Socio-Religious Reform Movements

By the early nineteenth century a new class of English-educated Indians had appeared in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. They had read about the French Revolution, liberty and reason, and then looked at their own society: sati, child marriage, polygamy, caste barriers, idol-worship and the priest's monopoly. The result was the Indian Renaissance (the 'Bengal Renaissance' in its first phase). Reformers took two roads: some reformed Hinduism using reason and the Upanishads (Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj), others revived it by returning to the Vedas (Arya Samaj). Bengal came first, and its great figure is Raja Ram Mohan Roy.

Roy's thought was rooted in monotheism. He believed that the Upanishads taught one formless God and that idol-worship, costly rituals and priestly control had been added later. He admired the moral teaching of Jesus ('The Precepts of Jesus', 1820) but rejected the Trinity, and he supported English education because it brought science and reason: in 1823 he wrote to Lord Amherst opposing a Sanskrit-only college and asking for modern learning. The Mughal emperor Akbar II conferred on him the title 'Raja' (1831) and sent him to England as his envoy, and he died at Bristol in 1833. He is called the 'Father of the Indian Renaissance', the 'Maker of Modern India' and the 'Morning Star of the Indian Renaissance'.

The story of the split is a favourite of examiners. Debendranath Tagore (father of Rabindranath) had founded the Tattvabodhini Sabha (1839) and made the Samaj active again, but he was cautious. His young disciple Keshab Chandra Sen (joined 1857) wanted to attack caste openly, promoted inter-caste marriages and started the Indian Reform Association (1870) and the paper Indian Mirror. In 1866 they parted. In 1872 Keshab's pressure led to the Native Marriage (Special Marriage) Act, which allowed Brahmo marriages without Hindu rites, with minimum ages of 14 for girls and 18 for boys. Then in 1878 Keshab married his own 13-year-old daughter to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, against the very Act he had asked for, and his followers broke away to form the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj under Ananda Mohan Bose and Shivanath Shastri. Keshab started the Nava Vidhan (New Dispensation) in 1880.

Why did a movement of such educated people keep splitting? Because the reformers were not copying each other; they were answering one question: how far can we change without ceasing to be ourselves? Roy answered with reason and the Upanishads, Debendranath with caution and tradition, Keshab with bold social action, and the Sadharan Samaj with democracy. Learn each split as a disagreement of method, not a loss of purpose.

Two other Bengal streams belong here. Young Bengal was the radical group of students of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-31), a young Anglo-Indian teacher at the Hindu College, Calcutta (taught 1826-31). Inspired by the French Revolution, he taught his students to question every authority, founded the Academic Association (1828) for debate and wrote poetry and journalism. The Derozians (such as Krishna Mohan Banerjee, Ramgopal Ghosh and Radhanath Sikdar) attacked superstition, caste and idol-worship, but they had little contact with ordinary people. Derozio was dismissed in 1831 after orthodox Hindus complained, and died of cholera the same year, aged only 22. The other stream was Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-91), principal of the Sanskrit College (1851), who campaigned for widow remarriage (the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856, passed under Lord Canning), set up many girls' schools, and supported the Bethune School (1849), a pioneering girls' school in Calcutta. He also opposed child marriage and polygamy. His Bengali primer Barna Parichay is still known.

Bengal asked, 'How can we reform Hinduism with reason?' Northern India, led by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, asked a bolder question: 'What if the Hinduism we practise today is not the real thing at all?' His answer was 'Back to the Vedas' (Vedon ki or lauto). Dayananda was born as Mool Shankar in Tankara (Morvi, Kathiawar, Gujarat) in 1824. After leaving home he became a disciple of the blind scholar Swami Virjanand at Mathura and then taught for years, challenging pandits and missionaries in public debates. He founded the Arya Samaj on 10 April 1875 at Bombay; its headquarters later moved to Lahore (1877), and Punjab and the United Provinces became its stronghold. He died in 1883 at Ajmer.

The next great stream was spiritual. Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86), a priest of the Kali temple at Dakshineswar near Calcutta, never wrote a book or founded an institution, yet he taught a message every examiner remembers: 'Yato mat, tato path', 'as many faiths, as many paths', and that all religions lead to the same God. His disciple Narendranath Datta (1863-1902), known as Swami Vivekananda, carried that message to the world. On 11 September 1893 he spoke at the Parliament of the World's Religions, Chicago, beginning with 'Sisters and Brothers of America', and became the voice of Hindu thought abroad. Back in India he founded the Ramakrishna Mission on 1 May 1897, with its headquarters at Belur Math near Calcutta. The Mission was different: it joined spiritual study with service to the poor, the sick and the uneducated ('service of man is service of God'), running schools, hospitals and relief work.

