RAJA RAMMOHAN ROY IN RETROSPECT AT 250 YEARS (22 MAY, 1772 -- 22 MAY, 2022) -- THE FATHER OF THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE

RAJA RAMMOHAN ROY IN RETROSPECT AT 250 YEARS (22 MAY, 1772 -- 22 MAY, 2022) -- THE FATHER OF THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE 

1757. Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah was humbled in the Battle of Plassey by the East India Company and India's freedom-sun sank. Fifteen years later the first resistance arose against this Western infiltration into India and its concomitant evil of Christian proselytisation. At Radhanagar in Bengal was born the babe that was to usher in the modern age in India. Rammohan Roy appeared on the firmament of India on 22 May, 1772. Today we celebrate the 250th birth anniversary of the Prophet of Modern India.

Rammohan Roy ushered in the modern age in India. Recalling his seminal contributions to the nation Rabindranath Tagore hailed him as 'ভারতপথিক রামমোহন' (The Pathfinder of India). He was India's first modern man of the modern age who in the words of Tagore held the East and the West on either side of him, absorbed and synthesised the best elements of each but was never overwhelmed by either. And out of this synthesis was born the crucible in which modern India in its earliest phase came into being. Successive generations thereafter built the edifice of modern India upon the first foundation that Rammohan laid.

An erudite linguist who studied the Qur'an and the other Islamic scriptures in Arabic and allied literature in Persian, the Bible in Hebrew, the Vedas, the Puranas and the Tantras in Sanskrit, the Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis in Latin, Aristotle, Plato and Greek philosophy in Greek, Buddhist scriptures from Lamas in Tibet which he visited at age sixteen years, one who learnt English at the late age of twenty-four and mastered the language, Rammohan was a multidimensional genius, a polymath of a rare breed indeed. This thirst for source-learning characterised Rammohan as he sped to the fountainhead of each academic discipline and gathered his knowledge before he critically examined, assimilated and rejected relevant portions of such en route to formulating his superstructure of philosophical thought which eventually gained expression in his founding of the grand universal church of the Brahmo Samaj where people of all denominations were wholeheartedly welcome to gather and worship the One true, immutable, formless Brahman, the author and preserver of the universe, no intermediary between Him and His devotee being the bar to divine union.

Born of a Vaishnava father and a Shaivite mother into an aristocratic family, Rammohan early on exhibited a regal bearing that made him rebel against prevalent malpractices in Hindu society. A keen thinker with a sharp original mind and bred early on in the Islamic academic tradition of the madrassa at Patna, then a seat of learning, which was followed by a protracted period at a Gurukul in Varanasi where he became well-versed in Sanskrit studies, Rammohan developed the othersidedness of perspective on religio-social issues which brought him into sharp conflict with his father and Hindu orthodoxy in general. It is said that in his adolescence he was horrified to behold the enforced burning on the funeral pyre of his live sister-in-law along with her dead husband, a tragedy that shook him so, that he launched a lifelong crusade against this evil aberration of the spiritual-social culture of Bengal and with the help of the English East India Company succeeded in getting it outlawed in 1829 just four years before his death in faraway Bristol. Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor General, was persuaded by Roy to pass the Anti-Sati Act of 1829 which saved these helpless widows from the fire.

Rammohan brooded on the fate of his immolated sister-in-law and came to the conclusion that the sickening superstitious customs that held Hindu society down were to be traced to the evil of idol worship that was prevalent all around, a practice that was to his mind not specified in the Vedas nor historically corroborated as existent among the Hindus prior to the advent of Mahayana Buddhism. His Vedic studies in Varanasi and Islamic studies in Patna had laid monotheistic seeds in his maturing mind early on and his further research into the origin and practice of idol worship and Sati (the co-cremation of Hindu widows) convinced him that these practices were not in consonance with the precepts of classical Hinduism. He, thus, began his crusade against idol worship and Sati which ran him headlong into conflict with his father who disowned him. Rammohan, who would not cower and compromise before authority, was now entirely on his own, having left hearth and home to embark on a career of bold adventure with an unremitting zeal to discovering the way to India's recovery as a nation. Remember, this was a hundred years before Vivekananda set upon the same task of discovering the soul of enslaved India. 

Rammohan Roy did the bania's (moneylender's) job, then secured employment with the British as a consultant pandit (scholar) on Hindu Law and finally as an employee in the revenue department of the English East India Company. He amassed a great deal of wealth which he liberally spent on social and academic causes. In 1817 he collaborated with David Hare in founding the Hindu College (now Presidency University). Roy donated incognito Rupees 100,000 for the founding of the Hindu College. He feared that a public donation on his part as an anti-orthodoxy crusader would keep away orthodox Hindus from participating and contributing to the cause and would instead antagonise them against the proposed academic institution. Five years later in 1822 Roy founded the Anglo-Hindu school and four years thence in 1826 he set up the Vedanta College for the teaching of his monotheistic Vedanta doctrine along with modern Western academic curriculum. Finally, in 1830 he vacated land owned by the Brahmo Samaj to help Rev. Alexander Duff found the General Assembly's Institution (now, Scottish Church College).

