UPSC History Indian National Movement NCERT Extracts - Social and Cultural Awakening

 Rammohun Roy

• Western culture and consciousness of defeat by a foreign power gave birth to a new awakening. There was an awareness that a vast country like India had been colonized by a handful of foreigners because of internal weaknesses of Indian social structure and culture.
• Thoughtful Indians began to look for the strengths and weaknesses of their society and for way and means of removing the weaknesses. Nearly all 19th century intellectuals shared the conviction that social and religious reform was urgently needed.
• The central figure in this awakening was Rammohun Roy, who is rightly regarded as the first great leader of modern India.
• Rammohun Roy possessed great love and respect for the traditional philosophic systems of the East; but, at the same time, he believed that modern culture alone would help regenerate Indian society.
• In particular he wanted his countrymen to accept the rational and scientific approach and the principle of human dignity and social equality of all men and women.
• He also wanted the introduction of modem capitalism and industry in the country.
• He was a scholar who knew over a dozen language.
• Later he made an intensive study of Western thought and culture.
• In 1809 he wrote in Persian his famous work Gifts of Monotheists in which he put forward weighty arguments against belief in many gods and for the worship of a single God.
• He settled in Calcutta in 1814 and soon attracted a band of young men with whose cooperation he started the Atmiya Sabha.
• In particular he vigorously opposed the worship of idols, the rigidity of caste, and the prevalence of meaningless religious rituals.
• He held that the all the principal ancient texts of the Hindus preached monotheism or worship of one God.
• He published the Bengali translation of the Vedas and of five of the principle Upanishads to prove his point. He also wrote a series of tracts and pamphlets in defence of monotheism.
• While citing ancient authority for his philosophical views, Rammohun Roy relied ultimately on the power of human reason which was in his view the final touchstone of the truth of any doctrine. Eastern or Western,
• He believed that the philosophy of Vedanta was based on this principle of reason.
• In 1820, he published his Precepts of Jesus in which he tried to separate the moral and philosophic message of the New Testament, which he praised, from its miracle stories. He wanted the high moral message of Christ to be incorporated in Hinduism.
• Thus, as far as Rammohun was concerned there was to be no blind reliance on India's own past or blind aping of the West.
• He vigorously defended Hindu religion and philosophy from the ignorant attack of the missionaries.
• In 1828 he founded a new religious society, the Brahma Sabha, later known as the Brahmo Samaj, whose purpose was to purify Hinduism and to preach monotheism or belief in one God.
• The Brahmo Samaj laid emphasis on human dignity, opposed idolatry, and criticised such social evils as the practice of sati.
• The best example of his life-long crusade against social evils was the historic agitation he organised against the inhuman custom of women becoming sati.
• To raise the status of women he demanded that they be given the right of inheritance and property.
• Rammohun Roy was one of the earliest propagators of modem education which he looked upon as a major instrument for the spread of modem ideas in the country.
• In 1817, David Hare, founded the famous Hindu College, Rammohun Roy gave most enthusiastic assistance to Hare in this and his other educational projects.
• In addition, he maintained at his own cost an English school in Calcutta from 1817 in which, among other subjects, mechanics and the philosophy of Voltaire were taught.
• In 1825 he established a Vedanta College in which courses both in Indian learning and in Western social and physical sciences were offered.
• He compiled a Bengali grammar. Through his translations, pamphlets and journals he helped evolve a modern and elegant prose style for that language.
• Thus, according to him, one of the aims of religious reform was political uplift.
• Rammohun Roy was a pioneer of Indian journalism. He brought out journals in Bengali, Persian, Hindi and English to spread scientific, literary and political knowledge among the people,
• He was also the initiator of public agitation on political questions in the country. He condemned the oppressive practices of the Bengal zamindars
• Rammohun was a firm believer in internationalism and in free cooperation between nations.
• Rammohun Roy took a keen interest in international events and everywhere he supported the cause of liberty, democracy, and nationalism and opposed injustice, oppression and tyranny in every form.
• The news of the failure of the Revolution in Naples in 1821 made him so sad that he cancelled all his social engagements.
• On the other hand, he celebrated the success of the Revolution in Spanish America to 1823 by giving a public dinner.
• In the field of education he was greatly helped by the Dutch watchmaker David Hare and the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff.