Meanwhile a foreign-born movement gave Indian pride a push. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian Madame H. P. Blavatsky and the American Colonel H. S. Olcott. It moved its headquarters to Adyar, Madras, in 1882. Theosophists admired karma, rebirth, the Upanishads and the Gita, and taught that Hindu, Buddhist and Zoroastrian traditions held deep truths, which made educated Indians proud of their own heritage at a time when missionaries ran it down. The movement became really powerful under the Irish woman Annie Besant, who came to India in 1893 and became president of the Society in 1907. She founded the Central Hindu College at Benares (1898), which became the nucleus of the Banaras Hindu University (1916), started the daily New India, launched the Home Rule League (1916) and became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress (Calcutta, 1917).

The three streams answered the same colonial insult ('your religion is backward') in three ways. Arya Samaj said: 'Our real religion, the Vedas, is pure; its later forms are the problem.' Ramakrishna-Vivekananda said: 'Our spiritual heritage is the world's gift; use it to serve people.' Theosophy said: 'Every ancient tradition has truth; Hinduism has plenty.' All three built the self-respect that nationalism needed.

Western India, with Bombay as its great port and Poona as its old Maratha capital, produced its own reformers. They fall into two groups. First came the high-caste, educated reformers (the Paramahansa Mandali, the Prarthana Samaj, Ranade, Agarkar, Karve), who wanted to reform Hindu society from within. Second came Jyotirao Phule, who said the problem was not just old customs but the Brahmin monopoly over knowledge and religion, and who stood for the shudras and ati-shudras (the lowest castes). To score well, remember the two groups, because examiners love to swap them.

The Paramahansa Mandali (1849) in Bombay was a small, secret society of educated men who wanted to break caste. Members ate food cooked by people of other castes in secret meetings, and it aimed at ending idol-worship and caste and at promoting widow remarriage and girls' education. It stayed secret because its members feared social boycott. Meanwhile the pioneering journalist Balshastri Jambhekar (1812-46) started the first Marathi newspaper, Darpan (1832), and Gopal Hari Deshmukh 'Lokahitawadi' (1823-92) wrote a famous series of letters, the Shatapatre, against orthodoxy. The Prarthana Samaj (31 March 1867, Bombay) was founded by Dr Atmaram Pandurang under the influence of Keshab Chandra Sen's visit to Bombay. It did not want a new religion; it wanted worship of one God, inspired by the Maharashtra saints like Tukaram, along with reform. Its great intellectuals were Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901) and R. G. Bhandarkar.

Jyotirao (Jyotiba) Govindrao Phule (1827-90) came from the Mali (gardener) community of Poona. After being insulted at a Brahmin friend's wedding, he began to question caste. In 1848 he and his wife Savitribai Phule (1831-97), who is called India's first woman teacher, opened the first girls' school in Poona; Savitribai was its first teacher. They started schools for untouchable children (1851), a home for widows and a shelter to prevent infanticide (Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha, 1863), and opened their well to the untouchables. On 24 September 1873 Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj ('Society of Seekers of Truth') to free the lower castes from Brahmin priests and to give them education and self-respect. Its members did not use priests at weddings. His books: Gulamgiri (1873; 'Slavery', which he dedicated to the Americans who fought to end slavery), Shetkaryancha Asud ('Cultivator's Whipcord', 1881), Sarvajanik Satyadharma Pustak (1891, published after his death). He gave evidence to the Hunter Commission (1882) on education for the masses. In 1888 he was given the title 'Mahatma' by Vithalrao Krishnaji Vandekar in Bombay.

