The Contribution of Indian Renaissance to the growth of Modern India

The Contribution of Indian Renaissance to the Growth of Modern India

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• The Indian Renaissance was the response of the educated Indian elite to the challenges posed by colonial rule — the impact of Western ideas gave birth to a new awakening and a felt need to reform from within, in the light of post-Enlightenment rationalism.
  • The educated Indian elite’s response to civilisational critiques of Hinduism was, essentially, to reform the religion from within using this same rationalist lens.
• This phenomenon is often celebrated in older historiography as the “Bengal Renaissance” or the “Nineteenth Century Indian Renaissance.”
  • Although the use of the term “renaissance” is itself problematic, this cultural movement essentially involved attempts to discover rationalism within India’s own past, and thereby to reposition her religious and philosophical traditions within the critical terrain of reason.
• The effects of the Indian Renaissance were felt in almost every aspect of life, contributing significantly to the growth of Modern India.

Religious

• The social and religious reform movements revived Indians’ faith in their own religion while underscoring the necessity of reforming it. All of India’s religious communities — Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, and Christians — attempted, in their own ways, to modernise and simplify their faiths.
  • The most notable efforts in this direction among Hindus came from reformers and institutions such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy and his Brahmo Samaj, Swami Dayanand Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, and Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Mission, all of whom sought to reform Hindu religion and revive its past glory.
  • Foreign scholars such as Max Müller, Sir William Jones, and Charles Wilkins also contributed to reviving India’s past glory, translating religious texts such as the Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Ramayana, and Mahabharata, and demonstrating that these ranked among the finest religious treatises in the world.
• Many Hindus gave up superstitions, redundant religious rituals, and idol worship, as the various socio-religious reforms worked to strengthen Hindu religion from within.
  • The Arya Samaj, for instance, rejected the Puranas and similar texts as authoritative sources for the development of Hindu thought, insisting instead that the Vedas alone be regarded as the fountainhead and sole foundation of the Hindu religion.
  • Swami Vivekananda, meanwhile, placed Hindu religion on the high pedestal of spiritualism.
• A similar process unfolded among Muslims through the Aligarh movement and related efforts aimed at strengthening Islam and Muslim society.

Social

• Efforts were also made to eliminate prevailing social evils, with reformers actively opposing the caste system, untouchability, child marriage, the Sati system, the Purdah system, and polygamy.
  • They supported the general upliftment of women — including widow remarriage — and the spread of modern education to both men and women, opening numerous schools and colleges in the process.
  • These movements made a significant contribution to female education, an impact mirrored in growing numbers of women stepping out of seclusion and taking part in public life.
• Several legal measures were introduced to elevate the status of women — the practices of sati and infanticide were made illegal, a law permitting widow remarriage was passed, and a further law was enacted to fix a minimum marriage age for girls.
  • Through the efforts of certain movements, inter-caste marriage and inter-dining were also promoted, alongside the opening of hospitals, dispensaries, orphanages, and libraries.

Political

• The social and religious reform movements of the nineteenth century contributed, albeit indirectly, to the rise of Indian nationalism.
  • Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and Annie Besant were all great patriots in their own right.
  • By reviving the glory of ancient India and instilling faith among the people in their own religion and culture, they carried a message of self-respect, self-confidence, and love for the motherland to the people of India.
• Dayanand Saraswati exercised a particularly powerful nationalising influence on his followers — he was the first to use the word “Swaraj” and declared Hindi the national language of India; many Arya Samaj leaders went on to occupy the front ranks of the national movement and were significantly responsible for the rise of the extremist wing within the Indian National Congress.
  • As Annie Besant put it: “It was Dayanand Saraswati who proclaimed India for the Indians.”
• These social and religious reformers thus made a significant contribution to the development of the national movement.

Economic

• The Renaissance also awakened Indians to the country’s dire economic conditions.
  • Several reformers were convinced that the very purpose of British rule was to exploit India economically — that is, to enrich England at India’s expense — and came to realise that India could make little economic progress unless British imperialism was replaced by a government controlled and run by Indians themselves.
  • They further believed that the only real remedy for reviving the economy lay in industrialisation, arguing that Indian industries could not flourish except under an Indian government able to protect and promote them.

The Growth of the Attitude of Reason and Humanism

• The growth of the attitude of reason was both a cause and a consequence of the Indian Renaissance. Before the social and religious movements began, Indians largely remained traditionalists, living by blind faith.
  • The religious reform movements of the modern era shared an underlying unity, most being grounded in the twin doctrines of Reason (Rationalism) and Humanism, even as they sometimes also appealed to faith and ancient authority to strengthen their case.
• The reformers of the nineteenth century opposed the ritualistic, superstitious, irrational, and obscurantist elements present within Indian religions.

