Comment: Raja Ram Mohan Roy as a social reformer. (1998, 20 Marks)
Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) is called the “father of the Indian Renaissance”, and Rabindranath Tagore named him “Bharat Pathik”, India’s wayfarer and pathfinder. His reform project joined reason, scripture and law: he tested custom against the Upanishads and against human welfare, then asked the state to act. Its achievements are real, but so are the limits historians have since exposed.
Method: reason read through tradition
- His Persian tract Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (1804) judged all creeds by reason and treated monotheism as their shared core.
- He then translated the Upanishads into Bengali and English to show that the Vedanta itself condemned idolatry and ritualism. Reform was presented as recovery of a purer tradition, not imported rupture, a strategy Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar later used for widow remarriage.
The reforms
1. Religion and association
- The Atmiya Sabha (1815) in Calcutta debated idolatry, caste rigidity and polygamy.
- The Brahmo Sabha (20 August 1828), founded with Dwarkanath Tagore, offered congregational worship of one formless God, the seed of the Brahmo Samaj.
2. Abolition of sati
- From 1818 he published dialogues between an advocate and an opponent of widow-burning, arguing that the smritis preferred ascetic widowhood.
- Governor-General William Bentinck’s Regulation XVII of 1829 (4 December) made sati culpable homicide. Roy sailed to England in 1830 partly to defend it against the orthodox appeal to the Privy Council, which failed.
3. Rights of women
- His 1822 tract on Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females argued that ancient law gave widows and daughters a share of property that later jurists had whittled away; he linked sati itself to heirs’ greed.
- He condemned polygamy and the sale of girls in marriage.
4. Education and press
- His letter to Governor-General William Pitt Amherst (1823) opposed a Sanskrit college and asked for mathematics, chemistry and anatomy.
- He founded the Anglo-Hindu School (1822) and Vedanta College (1826).
- He ran Sambad Kaumudi (1821) and Mirat-ul-Akhbar (1822), and petitioned against the 1823 press ordinance, an early Indian defence of free expression.
Why it mattered for nationalism
Roy converted private conscience into public argument — tract, petition, association and newspaper. Christopher Alan Bayly saw in him the beginnings of Indian constitutional liberalism. The later Moderates’ faith in reform through law descends from him.
Critiques
- Elitism: his world was the Calcutta bhadralok. He defended the Permanent Settlement while pleading for the ryot, and never made caste his main target.
- Colonial modernity: Sumit Sarkar argued that his break with the past was ambiguous, reliant on colonial power; Roy even welcomed wider European settlement in India.
- Feminist reading: Lata Mani’s Contentious Traditions (1998) shows that the sati debate was mainly about what Hindu scripture said, not about widows’ own voices; women were the ground, not the subjects, of reform.
- Derivative discourse: in Partha Chatterjee’s terms, reform accepted the coloniser’s verdict that Indian society needed civilising.
Contemporary relevance
His agenda is not closed. The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, passed after Roop Kanwar’s death at Deorala, reaffirmed his cause. In Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) the Supreme Court held that daughters are coparceners by birth, echoing his 1822 claim that women’s inheritance had been curtailed.
Conclusion
Roy was less a revolutionary than a bridge-builder: he made reason, law and print the instruments of Indian self-reform. The critiques show that his modernity was elite and state-dependent, yet they do not undo his central achievement, which was to establish that social reform is a public question a modern Indian polity had to answer.