More reformers of this region complete the picture. Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856-95), a fierce rationalist, edited Kesari with Tilak, then started his own weekly Sudharak (1888), and argued that social reform must come before political reform. Vishnushastri Pandit led the widow remarriage movement in Bombay. Dhondo Keshav Karve (1858-1962) founded the Widow Marriage Association (1893), a Widows' Home (1896) and the first women's university of India, the SNDT Women's University (1916), and received the Bharat Ratna in 1958. Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) wrote The High Caste Hindu Woman (1887), started the Arya Mahila Samaj (1882) and the Sharada Sadan (1889) for widows, and the Mukti Mission (1896). The Parsi reformer Behramji Malabari wrote on child marriage and forced widowhood (1884) and started the Seva Sadan (1885), while the Parsi Rahnumae Mazdayasnan Sabha (1851) reformed Parsi customs. Tarabai Shinde wrote Stri Purush Tulana (1882), called the first modern Indian feminist text.

Why Phule differs from the others. Ranade, Agarkar and the Prarthana Samaj asked, 'How do we improve Hindu society?' Phule asked, 'Who made the rules, and who benefits?' He treated caste as a system of power, not just of custom, and so his answer was education and self-respect for the oppressed. This line later flowed into the non-Brahmin movement and into Ambedkar's work.

In the South and among the lowest castes everywhere, reform meant something sharper than a debate on idols. For millions, caste meant that they could not enter a temple, draw water from a well, walk on a public road or send a child to school. These movements therefore did not ask for gentle change; they asked for rights. As you read, keep one thread in mind: Phule (Maharashtra) → Narayana Guru and Ayyankali (Kerala) → Periyar and the Justice Party (Tamil Nadu) → Ambedkar (all-India). Each took the anti-caste idea one step further, from education and dignity to temple entry, political representation and law.

Sree Narayana Guru (1856-1928) was born into the Ezhava community (considered 'untouchable' by the upper castes) at Chempazhanthy near Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. In 1888 he consecrated a Shiva idol at Aruvippuram, a bold act because only Brahmins were allowed to install idols; he said it was 'not the Brahmin's Shiva but the Ezhavas' Shiva'. His message was 'One Caste, One Religion, One God for Man' (Oru jathi, oru matham, oru daivam manushyanu). In 1903 the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam was founded at Aruvippuram, with Dr Palpu as the guiding spirit and the poet Kumaran Asan as its secretary. He also set up the Sivagiri Mutt (1904), the Advaita Ashram at Aluva (1913), and held an All-Religions Conference at Aluva (1924). Gandhi met him at Sivagiri in 1925.

The Vaikom Satyagraha (1924-25), in the princely state of Travancore, demanded that people of all castes be allowed to use the public roads around the Vaikom Mahadeva temple, which were closed to the 'avarna' castes. It was led by T. K. Madhavan, K. Kelappan and K. P. Kesava Menon under the Congress, and E. V. Ramasamy (Periyar) came from Madras to join and was called the 'Vaikom Hero' (Vaikom Veerar). Gandhi visited in 1925, and the roads were opened. After the 1936 Temple Entry Proclamation signed by Maharaja Chithira Thirunal, Travancore became the first major state to open its temples to all Hindus.

In Madras Presidency, the non-Brahmin movement began as politics. The South Indian Liberal Federation (the Justice Party) was formed in 1916 by T. M. Nair, P. Theagaraja Chetty and C. Natesa Mudaliar, with the English paper Justice, to win a share of government jobs and education for non-Brahmins; its Non-Brahmin Manifesto (1916) set out the demand. It won the first elections under the 1919 Act (1920) and formed the ministry (A. Subbarayalu Reddiar was the first Chief Minister), and later the ministry of the Raja of Panagal introduced reservation of government jobs. Then came E. V. Ramasamy 'Periyar' (1879-1973) of Erode, who left the Congress in 1925 and started the Self-Respect Movement, with the paper Kudi Arasu (1925). It attacked Brahmin priestly dominance, caste, superstition and the oppression of women; it promoted self-respect marriages without priests, widow remarriage and rationalism. In 1944 the Justice Party was renamed the Dravidar Kazhagam at Salem under Periyar.

Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), himself born into the Mahar community, turned the movement into a national force. He founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (1924) and started the papers Mooknayak (1920), Bahishkrit Bharat (1927) and Janata (1930). In 1927 he led the Mahad (Chavdar Tank) Satyagraha in Maharashtra for the right of the untouchables to draw water from a public tank, and burnt the Manusmriti. In 1930 he led the Kalaram temple entry at Nashik. He asked for separate electorates for the Depressed Classes at the Round Table Conferences, which led to the Communal Award (1932) and then the Poona Pact (1932) with Gandhi, giving reserved seats within the general electorate. Gandhi founded the Harijan Sevak Sangh (1932), started the paper Harijan (1933), and toured the country on a Harijan campaign in 1933-34. In Bengal the Matua sect was started by Harichand Thakur (1812-78) among the Namasudra (then called 'Chandal') peasants of Faridpur; his son Guruchand Thakur carried it forward, and the sect still honours Harichand's birth anniversary on 8 March. In Andhra, Kandukuri Veeresalingam (1848-1919) conducted the first widow remarriage in Telugu country (1881) and started the Rajahmundry Social Reform Association (1878).