Extent of the Renaissance’s Contribution to the Rise of Nationalist Consciousness

• The Indian Renaissance Movement was the broader nineteenth-century social and religious reform movement that gave birth not only to various socio-religious movements but touched nearly every aspect of Indian life — including, indirectly, the political sphere and the rise of national consciousness.
• The extent of this contribution can be understood through the following points:
  • Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, among others, were great patriots who revived the glory of ancient India and instilled in the people a renewed faith in their own religion and culture — offering a message of self-respect and self-confidence in the face of the imperialist disintegration of Indian society and culture.
    • In doing so, they provided a cultural defence against the assault of colonial culture — a defence that would prove useful to later national movements — and taught Indians to love their motherland and their fellow countrymen.
  • Swami Dayanand Saraswati, founder of the Arya Samaj, exercised a strong nationalising influence upon his followers, being the first to use the word “Swaraj” and to declare Hindi the national language. As Annie Besant observed: “It was Dayanand Saraswati who proclaimed India for the Indians.”
    • According to Sister Nivedita: “Swami Vivekananda was also a great patriot, and the queen of his adoration was his motherland.”
  • The reform movements were countrywide in character, influencing people everywhere rather than remaining confined to isolated pockets, and tackled social evils on a genuinely national basis — fostering a sense of shared nationality among Indians. By attacking institutions like caste, which hampered social unity, the reform movements helped create a broader sense of oneness among the people.
  • The reform movement also helped many Indians come to terms with the modern world, encouraging a modern, secular, and national outlook in place of the narrower worldview shaped by caste and religious considerations.
  • These movements were not an isolated phenomenon — the ideas and activities of the reformers were indirectly linked to the larger task of nation-building and formed a prelude to national consciousness.
    • As Jawaharlal Nehru put it: “The rising middle class were politically inclined and were not so much in search of religion; but they wanted some cultural roots to cling on to; something that gave them assurance of their own worth; something that would reduce their sense of frustration and humiliation that foreign conquest and rule had produced. The religious reform movement after all transformed India into a nation in the making.”

Limitations of the Socio-Religious Reform Movements

• These movements remained confined to a narrow social space, as the reformist spirit appealed chiefly to a small elite group who were themselves the primary economic and cultural beneficiaries of colonial rule.
  • In Bengal, the reform movement involved only a small number of Western-educated elite, known collectively as the bhadralok (gentlefolk).
    • These were the “new men” who had made their money as junior partners to English officers and free merchants, consolidated their position as small landholders under the Permanent Settlement, and later used English education to secure positions in the new professions and subordinate administrative posts.
    • Socially, they were mostly Hindus, and though caste was not a strict criterion for membership, most belonged to the three higher castes — Brahman, Kayastha, and Baidya.
  • The Brahmo movement was almost exclusively patronised by these groups, and although it spread from Calcutta to district towns and other provinces, it remained largely alienated from the masses.
    • Reformers made little effort to carry the message of reform to ordinary people — the chaste, Sanskritised Bengali prose used by figures like Ram Mohan Roy, for instance, remained incomprehensible to uneducated peasants and artisans.
  • Similarly, in western India, the members of the Prarthana Samaj were largely English-educated Chitpavan and Saraswat Brahmins, some Gujarati merchants, and a handful of Parsis — in 1872, the Samaj had only sixty-eight members and roughly 150–200 sympathisers.
  • In the Madras Presidency, where English education spread more slowly and Brahmin caste dominance remained largely unshaken, reform ideas took considerably longer to take root.
  • The broadly high-caste character of the early nineteenth-century reform movements also explains, to a large extent, their relative silence on the question of caste itself.
    • Untouchability as an issue of social reform had to wait until the beginning of the twentieth century, with the arrival of Mahatma Gandhi in Indian public life after the First World War.
• The reform movements, in the end, could not generate a genuine mass consciousness — the modern ideas of the reformers failed to percolate down to the masses.
  • At best, these remained individual or organisational efforts whose impact was restricted to the educated elite.
  • The movements were essentially urban phenomena, with their base and activities confined largely to towns and cities, producing little impact on rural India.
• Indian reformers of this period sought to rediscover reason and science within their own civilisation, and to reposition the modernisation project within a cultural space defined by Indian tradition.
  • This intellectual stance produced a reform mentality that did not reject Indian tradition outright, but instead sought to change certain “unreasonable” aspects of Hindu society that failed to conform to their own rationalist image of a glorious Indian past.
  • This, in turn, lent legitimacy to the reform agenda pursued by Utilitarian administrators such as William Bentinck. But since this reform mentality remained confined to a small circle of English-educated elites, the broader reform programme could hardly be expected to succeed on a mass scale.
• Indeed, the early nineteenth century saw a series of social reforms enacted mainly through government fiat — “reform from above” — and, as might be expected, most of these reforms remained largely confined to paper, since no serious attempt was ever made to build a modern social consciousness from below.
  • The concrete success of the reformers was, in this sense, far from spectacular, and much of the traditional and irrational ethos of society continued largely unchanged.
• The association of some of these movements with religious revivalism also proved to be a negative development, linking parts of the reform movement with orthodoxy and fundamentalism, and giving rise to tendencies toward religious solidarity that carried significant political implications in the subsequent period.
  • The reformers of the nineteenth century placed a somewhat one-sided emphasis on the religious and philosophical aspects of India’s cultural heritage — aspects that were not, in truth, a common heritage shared equally by all Indians.
  • By contrast, domains such as art and architecture, literature, music, science, and technology, in which all sections of society had contributed more or less equally, received comparatively little emphasis.
• Lacking a broad social base, the reformers of the early nineteenth century thus exhibited an underlying faith in the benevolent character of colonial rule, and relied more heavily on legislation to impose reform from above.
  • Very little was done to build a genuine reformist consciousness at the grassroots — a vacuum in which religious revivalism would later find fertile ground.