Rammohan Roy authored in Persian 'Tuhfat-al-Muwahhidin' (A Gift to Deists) in 1803, adding an introduction to his work in Arabic. It was a diatribe against prevalent Hindu idolatry and its ritualistic malpractices that was holding Hindu society down. Based on reason Roy launched into a verbal tirade against regressive ritualism and sickening superstitions that plagued Hindu society then. These were early days and Roy was only thirty-one. But he denounced all unreasonable affirmations going by the name of orthodox Hinduism and overthrew all intermediaries to the Divine, holding nothing that was opposed to reason or humanity as sacrosanct, be it prophet, priest, scripture or tradition. Rammohan was universal in his theological affirmations in the 'Tuhfat-al-Muwahhidin' and had sown early on the seeds of his more mature monotheism that was to manifest in his founding of the Atmiya Saha in 1815 followed by his life's climactic work, the founding of the Brahmo Samaj at Chitpur Road in Calcutta in 1828.

In 1824 Roy published 'The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness' where he examined in detail the four Gospels of the New Testament of the Bible and gave his critique of the same in his bid to uphold the supremacy of his affirmed monotheistic Vedantic convictions over the Trinitarian conception of orthodox Christianity. This publication brought him into sharp dissension with the Christian Trinitarians but befriended for him the Christian Unitarians. Following this early fraternity of his with the Unitarians, even today a close bond exists between the Brahmo Samaj and the Unitarian Church.

Rammohan Roy was the father of Bengali prose. His was the first translation of the Upanishads into Bengali. He authored several text books in Bengali on different subjects for students as Bengali being not yet an official language then, there was a dearth of text books in that language. Rammohan's prose was manly, his poetry virile and his writings in the vernacular surcharged with power. Endowed as he was with enlightened rationality, a deep feeling heart and a catholicity of approach with universal sympathies, Rammohan's writings were a blend of lofty idealism and earthy practicality with courage of conviction and power born of lived principles percolating through his words at every step. The manly personality and the large heart of Rammohan shone through his articulated observations that gave Bengali a firm foundation for future writers to build their literary edifice. His English was equally emphatic, his arguments powered by rational rigour and his affirmations potent in their persuasiveness.

Rammohan was way ahead of his times. A complex personality, he stood at the junction of the ancient, the medieval and the modern in every aspect of his dynamic multifaceted being. A rationinalist trained in Greek logic and philosophical thinking who then assimilated the gamut of classical Hindu thinking, a scholar versed in multiple linguistic traditions with their respective national and continental culture, a purist and a progressive person, a scientific and a spiritual man, a man of reason and a man of intuitive wisdom, a nationalist and an internationalist in a wondrous web of a singular being, a seer who drank deep of the fountain of the eternal Vedas and who could yet look through the advancing tide of times into the unborn future, Rammohan stood at the very heart-centre of every national and global thought-pulse of his times, of times gone by and of times yet to arrive, absorbing, holding, assimilating it all, then refashoning them into a grand harmony that bore the brunt of his being, the core of his consciousness and the sum and substance of his personality. And from the mergence and mingling of these meandering streams of thought punctuated by the pertinence of the perverse times was born the Brahmo Samaj as the bulwark against pernicious proselytising Christianity, the saviour of Hinduism for the time.

When Rammohan studied the Bible and proceeded to write 'The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness', he was vilified by both the Trinitarian Christians and the orthodox Hindus. Some of the latter ones even labelled him a Christian convert to which he could only respond thus with a smile, "দেখ, বেরাদার, এরা আমায় খ্রীষ্টান বলে | কিন্তু, বেরাদার, আমি কি গোমাংস খাই ?" ("Look, brother, these people call me a Christian. But, brother, do I eat beef?") While the Christians who patronised Roy with a view to seeing to his eventual conversion and becoming their Oriental Apostle of modern times that would set the seal on their proselytising programme in India were bitterly disappointed when they beheld Roy's steadfast adherence to his ancestral Vedic Dharma, the decadent orthodox sections of the Hindus eyed him with increasing suspicion and distrust and went into the offensive mode, scarce realising that here was the Prophet of Modern India born to save the Sanatan Dharma from decadence within and destruction without. Here was the fulfilment of the epic words of the Bhagavad Geeta that the Lord would ever appear to save the Dharma whenever perilous times threatened its very survival. Rammohan was a Hindu in the pre-Puranic monotheistic mode who had no faith in the Avatarvaad (the theory of the Divine Incarnation) but, nonetheless, he himself embodied the best of features that would have earned him the epithet of being one had he subscribed to such a concept. As it happened, he remained an ununderstood, a misunderstood, a maligned person among his own men, the Hindus, while the foreigners stood at an embittered distance from him on account of their failure to woo him to their Christian fold. Only a handful of friends, among them the unforgettable David Hare, stood by him in lasting friendship as he embarked on the final phase of his epic journey through life, a life turbulent and tormenting that consumed him early in distant England. 

