Write short note : Response of Indian society to the early impact of West (1998)
The word that matters is response. The nineteenth century is usually narrated as what the West did to India; sociologically it is more interesting as what Indians did with the West. The reaction was neither surrender nor refusal but a spread of simultaneous positions, each turning the new resources — print, law, association, school — to its own ends.
A typology of responses
- Reformist appropriation. Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828 and argued from the Upanishads that idolatry and sati were corruptions, not scripture; Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar made the textual case for widow remarriage and won the Act of 1856. Both worked through colonial law and the press, turning rationalist critique into statute.
- Revivalist-reformist. Dayanand Saraswati‘s Arya Samaj (1875) answered the missionary by going “back to the Vedas”, but carried that message in modern vehicles: printed tracts, membership rolls, schools and shuddhi as organised reconversion. Swami Vivekananda restated Vedanta as a universal, this-worldly faith in the West’s own register at Chicago in 1893, institutionalised in the Ramakrishna Mission (1897).
- Orthodox resistance. The Dharma Sabha, founded at Calcutta in 1830 by Radhakanta Deb, petitioned against the Bengal Sati Regulation, appealed unsuccessfully to the Privy Council in 1832, and in 1856 out-signed Vidyasagar’s widow-remarriage petition several times over. Its methods betray the depth of the change it opposed: a newspaper, office-bearers, meetings run by parliamentary procedure.
- Anti-caste radicalism. Jyotirao Phule turned the egalitarian idiom against Brahmanical authority rather than the rulers; Narayana Guru gave the Ezhavas temples, schools and the formula of one caste, one religion, one God for humankind. The encounter here produced not reform of Hinduism but a rival moral order.
- Muslim responses, in two directions. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan founded the college at Aligarh in 1875 on the argument that modern science could not contradict revelation; Darul Uloom Deoband (1866) took the opposite path of insulating classical learning — yet organised it on a modern fee-funded, examination-based model.
- Popular and armed rejection. The Santhal hul of 1855-56, the revolt of 1857 and Birsa Munda‘s ulgulan of 1899-1900 were refusals from below, voiced in millenarian idiom rather than the reformers’ constitutional one.
Reading the pattern
- Yogendra Singh supplies the frame: a heterogenetic challenge met by an orthogenetic reply — modern content restated in traditional legitimating language. Reformers argued from scripture; revivalists used modern organisation.
- M. N. Srinivas notes that Westernisation bit deepest at the primary level, among those in direct contact with the new institutions — which is why the response was authored by a narrow, largely upper-caste urban stratum the colonial order itself created.
- Partha Chatterjee explains the selectivity: the colonised conceded the outer domain of statecraft and science while declaring sovereignty over an inner domain of religion, language and the home — which is why the family became the central battlefield.
Conclusion
The early response was an argument, not an echo: the West supplied instruments and a vocabulary, and Indians used both to quarrel among themselves about their own society. Those answers remain institutionally alive — in November 2024 a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court, overruling its 1967 ruling in S. Azeez Basha, laid down fresh tests for whether Sir Syed’s Aligarh foundation is a minority institution under Article 30.