Socio-Religious Reform Movements

The 19th century saw a great awakening in India, sometimes called the Indian Renaissance. Enlightened Indians, troubled by the superstitions and social evils that had crept into religion and society, set out to reform them. These socio-religious reform movements reshaped Hinduism, Islam and other faiths. They attacked evils like sati and untouchability. They also helped give birth to modern nationalism. Understanding their causes, ideas and streams is foundational to modern Indian history.

Several forces gave rise to the desire for reform:

• Impact of British rule: colonial conquest came when India, unlike an enlightened 18th-century Europe, presented a "stagnant and decadent" society. Contact with the West forced a hard look inward.
• Social and religious ills: Hinduism had become "steeped in magic and superstition", with priestly domination, idolatry and rigid ritual.
• The position of women: child marriage, polygamy, the ban on widow remarriage, female infanticide and sati made women's lives miserable.
• The caste problem: a rigid, hierarchical system with the humiliation of untouchability at its base, blocking unity and human dignity.
• New awareness among educated Indians: Western education, the press and a sense of having been defeated by a "handful of foreigners" produced a conviction that society must be reformed.

The socio-cultural regeneration was occasioned by the colonial presence, but not created by it.

The movements shared an ideological core of three ideas. These ideas were carried by a new middle-class intelligentsia, drawn largely from law, education and journalism:

• Rationalism: judging tradition by reason, logic and social utility rather than blind faith (Raja Rammohan Roy stressed causality, and Akshay Kumar Dutt said "rationalism is our only preceptor").
• Religious universalism: seeing all religions as embodiments of a common truth, rising above narrow identity (Rammohan Roy defended the monotheism behind all faiths).
• Humanism: the belief that humanity can progress, and that an individual has the right to interpret scripture by reason and human welfare, attacking priestly domination.

Rationalism did not mean contempt for Indian thought. Raja Rammohan Roy held great love and respect for the traditional philosophical systems of the East, above all the Vedanta and the Upanishads. At the same time he was an uncompromising rationalist and an advocate of the equality of all human beings. The two went together: he used the monotheism of the Upanishads to attack idolatry and priestcraft from within the tradition. The exam tests this dual character. Roy revered Eastern philosophy and championed reason and equality; he did not hold one position at the expense of the other.

The reform movements fell broadly into two streams, differing mainly in how far they relied on reason versus tradition:

• Reformist movements: leaned on reason and conscience to reform from within, e.g. the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj and the Aligarh Movement.
• Revivalist movements: appealed to a lost purity of the ancient religion, e.g. the Arya Samaj ("Back to the Vedas") and the Deoband movement.

In truth, both depended, to varying degrees, on an appeal to the "golden past". The difference was only in how much each relied on tradition versus reason.

The Brahmo line of reform passed through two generations, and the exam tests who founded what:

• Calcutta Unitarian Committee: founded by Raja Rammohan Roy himself, before the Brahmo Samaj. It is not Keshab Chandra Sen's work, a standard trap.
• Indian Reform Association (1870): founded by Keshab Chandra Sen, the leading later Brahmo, to carry reform into everyday social life.
• Tabernacle (Church) of the New Dispensation: also founded by Sen, proclaiming the harmony of all religions.

Under Sen's leadership the Brahmo Samaj also campaigned vigorously for women's education, widening the older agenda of worship reform into social work.

On the revivalist side, the Arya Samaj was founded by Swami Dayananda Saraswati in 1875. The date matters: 1835 is the classic wrong option. Lala Lajpat Rai was a prominent supporter of the Arya Samaj, not its opponent, and led its educational work in Punjab. One later body often slipped into matching questions is the Sarvodaya Samaj, founded by Vinoba Bhave to work among refugees. It belongs to the Gandhian tradition of social service after independence, not to the 19th-century samajes.

The fight against caste produced its own line of movements, distinct from the religious samajes. The pioneer was Jyotiba Phule in Maharashtra. In 1873 he founded the Satya Shodhak Samaj (Truth-Seekers' Society), an anti-caste movement that attacked Brahminical dominance and worked for the education of lower castes and women. Remember the founder carefully: the Samaj belongs to Phule, not to Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Another Maharashtra pioneer, Gopal Baba Walangkar, published Vital-Vidhwansak, the first monthly journal addressed to the untouchable community itself.

In Kerala, Sri Narayana Guru led a lifelong struggle against upper-caste domination through the SNDP movement, the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana movement. His slogan was "one caste, one religion, one God for mankind". In the south, 'Periyar' E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker founded the Self-Respect Movement in 1925 in Tamil Nadu. It rejected caste discrimination and priestly ritual and demanded social equality and dignity for non-Brahmins.

