Assess the impact of the west in the shaping the Indian renaissance movement in the 19 th centuary. (1987)
The word “renaissance” is itself an import — a European periodisation borrowed to name a colonial awakening — and borrowing it concedes part of the answer. Assessed carefully, the West supplied the occasion, the instruments and much of the vocabulary of nineteenth-century reform, but neither its motive nor its content; and the result was far narrower than the term implies.
What the West supplied
- English education. Thomas Babington Macaulay‘s Minute of February 1835 created a stratum literate in liberal and utilitarian argument; Hindu College (1817) and Henry Louis Vivian Derozio‘s Young Bengal made scepticism about custom respectable.
- Print. Mission and Indian presses, tracts and vernacular newspapers turned religious dispute from pandits’ authority into public controversy argued before readers.
- Missionary critique. Sustained attack on idolatry, caste and sati compelled defence, and defence forced self-examination.
- Orientalist scholarship. William Jones and the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784), and later European philology, recovered and canonised Sanskrit texts — handing Indians a usable “classical” past and the idea of a golden age from which they had fallen.
- Colonial legislation. The Bengal Sati Regulation (1829) and the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act (1856) made the state arbiter of custom, so reform became the petitioning of power.
What was not Western
- The method of argument was scriptural. Raja Ram Mohan Roy argued monotheism from the Upanishads, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar widow remarriage from the smritis: the authority invoked was Indian even when the conclusion was liberal.
- Indigenous currents preceded contact: devotional and sectarian challenges to ritual hierarchy supplied a vocabulary of equality long before Bentham.
- Selection was Indian. Dayanand Saraswati‘s Vedic revival explicitly refused Christianity, and Partha Chatterjee shows why reform stopped where it did: the colonised conceded the outer domain of science and statecraft while declaring the inner domain of religion and family sovereign.
The critical assessment
- Sumit Sarkar denied that any European-style rupture was possible under colonial conditions. The culture of the “Bengal renaissance”, he argued, was highly elitist; its leaders combined landed rentier income with colonial commerce; reformers never took up the lower-caste monotheistic cults already flourishing in eighteenth-century Bengal; and the next generation was squeezed out of business into the professions and land.
- The social base was upper-caste, propertied, urban, male and largely Bengali. Jyotirao Phule‘s Gulamgiri (1873) treated Brahmanical learning itself as the instrument of servitude — a charge the reformers never answered.
- The frame was Orientalist. Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978) and Bernard S. Cohn (Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 1996) show that the classical India reclaimed had itself been assembled by colonial scholarship. Ashis Nandy (The Intimate Enemy, 1983) adds that a rational, masculine, Vedic Hinduism accepted the coloniser’s scale of worth while reversing its verdict.
Conclusion
The impact was formative but not generative. The West set the terms of the encounter and equipped it; Indians chose the questions and answered from their own texts. “Renaissance” overstates the result: not a society’s rebirth but the self-reform of a thin, favoured stratum, whose genuinely new element was the method — custom made arguable in public, in print. The colonial habit of certifying antiquity persists: in October 2024 the Union Cabinet extended classical-language status to Marathi, Pali, Prakrit, Assamese and Bengali, raising the list to eleven.