Raja Ram Mohan Roy

Often called the father of the Indian Renaissance, Ram Mohan Roy was a Bengali scholar and reformer of the early nineteenth century who argued that Hinduism, stripped of later customs, taught the worship of one God. He campaigned against the burning of widows, polygamy and child marriage, promoted modern education and a free press, and in 1828 co-founded the Brahmo Sabha, forerunner of the influential Brahmo Samaj.

He was born, probably on 22 May 1772, at Radhanagar in the Hooghly district of Bengal, into a Kulin Brahmin family; his father was a devotee of Vishnu and his mother came from a family of Shiva worshippers. Details of his schooling are uncertain, but he is said to have studied Persian and Arabic at Patna and Sanskrit scripture at Benares, and he later learned English, Latin and Greek. According to a traditional account, as a boy he saw his young sister-in-law forced onto her husband's funeral pyre, an experience linked to his later campaign against sati. He married three times.

By 1797 Roy was in Calcutta, lending money to East India Company officials and working with the courts. From 1803 to 1815 he served the Company as a clerk, notably under the collector John Digby at Rangpur. In 1804, at Murshidabad, he wrote his first theological work, A Gift to Monotheists, in Persian. In 1814 he formed in Calcutta the Atmiya Sabha, a circle that met to discuss the monotheism of the Vedanta and to criticise idol worship, caste rigidity and empty ritual. He translated parts of the Upanishads, debated Christian missionaries at Serampore over the Trinity, and was drawn towards Unitarian Christians. He was also among the first to estimate how much of India's revenue was being drained away to Britain.

In the 1820s Roy poured out tracts and periodicals, including the Bengali weekly Sambad Kaumudi and the Persian paper Mirat-ul-Akhbar, and protested when the Company restricted the press. He founded the Anglo-Hindu School in 1822 and the Vedanta College in 1826, combining Western subjects with Indian learning, and in 1830 helped the missionary Alexander Duff open the school now known as Scottish Church College. His Gaudiya Vyakaran, published in 1826, was the first complete grammar of Bengali. In 1828 he launched the Brahmo Sabha, a congregation devoted to the worship of one formless God.

Roy's best-known cause was the abolition of sati, in which widows were burned on their husbands' pyres. He attacked it in print and in petitions, presenting it as one of the corruptions that disfigured Hinduism. In 1829 the governor-general, Lord William Bentinck, banned the practice in Bengal.

In 1830 the Mughal emperor Akbar II gave him the title Raja and sent him to England. His tasks were to defend the ban on sati against appeals for its repeal and to seek a larger allowance for the emperor, which the British raised by £30,000. In Britain he met politicians, published on Indian law and economics, and supported the Reform Bill. While visiting Unitarian friends in Bristol he fell ill and died at Stapleton on 27 September 1833. He was later reburied at Arnos Vale Cemetery, beneath a memorial in Indian style.

The Brahmo Samaj became a major force in Bengali intellectual life. Roy's embrace of English learning was later debated by Mahatma Gandhi, who thought it excessive, and Rabindranath Tagore, who defended him as a true inheritor of Indian wisdom.

Our 1815 map shows the India of his career, where Company territory was expanding at the expense of the shrunken Mughal Empire and other states; Bengal is today divided between India and Bangladesh.