Our first maker of modern India exemplified both kinds of responses to the West. In seeking to reform and reinvigorate his society he was, pace Karl Marx, a very conscious tool of history indeed.
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Chapter One
The First Liberal
Rammohan Roy
A recent biography of Rammohan Roy is subtitled ‘The Father of Modern India’. The hyperbole may be excused. Roy was unquestionably the first person on the subcontinent to seriously engage with the challenges posed by modernity to traditional social structures and ways of being. He was also one of the first Indians whose thought and practice were not circumscribed by the constraints of kin, caste and religion.
Rammohan Roy1 was born in the village of Radhanagar in Bengal in 1772. His family were of the Vaishnava sect of Hindus. Moderately prosperous landowners, they had served for several generations as revenue officials under the Mughals. Rammohan was married twice before he entered his teens, this being customary among high-caste families, among whom child marriage and polygamy were both very common. According to his early biographers, Rammohan studied Bengali and Persian as a boy and was then sent to Patna to learn Arabic, where his teachers made him read Euclid and Aristotle in translation. The last stop on this mobile college was Banaras, where he studied Sanskrit with traditional pandits.
This version of Rammohan Roy’s peripatetic education has been challenged by later scholars. What they do not dispute, however, is that he was formidably multilingual. It may be that he learnt these languages in Bengal itself, rather than being sent to distant towns to be educated. What seems clear is that through his studies—wherever these may have been—Roy became less willing to accept the claims and prejudices of orthodox Hinduism. The disenchantment was confirmed by what he saw around him. His elder brother died, and the wife was forced to commit sati, to Rammohan’s dismay.
After he had finished with his studies, Rammohan Roy worked with the East India Company at various places in Bengal, before settling in Calcutta in the year of the Battle of Waterloo, 1815. By this time he had already published several books. His first book, written in Persian with a preface in Arabic, was an attack on idol worship.
After he moved to Calcutta, Roy became increasingly involved in literary and social work. He translated the Upanishads from Sanskrit into Bengali. He published a tract in English against sati. He debated with orthodox scholars on the rights of Hindu women. He also contested the claim of Christian missionaries that their religion was superior to all others. In 1815 he founded an Atmiya Sabha or ‘friendship association’ which, among other things, searched for elements common to different religious traditions.
Roy himself had now come to believe that the ‘omnipresent God, who is the only proper object of religious veneration, is one and undivided in person’. He claimed this was the message of the Vedas, and of the Bible and the Quran as well. Seeking to promote inter-religious understanding, Roy wrote a book on the precepts of Jesus, and began work on a life of Muhammad.
Roy and his circle were roundly abused by orthodox Hindus, who derided them as sinful atheists and ‘moderns blinded by passion’. However, the European Christians in India did not warm to him either. They complained that he opposed conversion and that his admiration for Jesus did not extend to acknowledging his divinity.
In 1816 Roy opened a school for boys, whose medium of instruction was English. In 1821 he started a weekly newspaper in Bengali—one of the first such in any Indian language. Then he started a paper in Persian (of which, as with its Bengali predecessor, he wrote all the contents). In 1828 he founded the Brahmo Samaj (the Society of God), which preached the worship of the One God on the basis of what its founder claimed were the original teachings of the Vedas.
When the practice of sati was legally abolished in 1829, the credit for its abolition was given to the Governor General, William Bentinck. However, as a contemporary English observer—herself a woman—pointed out, the legislation could not have been brought about ‘but for the powerful though unacknowledged aid of the great Hindu philosopher Rammohun Roy’. Roy’s great contribution towards this reform was to demonstrate that sati was not a religious duty sanctioned or upheld by Hindu scriptural tradition.
Through the 1820s, Roy’s ideas were being propagated through his Bengali newspaper, which was called the Sangbad Kaumudi, or the ‘Moon of Intelligence’. The historian A.F. Salahuddin Ahmed quotes two remarkable contemporary testimonies to this paper’s influence. In December 1921, the Calcutta Journal, a periodical of (and for) the English in India, wrote of Roy’s newspaper that ‘she will be the means of the moral and intellectual renovation of India’. Nine years later, a London magazine described the Sangbad Kaumudi as ‘the Morning Chronicle of India, advocating freedom, civil and religious, opposed to corruption and tyranny, and labouring, we are happy to say effectively and extensively, to eradicate the idolatrous rites of the Brahmins, and awaken the Hindoos to a sense of the degradation and misery into which they have been plunged’.