The Colonial Character of the Reforms

• Equally important is the colonial character of these reforms: the positions taken by Indian reformers, in significant ways, mirrored the colonial mindset itself, and thereby also the underlying ambivalence of colonial policy planners.
  • The dominant colonial assumption of the time held that religion was the very basis of Indian society, and that this religion was encoded within the scriptures — a view that presumed a total submission of Indian society to scriptural dictates.
  • Social evils, in this colonial reading, were seen as the results of scriptural distortion by self-serving individuals — chiefly the “cunning” Brahman priests, who held a monopoly over textual knowledge. The “civilising mission” of the colonial state was thus framed as one of restoring to Indians the true meaning of their own, largely unread and poorly understood, shastras.
• The entire debate over sati, for example, was grounded in scripture: the colonial government moved to prohibit the practice only once convinced that it was not, in fact, enjoined by scripture.
  • As colonial rulers accorded supreme importance to scripture, Indian reformers — and their detractors alike — likewise turned to ancient religious texts to argue their respective positions.
  • The brutality or irrationality of the custom itself, or the actual plight of the women the reform was meant to protect, remained secondary concerns in a debate that was, at its core, more about the definition of “tradition.”
    • As Mani put it: “women are neither subjects nor objects but, rather, the ground of the discourse on sati; … women themselves are marginal to the debate.” Much the same could be said of the later debates on widow remarriage and the prohibition of female infanticide.
  • The scriptures — newly valorised by Orientalist scholarship — thus lent legitimacy to social reform even as women themselves were largely denied agency in their own emancipation.

Opposing Views: The Inner Tensions of Colonial Modernity

• This brings us to the inner tensions of colonial modernity — it would be inaccurate to say that Indian reformist discourse simply mirrored colonial formulations wholesale.
  • The early writings of Rammohun Roy, for instance, are full of genuinely humanistic pleas to ameliorate the condition of Indian womanhood.
  • He invoked scripture when advocating the abolition of sati chiefly as a strategic choice — this was how he could sell his reform to a cautious colonial government and to a reticent Hindu society reluctant to accept change — yet, this traditionalist framing notwithstanding, his underlying arguments anticipated the idiom and stances of contemporary feminism.
• Roy’s rationalism, in fact, predated colonial influence: in his early Persian writings, he had taken a wholly rational approach to religion that came close to a negation of religion itself.
  • It was only after his subsequent contact with Christianity and Western free-trade thinking in Calcutta that his position grew more moderate — or, perhaps, more genuinely ambivalent.
• Although Indian modernisers looked to the colonial state for support and direction, and though post-Enlightenment rationality shaped their vision, they could neither abandon their own tradition nor forget their Indian identity.
  • The Indian modernisation project, as a result, always felt a compulsion to construct a modernity located firmly within Indian cultural space. As Christophe Jaffrelot summarised this position, Indian reformers “undertook to reform their society and its religious practices in order to adapt them to Western modernity while preserving the core of Hindu tradition.”
  • It was through precisely this project that the cultural essence of Indian nationhood, and its distinctiveness from the colonising West, was gradually imagined by the Indian intelligentsia.
• However, the inherent ambivalence and tensions within this cultural enterprise later made it appear weak, rendering it vulnerable to the more aggressive assertions of tradition that emerged in the late nineteenth century.
  • These later cultural movements, too, remained caught up in a complex intellectual project — simultaneously interrogating and adjusting to the colonial constructs of Indian tradition.