Anti-caste movements moved in three steps: first dignity and education (Phule, Narayana Guru), then access to water, roads and temples (Mahad, Vaikom, Kalaram), then political power and law (Justice Party, Ambedkar, Poona Pact, and finally Article 17 of the Constitution abolishing untouchability). If a question asks 'what came first', check which step it describes.

Muslims, Sikhs and others reacted to British rule in their own ways, and their movements fall into two clear families. Revivalist movements (the Wahabi movement, the Faraizi movement and the Deoband school) believed that Muslims had weakened by drifting away from pure Islam, and wanted to purify the faith. Modernist movements (the Aligarh movement of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan) believed that Muslims had fallen behind because they had refused modern education, and wanted to combine Islam with science and English. The Sikhs had their own Singh Sabha and, later, the Akali movement. Tell the families apart and you can answer almost any question.

The Wahabi movement (also called the Walliullah movement, after the thinker Shah Waliullah) was led by Syed Ahmad Barelvi (1786-1831) of Rae Bareli (Uttar Pradesh). He wanted to purge Islam of later innovations and, since he thought India under the British and Sikhs was 'Dar-ul-Harb' (land of war), to fight a jihad. He raised a base in the North-West Frontier and was killed at Balakot in 1831 fighting the Sikhs. Patna became the movement's Indian centre; after 1857 it turned against the British until the Ambala and Patna trials of the 1860s crushed it. In Bengal Titu Mir (Mir Nisar Ali, 1782-1831), influenced by it, led poor Muslim peasants against zamindars and indigo planters from his bamboo fort at Narkelberia. The Faraizi movement was started in East Bengal (Faridpur) by Haji Shariatullah (1781-1840) about 1818. Its name comes from faraiz (obligatory duties of Islam). After him, his son Dudu Miyan (Muhsin-ud-din Ahmad, 1819-62) turned it into a peasant movement against zamindars and indigo planters, arguing that the land belongs to God and none may tax it. The Deoband school (Darul Uloom, Deoband, 30 May 1866) was set up by Muhammad Qasim Nanautavi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi to train ulema in pure Islamic teaching without British help; later it supported the Congress (the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, 1919).

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98), born in Delhi, served the Company as a judge. He saw the Revolt of 1857 at close quarters, and in 'The Causes of the Indian Revolt' (Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind, 1859) blamed British policy rather than Muslims. His lesson was that Muslims must take up modern education. He founded the Scientific Society (1864) to translate Western books into Urdu, the Aligarh Institute Gazette (1866) and the journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq (1870), and in 1875 the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) School at Aligarh, which became the MAO College (1877) and the Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. He started the All India Muhammadan Educational Conference (1886). In his later years he advised Muslims to stay away from the Congress, and the Aligarh circle supplied many of the leaders of the later Muslim League. Other modernists were Nawab Abdul Latif (Mohammedan Literary Society, Calcutta, 1863) and Syed Ameer Ali (Central National Mohammedan Association, 1877). Later movements include the Ahmadiyya (Punjab, 1889, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian) and the Nadwat-ul-Ulama (1894).

Among the Sikhs, the Singh Sabha movement began at Amritsar in 1873 (a Lahore Singh Sabha followed in 1879) to protect Sikh identity from conversion drives of missionaries and the Arya Samaj, to spread modern education through Gurmukhi and English, and to cleanse practice of Hindu influences. Its great achievement was the Khalsa College, Amritsar (1892), and the Chief Khalsa Diwan (1902) brought the Sabhas together. The Gurdwara Reform (Akali) movement (1920-25) sought to free Sikh gurdwaras from corrupt hereditary mahants who were backed by the government. The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) was formed in November 1920 and the Shiromani Akali Dal in December 1920. The Nankana Sahib massacre (February 1921), the Guru-ka-Bagh morcha (1922) and the Jaito morcha (1923-25) were its high points, and the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925 handed control of the shrines to the SGPC. Two earlier Sikh sects deserve a line: the Nirankari movement (Baba Dayal Das, mid-19th century), which urged worship of the formless God, and the Namdhari (Kuka) movement (Baba Balak Singh and then Baba Ram Singh, who formalised it in 1857), which urged purity, boycotted British goods and courts, and rose in the Kuka revolt of 1872.