Notably, Rammohan Roy had a keen interest in politics outside India as well. He welcomed the movements that delivered the countries of South America from Spanish colonial rule. Within Spain, he supported the liberal opposition to an autocratic monarchy. He championed the emancipation of Catholics within the United Kingdom. This internationalist orientation set him apart from moralists and thinkers of the past—thus, as C.A. Bayly has recently pointed out, Roy ‘was the first Indian to represent the growth of freedom in India as an essential part of a wider transnational quest of humanity for self-realization’.
In 1830 Rammohan Roy was sent by the now much-weakened Mughal emperor to England, to petition the King to increase his allowance and perquisites. Arriving in London in April 1831, Roy spent the next two years in the city. He met with officials of the East India Company, lobbied with members of Parliament, was granted an audience with the King and wrote and published books on Indian economics and law. He exchanged views with British Utilitarians and English Socialists and also travelled to Paris. His biographer Sophia Dobson Collet remarks that ‘as he had interpreted England to India, so now he interpreted India to England’. In London, he watched with interest from the sidelines as Parliament passed the Reform Bill of 1831, which extended the franchise to a greater number of British men.
After many months of patient lobbying, Roy was able to persuade the British government to increase the stipend of the Mughal emperor by 30,000 pounds a year. However, he never saw the emperor again, nor his native Bengal. On a visit to English friends in Bristol, Roy took ill and died on 27 September 1833. He was buried (there being no cremation facilities then in England) in Bristol itself, with a tombstone whose inscription notes his scholarship and mastery of languages, and his belief in the unity of the godhead, before summarizing his life’s work as follows:
HIS UNW[E]ARIED LABOURS TO PROMOTE THE SOCIAL, MORAL AND PHYSICAL CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, HIS EARNEST ENDEAVOURS TO SUPPRESS IDOLATRY AND THE RITE OF SUTTEE, AND HIS CONSTANT ZEALOUS ADVOCACY OF WHATEVER TENDED TO ADVANCE THE GLORY OF GOD AND THE WELFARE OF MAN, LIVE IN THE GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF HIS COUNTRYMEN.
And so they should. For, as the excerpts below demonstrate, while it is perhaps too much to claim that Rammohan Roy was the ‘Father of Modern India’, he was nonetheless its first liberal thinker of consequence, without whose work and writings India’s encounter with modernity would have been even more conflicted and painful than it has been.
Relations Between Men and Women
In 1818 Rammohan Roy wrote a pamphlet in his native Bengali, opposing the practice of asking Hindu widows to immolate themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyre. In the same year he published an English version entitled ‘A Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows alive’. The excerpts below are from this work. The ‘you’ in the text is the advocate of widow-burning, but Rammohan is also addressing the Hindu patriarch more generally.2
… Women are in
general inferior to men on bodily strength and energy; consequently the male part of the community, taking advantage of their corporeal weakness, have denied to them those excellent merits that they are entitled to by nature, and afterwards they are apt to say that women are naturally incapable of acquiring those merits. But if we give the subject consideration, we may easily ascertain whether or not your accusation against them is consistent with justice. As to their inferiority in point of understanding, when did you ever afford them a fair opportunity of exhibiting their natural capacity? How then can you accuse them of want of understanding? If, after instruction in knowledge and wisdom, a person cannot comprehend or retain what has been taught him, we may consider him as deficient; but as you keep women generally void of education and acquirements, you cannot therefore, in justice pronounce on their inferiority …
Secondly. You charge them with want of resolution, at which I feel exceedingly surprised: for we constantly perceive, in a country where the name of death makes the male shudder, that the female, from her firmness of mind, offers to burn with the corpse of her deceased husband; and yet you accuse those women of deficiency of resolution.
Thirdly. With regard to their trustworthiness, let us look minutely into the conduct of both sexes, and we may be enabled to ascertain which of them is the most frequently guilty of betraying friends. If we enumerate such women in each village or town as have been deceived by men, and such men as have been betrayed by women, I presume that the numbers of the deceived women would be found ten times greater than that of the betrayed men. Men are, in general, able to read, write, and manage public affairs, by which means they easily promulgate such faults as women occasionally commit, but never consider as criminal the misconduct of men towards women. One fault they have, it must be acknowledged, which is, by considering others equally void of duplicity as themselves, to give their confidence too readily, from which they suffer much misery, even so far that some of them are misled to suffer themselves to be burnt to death.
In the fourth place, with respect to their subjection to the passions, this may be judged of by the custom of marriage as to the respective sexes; for one man may marry two or three, sometimes even ten wives and upwards; while a woman, who marries but one husband, desires at his death to follow him forsaking all worldly enjoyments, or to remain leading the austere life of an ascetic.
