Raja Ram Mohan Roy (22 May 1772 - 27 September 1833), the Father of the Indian Renaissance, having contributed to various fields by establishing Brahmo Samaj, a Hindu reformist sect, and making Lord William Bentinck, the Governor General of India, ban the inhuman Sati tradition in 1829, continues to be remembered as a controversial figure.
Though he was a Sanskrit scholar, he opposed the government funding for Sanskrit education. A great scholar of theology and various languages, Roy was the Ambassador of the Mughal Emperor Akbar II (1806-1837) pleading for his case before the British Government. Simultaneously, he was a known sympathiser of the English cause over the Old Order. He had put in his ideas to reform Hindu religion and popularised the word “Hinduism”. Raja can be considered as a torchbearer of freedom of press too.
Roy was born of Vaishnavite Rarhi Brahmin father Ramakant Roy and Shivaite mother Tarini Devi in Radhanagar of Hooghly District of Bengal Presidency. Normally a Vaishnavite did not marry a Shivaite in those days. Both his father and mother were orthodox Hindus following rituals like idol worship whereas he was against that. He studied Bengali, Persian and Sanskrit at home and in a village Pathshala. He was sent to Patna and Banaras for higher studies of Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit.
Ram Mohan is mostly remembered for ban on Sati tradition. Sati was not a practice in the early Vedic period, notes Dr Tina Doshi in her “Indian Women Encyclopaedia”, adding even the widow marriages were not uncommon during the Vedic period. She says the inhuman Sati practice cropped up during the Parasharsmriti period, much after the Manusmriti. The Rishis (Sages) who codified Smrities even allowed remarriages of widows. In the 10 years between 1815 and 1824, nearly 6,632 cases of Sati were reported in three Presidencies of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. Of these, 5,997 (90.4%) took place in Bengal, states Anand A Yang in “Women and Social Reforms in Modern India” edited by Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar.
Roy, the founder of Atmiya Sabha, tried to initiate social and religious reforms in the society. He campaigned for women's rights, including the right for widows to remarry, and the right for women to hold property. He actively opposed Sati system and the practice of polygamy, despite his three marriages. Roy also supported education, particularly education for women. Bentinck signed Lord Macaulay’s draft into law, which supported the replacement of Persian by English as the official language, the use of English as the medium of instruction in all schools. Macaulay was of the opinion that there was no point in perfecting the vernaculars, since there was nothing intelligent, but falsehood, in them.
Roy believed that English-language education was superior to the traditional Indian education system, and he opposed the use of government funds to support schools teaching Sanskrit. But Ram Mohan himself established a Vedanta College with his own funding in 1825, which facilitated learning of Sanskrit. Raja had learnt even Hebrew and Greek to refer the original texts of Christianity. At one stage Ram Mohan was believed to have converted to Christianity but he had a different intention. Through Brahmo Samaj, he wanted to expose the religious hypocrisies and check the growing influence of Christianity on the Hindu Society. Raja did attack the Christian Missionaries for their conversion activity.
Raja launched “Sambad Kaumudi”, a Bengali weekly, on December 4, 1821, followed by “Mirat-Ul-Akhbar”, a Persian weekly, in 1822. Indian Journalism is fortunate to have Roy as its founder. He laid down the principles on which the journalism of later days made progress. For him, journalism was not a profession, but an instrument through which he was able to propagate his ideas regarding reform in the social, religious and educational spheres.
Ram Mohan was awarded the title Raja by the Mughal Emperor when Roy was going to England as his Ambassador to present his case before Her Majesty’s Court. Raja left for England on his dual mission on November 19, 1830, one was to present the grievances of Akbar II and another was to plead before the British Government to make the Sati ban a permanent legal entity. He delivered some public lectures in England and became talk of the town. Unfortunately, he fell sick while being in Vilayat and died of meningitis in Stapleton near Bristol. He was buried at the Arnos Vale Cemetery nearby.
Holding social reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Keshav Chandra Sen responsible for the decline of Indian education system, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, Human Resource Development Minister of India in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government (1999-2004), blames Roy for doing great harm to Sanskrit. In spite of the limitations and differences of opinion, none can deny the extraordinary contribution of Raja Ram Mohan Roy to social and religious reforms which are paying dividends even today.
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(The writer is a Socio-political Historian. E-mail : [email protected])