Derozio and Young Bengal

• A radical trend arose among the Bengali intellectuals during the late 1820s and the 1830s. This trend was more modem than even Rammohun Roy's and was known as the Young Bengal movement.
• Its leader and inspirer was the young Anglo-Indian Henry Vivian Derozio, who was born in 1809 and who taught at Hindu College from 1823 and 1831.
• Derozio possessed a dazzling intellect and followed the most radical views of the time drawing his inspiration from the great French Revolution.
• He inspired these student to think rationally and freely, to question all authority, to love liberty, equality and freedom, and to worship truth.
• Derozio and his famous followers, known as the Derozians and Young Bengal, were fiery patriots. Derozio was perhaps the first nationalist poet of modem India.
• The Derozians who were passionate advocates of women's rights and demanded education for them, attacked old and decadent customs, rites and traditions.

Debendranath Tagore

• The Brahmo Samaj had in the meanwhile continued to exist but without much life till Debendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath revitalized it. He was a product of the best in the traditional Indian learning and the new thought of the West.
• In 1839 he founded the Tatvabodhini Sabha to propagate Rammohun Roy's ideas.
• The Tatvabodhini Sabha and its organ the Tatvabodhini Patrika promoted a systematic study of India's past in the Bengali language.
• In 1843 Debendranath Tagore reorganised the Brahmo Samaj and put new life into it. The Samaj actively supported the movement for widow remarriage, abolition of polygamy, women's education, improvement of the ryot's condition and temperance.

Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar

• Vidyasagar dedicated his entire life to the cause of social reform. Born in 1820 in a very poor family, he struggled through hardship to educate himself and in the end rose in 1851 to the position of the principalship of the Sanskrit College.
• His generosity to the poor was fabulous. He seldom possessed a warm coat for he invariably gave it to the first naked beggar he met on the street.
• He wrote a Bengali primer which is used till this day. By his writings he helped in the evolution of a modem prose style is Bengali.
• He opened the gates of the Sanskrit college to non-brahmin students for he was opposed to the monopoly of Sanskrit studies that the priestly caste was enjoying at the time.
• He was determined to break the priestly monopoly of scriptural knowledge. To free Sanskrit studies from the harmful effects of self-imposed isolation, he introduced the study of Western thought in the Sanskrit College.
• He waged a long struggle in favour of widow remarriage. His humanism was aroused
• In 1855, he raised his powerful voice, backed by the weight of immense traditional learning, in favour of widow remarriage.
• Later in the year 1855, a large number of petitions from Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Nagpur and other cities of India were presented to the Government asking it to pass an act legalising the remarriage of widow.
• In 1850, Vidyasagar protested against child-marriage. All his life he campaigned against polygamy.
• He was also deeply interested in the education of women. As a Government Inspector of Schools, he organised thirty-five girls schools, many of which he ran at his own expense. As Secretary to the Bethune School, he was one of the pioneers of higher education for women.
• The Bethune School, founded in Calcutta in 1849, was the first, fruit of the powerful movement for women's education that arose in the 1840s and 1850s.
• The first steps in giving a modem education to girls were taken by the missionaries in 1821, but these efforts were marred by the emphasis on Christian religious education.

Pioneers of Reform in Western India

• Bal Shastri Jambekar was one of the first reformers in Bombay. He attacked Brahmanical orthodoxy and tried to reform popular Hinduism.
• In 1849, the Paramahansa Mandali was founded in Maharashtra. Its founders believed in one God and were primarily interested in breaking casts rules. At its meetings, members took food cooked by low-caste people.
• G Bhandarkar was a famous historian,
• In 1851, Jotiba Phule and his wife started a girl's school at Poona and soon many other school came up.
• Vishnu Shastri Pundit founded the Widow Remarriage Association in the 1850s,
• Another prominent worker in this field was Karsondas Mulji who started the Satya Prakash in Gujarati in 1852 to advocate widow remarriage.
• An outstanding champion of new learning and social reform in Maharashtra was Gopal Hari Deshmukh, who became famous by the pen-name of "Lokahitawadi”
• Jotiba Phule born in a low caste Mali family was also acutely aware of the socially untouchables in Maharashtra. All his life he carried on a campaign against upper caste domination and Brahmanical supremacy,
• Dadabhai Naorqji was another leading social reformer of Bombay. He was one of the founders of an association to reform the Zoroastrian religion and the Parsi Law Association which agitated for the grant of a legal status to women and for uniform laws of inheritance and marriage for the Parsis,
• We should also remember that the significance of the 19th century reformers lay not in their number but in the fact that they were the trend setters - it was their thought and activity that were to have decisive impact on the making of a new India.