enquiry of the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens.
In 1793, William Carey landed in India to settle. His objective was to translate, publish and distribute the Bible in Indian languages and propagate Christianity to the Indian people. He realised the "mobile" Brahmins and Pandits were most able to help him in this endeavour, and he began gathering them. He learnt the Buddhist and Jain religious works to better argue the case for Christianity in a cultural context.
In 1795, Carey made contact with a Sanskrit scholar, the Tantric Saihardana Vidyavagish, who later introduced him to Ram Mohan Roy, who wished to learn English.
While there are rumors that between 1796 and 1797, the trio of Carey, Vidyavagish, and Roy created a religious work known as the "Maha Nirvana Tantra". Scholars like John Duncan Derrett are skeptical of this claim calling it "highly improbable" and Hugh Urban argues that "It is probable that we will never know the true author and date of the Maha Nirvana Tantra". Carey's involvement is not recorded in his very detailed records and he reports only learning to read Sanskrit in 1796 and only completed a grammar in 1797, the same year he translated part of The Bible, a massive task. For the next two decades Maha Nirvana Tantra was regularly augmented. Its judicial sections were used in the law courts of the English Settlement in Bengal as Hindu Law for adjudicating upon property disputes of the zamindars. However, a few British magistrates and collectors began to suspect and its usage was quickly deprecated. Vidyavagish had a brief falling out with Carey and separated from the group, but maintained ties to Ram Mohan Roy.
In 1797, Raja Ram Mohan reached Calcutta and became a bania, mainly to lend to the Englishmen of the Company living beyond their means. Ram Mohan also continued his vocation as pandit in the English courts and started to make a living for himself. He began learning Greek and Latin.
In 1799, Carey was joined by missionary Joshua Marshman and the printer William Ward at the Danish settlement of Serampore.
From 1803 until 1815, Ram Mohan served the East India Company's "Writing Service", commencing as private clerk to Thomas Woodroffe, Registrar of the Appellate Court at Murshidabad. Roy resigned from Woodroffe's service and later secured employment with John Digby, a Company collector, and Ram Mohan spent many years at Rangpur and elsewhere with Digby, where he renewed his contacts with Hariharananda. William Carey had by this time settled at Serampore and the old trio renewed their profitable association. William Carey was also aligned now with the English Company, then head-quartered at Fort William, and his religious and political ambitions were increasingly intertwined.
While in Murshidabad, in 1804 Raja Ram Mohan Roy wrote Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin in Persian with an introduction in Arabic. Bengali had not yet become the language of intellectual discourse. The importance of Tuhfat-ul-muwahhidin lies only in its being the first known theological statement of one who achieved later fame and notoriety as a Vedantin. On its own, it is unremarkable, perhaps of interest only to a social historian because of its amateurish eclecticism. Tuhfat was, after all, available as early as 1884 in the English translation of Maulavi Obaidullah EI Obaid, published by the Adi Brahmo Samaj. Raja Ram Mohan Roy did not know the Upanishad at this stage in his intellectual development.
In 1814, he started Atmiya Sabha a philosophical discussion circle in Kolkata to propagate the monotheistic ideals of the vedanta and to campaign against idolatry, caste rigidities, meaningless rituals and other social ills.
The East India Company was draining money from India at a rate of three million pounds a year by 1838. Ram Mohan Roy was one of the first to try to estimate how much money was being taken out of India and to where it was disappearing. He estimated that around one-half of all total revenue collected in India was sent out to England, leaving India, with a considerably larger population, to use the remaining money to maintain social well-being. Ram Mohan Roy saw this and believed that the unrestricted settlement of Europeans in India governing under free trade would help ease the economic drain crisis.
During the next two decades, Ram Mohan along with William Carey, launched his attack against the bastions of Hinduism of Bengal, namely his own Kulin Brahmin priestly clan and their priestly excesses. The Kulin excesses targeted include sati, polygamy, child marriage and dowry.
From 1819, Ram Mohan's battery increasingly turned against William Carey, a Baptist Missionary settled in Serampore, and the Serampore missionaries. With Dwarkanath's munificence, he launched a series of attacks against Trinitarian Christianity and was now considerably assisted in his theological debates by the Unitarian faction of Christianity.
He wrote Gaudiya Vyakaran which was the first complete Bangla grammar written book. It was published in 1826.
In 1828, he launched Brahmo Sabha with Debendranath Tagore. By 1828, he had become a well known figure in India. In 1830, he had gone to England as an envoy of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar Shah II, who invested him with the title of Raja to the court of King William IV.
Middle "Brahmo" period (1820–1830)
This was Ram Mohan's most controversial period. Commenting on his published works Sivanath Sastri writes:"The period between 1820 and 1830 was also eventful from a literary point of view, as will be manifest from the following list of his publications during that period:
He publicly declared that he would emigrate from the British Empire if Parliament failed to pass the Reform Bill.
In 1830, Ram Mohan Roy travelled to the United Kingdom as an ambassador of the Mughal Empire to ensure that Lord William Bentinck's Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829 banning the practice of sati was not overturned. In addition, Roy petitioned the King to increase the Mughal Emperor's allowance and perquisites. He was successful in persuading the British government to increase the stipend of the Mughal Emperor by £30,000. While in England, he embarked on cultural exchanges, meeting with members of parliament and publishing books on Indian economics and law. Sophia Dobson Collet was his biographer at that time.