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was the towering leader of the depressed classes. In 1924 he founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha, a body for their uplift, with the motto "Educate, Agitate, Organise". He started newspapers such as Mooknayak to give the community a voice. In 1927 he led the Mahad Satyagraha, the struggle for the right of untouchables to draw water from a public tank, and burnt the Manusmriti, the ancient brahminical law code. He demanded the annihilation of caste itself. He then carried the struggle into organised politics. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1936 and the All India Scheduled Castes Federation in 1942. He did not found the Peasants and Workers Party of India, a common trap in matching questions. Mahatma Gandhi founded the All India Anti-Untouchability League in 1932, later renamed the Harijan Sevak Sangh, to work for the removal of untouchability.

Two forces eroded caste over the century. The first was British rule itself, through uniform law, the modern economy and education. The second was the reform and national movements. Yet the struggle could not fully succeed under colonial rule. The Constitution of free India abolished untouchability and made equality and non-discrimination on the basis of caste a constitutional requirement.

Two related identifications recur in the exam:

• Thakkar Bappa: the social worker Amritlal Vithaldas Thakkar, who devoted his life to tribal welfare and first used the word Adivasi for the tribal people.
• Swami Sahajanand Saraswati: leader of the All India Kisan Sabha (1936), the peasant organisation, not a caste movement, but often paired with the above in matching questions.

Reform of women's condition centred on Bengal. Women were generally accorded a low status, suppressed by purdah, child marriage, the ban on widow remarriage, and sati. Reformers appealed to individualism and equality to change this. Raja Rammohan Roy led the campaign against sati, the burning of widows, which he called "murder according to every shastra". His agitation persuaded Governor-General William Bentinck to ban the practice by Regulation XVII of 1829. Note the attribution: the anti-sati campaign was Rammohan Roy's work, not Keshab Chandra Sen's, who belonged to a later generation of Brahmo reformers.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar took up the next causes. He championed widow remarriage, which the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856 (the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act) legalised, and he was the great promoter of women's schooling. D. K. Karve and Veerasalingam Pantulu carried the widow remarriage cause forward. Vidyasagar was closely associated with the Bethune School at Calcutta (1849), founded to encourage education for women, and worked to open dozens of girls' schools in Bengal. The new education also produced its first modern graduates: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, the novelist, was among the first graduates of the University of Calcutta.

Women's schooling also spread beyond Bengal. Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule opened the first school for girls at Pune in 1848. Savitribai Phule, herself once denied an education, is regarded as modern India's first woman teacher. D. K. Karve founded the Indian Women's University in 1916.

Beyond sati and widow remarriage, reform won a chain of further legal landmarks:

• Against female infanticide: Bengal regulations of 1795 and 1804, and an Act of 1870, made it a crime to kill or fail to register female infants.
• Age of Consent Act (1891): the law that forbade the marriage of girls below twelve. The Parsi reformer B. M. Malabari pushed for it, aided by the Rukhmabai case, a court battle over enforcing a child marriage.
• Sarda Act (1929): the Child Marriage Restraint Act, which raised the minimum marriage age to 18 for boys and 14 for girls.

Women also began to organise themselves into national bodies:

• Bharat Stri Mahamandal (1910): an early all-India women's organisation.
• National Council of Women in India (1925): a national body for women's welfare.
• All India Women's Conference (1927): the leading platform for women's rights.

Modern education in India grew through a chain of dated landmarks, and the exam loves their chronology. The story opens with Hindu College, Calcutta (1817), founded by Raja Rammohan Roy in collaboration with David Hare and Alexander Duff to promote Western education. Vidyasagar later served as Secretary of the Hindu Female School, which became the Bethune Female School. The Charter Act of 1813, the law renewing the East India Company's charter, set aside one lakh rupees a year for education, the first state commitment. The General Committee of Public Instruction (1823) was created to manage these funds. A dispute then broke out within it, the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy, over whether to fund classical Indian learning or English education. All three together led to the introduction of English education in India.

Macaulay's Minute (1835) settled the controversy in favour of English as the medium of higher instruction. The same period produced Adam's Report (1835), a survey of indigenous vernacular education in Bengal and Bihar. The next great charter was Wood's Despatch (1854), a comprehensive education plan whose stated aim was the spread of Western culture and knowledge in India. Its provisions are tested in detail:

• Grants-in-aid: a system of state grants to private schools was introduced.
• Universities: establishment of universities at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras was recommended, and the University of Calcutta followed in 1857.
• Medium of instruction: vernacular languages at the primary level and English at the higher level. It did not prescribe English at all levels, a standard trap.

Later milestones complete the sequence. The Hunter Commission (1882) reviewed education, especially primary schooling. Gokhale's Elementary Education Bill (1911), the first attempt to make primary education compulsory, was rejected by the colonial government, which feared that a literate peasantry would grow discontented. The Sargent Report (1944) drew up a post-war plan for universal education. The chronological chain to memorise is: Hindu College 1817, Charter Act 1813 funding put to work through the 1823 Committee, Macaulay's Minute and Adam's Report 1835, Wood's Despatch 1854, Calcutta University 1857, Hunter Commission 1882, Gokhale's Bill 1911, Sargent Report 1944.