What were the main trends of social reform movements in nineteenth century? Critically discuss any one internal revitalization movement in Indian society. (1993)
Nineteenth-century reform answered colonial rule and missionary criticism across Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Parsi society. A. R. Desai (Social Background of Indian Nationalism, 1948) read them as national in content, religious in form — the ideology of classes thrown up by colonial capitalism.
Main trends of nineteenth-century reform
- Legitimation from within the tradition — change justified by recovering an authentic past, not by importing a principle: Dayanand Saraswati’s “Back to the Vedas”, Swami Vivekananda’s restated Vedanta. Yogendra Singh (Modernization of Indian Tradition, 1973) calls this orthogenetic modernisation.
- Rationalism against ritual and priestcraft — monotheism, rejection of idolatry, vernacular scripture, the right of self-interpretation.
- Women’s status as the index of civilisation — sati, child marriage, purdah, female education — agitation converted into statute (sati abolished 1829, Widows’ Remarriage Act 1856, Age of Consent Act 1891).
- Two directions on caste — reform from above, softening caste but leaving it intact; revolt from below, as in Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (1873).
- Education as the instrument, across communities — Brahmo and Prarthana schools, the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic network, Aligarh, the Singh Sabha’s Khalsa College, which produced the leadership the freedom movement inherited.
Revitalization: the concept
Anthony F. C. Wallace (“Revitalization Movements”, American Anthropologist, 1956) defined one as “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture”. It moves from a steady state through stress and cultural distortion to a revitalization phase led by a prophet who reformulates the group’s cognitive map. The Arya Samaj is India’s clearest internal instance.
The Arya Samaj critically discussed
Fit. Colonial rule, missionary conversion and the census produced acute cultural distortion among north Indian Hindus. Dayanand Saraswati (1824–1883) was the prophet-reformulator: founding the Samaj at Bombay on 10 April 1875 and writing Satyarth Prakash (1875), he made the Vedas alone authoritative and all that followed — Puranas, idolatry, hereditary caste, child marriage, untouchability — corruption.
Achievements. The most socially aggressive Hindu reform body: Vedic study opened to women and Shudras, widow and inter-caste marriages performed, marriage ages raised, and charisma routinised into the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic and Gurukul schools, shuddhi and relief work, building a mass vernacular organisation in Punjab and the United Provinces.
The critique.
- Pseudo-rationalism — reason was turned on the Puranas but suspended before the Vedas; anti-obscurantism resting on an infallible text cannot yield secularity.
- Caste attacked, hierarchy retained — birth-based caste was rejected, yet varnashrama by guna and karma was defended — hierarchy re-founded on merit, not abolished. M. N. Srinivas would read the resulting mobility as Sanskritisation: positional, not structural.
- From revitalization to communalism — a revitalised culture need not be an inclusive one. Shuddhi joined to sangathan in the 1920s turned a reform body into an agency of boundary-making, answered by tabligh and tanzim; Swami Shraddhanand’s assassination in 1926 marked the cost.
- Class- and region-bound — its base was the north-west’s urban trading and service castes; peasants and untouchables were objects of uplift, not agents.
Conclusion
Revitalization restored dignity and delivered real reform; but because the Arya Samaj’s charter lay in an idealised past, it bought cultural confidence at the price of exclusion — the standing dilemma of orthogenetic modernisation.