A revivalist asks, 'What have we lost, and how do we get it back?' A modernist asks, 'What do we lack, and how do we get it?' The Wahabis and Deobandis looked back to a pure Islam; Sir Syed looked forward to science. Neither was 'anti-British' by default: Sir Syed was loyal to the Raj for strategic reasons, while the Wahabis fought it. That is why questions about 'loyalty' or 'jihad' point to different groups.

Reformers could write books and start societies, but only the law could bind everyone. So the story of social reform is also a story of legislation, and it follows a pattern: an Indian reformer campaigns, orthodox groups protest, and a colonial government, careful not to offend religious feelings, acts only when the pressure is strong enough. That is why the Company was slow to ban sati, why the 1857 Revolt made the Crown even more cautious, and why many laws after 1857 were enabling (permitting reform) rather than compulsory. Notice, too, that nearly all these laws are about women and children.

Sati (the burning of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre) was most common in Bengal. Raja Ram Mohan Roy collected evidence from Hindu scriptures to show that the practice was not compulsory, wrote in his papers, and publicly debated the pandits. Many officials, and above all the Company's Court of Directors and Parliament, feared a religious backlash and held back. The turning point was the arrival of Lord William Bentinck as Governor-General in 1828, a man of strong liberal convictions who also had Indian support. On 4 December 1829 he issued the Bengal Sati Regulation (Regulation XVII), making sati a culpable homicide punishable by the courts; it was extended to Madras and Bombay in 1830. The orthodox formed the Dharma Sabha (Radhakanta Deb, 1830) and appealed to the Privy Council in London, but the appeal was rejected in 1832. The law was, however, motivated by a mix of British moral beliefs, Indian reform pressure and the need to show that Company rule was 'civilised'.

Widow remarriage followed the same path. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar argued from the Parashara Smriti that a widow could lawfully remarry, and collected thousands of signatures in 1855. The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act (Act XV of 1856), passed under Lord Canning on 26 July 1856, legalised the remarriage of Hindu widows and the children of such marriages. The first legal widow marriage was held in Calcutta in December 1856, but most Hindu families still shunned remarried widows, so the law changed little in practice. On the other side of the age-of-marriage debate, the Age of Consent Act (1891) under Lord Lansdowne was passed after the tragic death of an 11-year-old Bengali bride, Phulmoni Dasi, and the campaign of the Parsi reformer Behramji Malabari. It raised the age of consent for girls from 10 to 12 years. Orthodox opinion, including Tilak, objected to the law as foreign interference in Hindu customs, even though many of them supported reform in principle. Finally the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929), known as the Sarda Act after Har Bilas Sarda, who introduced it, set 14 as the minimum marriage age for girls and 18 for boys (later raised to 18 and 21 by the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006).

A law is only the first step. The Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856 allowed widows to marry again, yet few did for decades; the Sarda Act of 1929 was often broken; the Age of Consent Act was disliked by orthodoxy. If an exam asks whether a law 'ended' a practice, the safe answer is that the law declared it illegal, while social change took far longer. Sati is the exception where legal action was relatively effective.

A reformer needs a voice that reaches beyond the hall where the society meets. In the nineteenth century that voice was the newspaper. Every movement in this chapter, from the Brahmo Samaj to the Satyashodhak Samaj, ran a paper, and the government's reaction to the press (control, then relaxation, then control again) tells us how nervous it was about Indian public opinion. For exams, the press topic is two lists: who founded which paper, and which law controlled the press and under whom.

The Vernacular Press Act of 1878, passed under Lord Lytton, is the most asked press law, and the reason is its design. A magistrate could ask the printer of an Indian-language paper to sign a bond not to publish anything that might excite disaffection, and could seize the press if he did. English papers were left alone. Indians called it the Gagging Act. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, which had been bilingual, became an all-English paper almost overnight to escape the Act. Lord Ripon repealed it in 1882.