When Rammohan formed the 'Atmiya Sabha' (The Society of Spiritual Kith and Kin) in 1815 in Calcutta, he had given birth to his future spiritual fraternity in seed form that was to sprout and fructify as the Brahmo Samaj.

The Brahmo Samaj came into being in 1828, a year before the passing of the Anti-Sati Act. It was a fraternity of monotheists worshipping the formless, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Brahman having infinite good attributes, the One without a second who is the author and preserver of the universe and all that exists. It was a universal church open to all who subscribed to this fundamental doctrine, and it sought to revive the pure Sanatan Dharma in this specific monotheistic, formless aspect of the Upanishadic Brahman, eschewing the  later idolatrous accretion and ritualistic corruptions that it viewed as the cause of its current fallen state. The Brahmo Samaj also rejected Shankaracharya's Advaita Mayavaad and affirmed a theistic, dualistic view of the Vedanta.

The Brahmo Samaj of Rammohan Roy was not yet a distinct sect as Devendranath Tagore later sought to make it and did make it in his formulation of its basic tenets in 1850 but was merely an association of like-minded Hindus who practised its pristine monotheistic form. In rejecting the infallibility of the Vedas much like the Buddhists and the Jains did ages ago, Devendranath effectively took the Brahmo Samaj out of the definitive fold of the Sanatan Dharma and thereby created a new religious derivative of sorts with almost total overlapping of it with the Sanatan Dharma barring this core point of Vedic infallibility which it rejected.

Today, the Brahmos are trying hard to obtain 'minority status' for Brahmoism in order to secure its educational institutions from undue nefarious political interference, much like the Ramakrishna Mission unsuccessfully did in the 1980s and 90s. But as of now in the eyes of the Constitution of India Brahmoism is but another sect of the vast body of the Sanatan Dharma. 

Returning to Rammohan again. Roy now entered the last phase of his illustrious career that had seen him as a champion of women's rights, the voice for freedom of the press, a crusader against caste oppression and co-cremation of widows, and an educationist who fought with the British to supplant their intended classical Sanskrit curriculum for the Hindus with modern scientific European education in the English language that proved momentous in the emerging nation's development. We owe everything to Roy for our emergence as a modern nation. What we are today in our positive aspects of national development, we owe it entirely unto him as our first path-finder. His unerring vision of the future of the world inspired him to influence the highest echelons of the British administration to introduce English education on a large scale instead of the classical Sanskrit education. Had Rammohan not prevailed in his persuasions we would have found ourselves as a nation much worse off today. His forevision for sure helped us achieve political independence much earlier than would have been the case were he to be less progressive in his outlook and less of a visionary man. Indeed, Rammohan Roy fathered the Bengal Renaissance which then spread throughout the nation, enlivening and invigorating it unto ushering in a brighter day.

The anti-Sati crusader found his ally in Governor General Lord William Bentinck who he prevailed upon to get the Anti-Sati Act passed in 1829 amidst dreadful opposition. Orthodoxy was overruled and modernity prevailed but the defeated factions were not to stay idle. They appealed to the Privy Council in London to get the Act repealed. Rammohan now set sail for England to prevent such a possible regressive repealing. The Mughal Emperor Akbar II conferred on him the honorific 'Raja' and furnished the expenses for his trip to England with the errand to seek increase in allowances for the Mughal Crown. Roy successfully pleaded on behalf of the Mughal Emperor and managed a sizeable increase in his allowances. He also prevented by his presence and pleading the repealing of the Anti-Sati Act by the Privy Council. 

Written by Sugata Bose

Comments :

@Brajakishor Khamaru : Sorry, brother, you are mistaken. I am not a descendant of Netaji or of any of his extended family. I am quite another Sugata Bose, distinct from the one you mistake me to be, he being my namesake. I hope your 'genius' epithet now survives this revelation. If it does, your appreciation has been truly based on the literary worth of the article, if any. Else, I should say, it has been more an expression of adulation for Netaji's family than on my person or creative output which, alas, is a rather regrettable feature and must be left alone. However, if in any way the content of the essay has moved you, leave my person aside and attend on the subject of it, the pathfinder of modern India, Raja Rammohan Roy, whose 250th birth anniversary should call for our diligent study of his life and attainments, ideas and ideals, message and manners, than idle attachment to descendants of seminal personalities of the past. Our great men and women deserve more than infatuated adulation of their descendants. If any such descendant deserves any, let him or her do so as an independent personality on the basis of pure merit that is devoid of any infatuating association with a predecessor mightily great. The nation will be a truer democracy only when such feudal glorification of lineage and line is replaced by sincere appreciation of individual achievement and worth. Thank you, nonetheless, for bearing patience with my essay and observation. May Sri Ramakrishna bless you and yours ever and ever!