Fifthly. The accusation of their want of virtuous knowledge is an injustice. Observe what pain, what slighting, what contempt, and what afflictions their value enables them to support! How many Kulin Brahmins are there who marry ten or fifteen wives for the sake of money, that never see the greater number of them after the day of marriage, and visit others only three or four times in the course of their life. Still amongst those women, most, even without seeing or receiving any support from their husbands, living dependent on their fathers or brothers, and suffering much distress, continue to preserve their virtue; and when Brahmins, or those of other tribes, bring their wives to live with them, what misery do the women not suffer? At marriage the wife is recognized as half of her husband, but [after marriage] they are treated worse than inferior animals. For the woman is employed to do the work of a slave in the house, such as, in her turn, to clean the place very early in the morning, whether cold or wet, to scour the dishes, to wash the floor, to cook night and day, to prepare and serve food for her husband, father and mother-in-law, brothers-in-law, and friends and connections! (For amongst Hindus more than in other tribes relations long reside together, and on this account quarrels are more common amongst brothers respecting their worldly affairs.) If in the preparation or serving up of the victuals they commit the smallest fault, what insult do they not receive from their husband, their mother-in-law, and the younger brothers of their husband! After all the male part of the family have satisfied themselves, the women content themselves with what may be left, whether sufficient in quantity or not … In the afternoon they fetch water from the river or tank; and at night perform the office of menial servants in making the beds. In case of any fault or omission in the performance of those labours, they receive injurious treatment. Should the husband acquire wealth, he indulges in criminal amours to her perfect knowledge, and almost under her eyes, and does not see her, perhaps once a month. As long as the husband is poor she suffers every kind of trouble and when he becomes rich she is altogether heart-broken. All this pain and affliction their virtue alone enables them to support. Where a husband takes two or three wives to live with him, they are subjected to mental miseries and constant quarrels. Even this distressed situation they virtuously endure. Sometimes it happens that the husband, from a preference for one of his wives, behaves cruelly to another. Amongst the lower classes, and those even of the better class who have not associated with good company, the wife on the slightest fault, or even on bare suspicion of her misconduct, is chastised as a thief. Respect to virtue and their reputation generally makes them forgive even this treatment. If, unable to bear such cruel usage, a wife leaves her husband’s house to live separately from him, then the influence of the husband with the magisterial authority is generally sufficient to place her again in his hands; when, in revenge for her quitting him, he seizes every pretext to torment her in various ways, and sometimes even puts her privately to death. These are facts occurring every day, and not to be denied. What I lament is, that seeing the women thus dependent and exposed to every misery, you feel for them no compassion that might exempt them from being tied down and burnt to death.
The Freedom of the Press
In 1824 the Government of Bengal (which was in the hands of the East India Company) issued an ordinance placing strict restrictions on the press. Newspapers and journals had to obtain a licence that could be granted or withdrawn at the government’s discretion. A memorial protesting this move was drafted by Rammohan Roy and, with the signatures of several other prominent Bengalis, sent to the government. Note the deferential tone of the memorial, which masks its challenging and combative contents.3
… Your Lordship may have learned from the works of the Christian Missionaries, and also from other sources, that ever since the art of printing has become generally known among the Natives of Calcutta, numerous Publications have been circulated in the Bengalee Language, which by introducing free discussion among the Natives and inducing them to reflect and inquire after knowledge, have already served greatly to improve their minds and ameliorate their condition. This desirable object has been chiefly promoted by the establishment of four Native Newspapers, two in the Bengalee and two in the Persian Languages, published for the purpose of communicating to those residing in the interior of the country, accounts of whatever occurs worthy of notice at the Presidency or in the country, and also the interesting and valuable intelligence of what is passing in England and in other parts of the world, conveyed through the English Newspapers or other channels …
While your Memorialists were indulging the hope that Government, from a conviction of the manifold advantages of being put in possession of full and impartial information regarding what is passing in all parts of the Country, would encourage the establishment of Newspapers in the cities and districts under the special patronage and protection of Government, that they might furnish the Supreme Authorities in Calcutta with an accurate account of local occurrences and reports of Judicial proceedings, they have the misfortune to observe, that on the contrary, his Excellency the Governor General in Council has lately promulgated a Rule and Ordinance imposing severe restraints on the Press and prohibiting all Periodical Publications even at the Presidency and in the Native Languages, unless sanctioned by a Licence from Government, which is to be revocable at pleasure whenever it shall appear to Government that a publication has contained anything of an unsuitable character.
Those Natives who are in more favourable circumstances and of respectable character, have such an invincible prejudice against making a voluntary affidavit, or undergoing the solemnities of an oath, that they will never think of establishing
a publication which can only be supported by a series of oaths and affidavits, abhorrent to their feelings and derogatory to their reputation amongst their countrymen.
After this Rule and Ordinance shall have been carried into execution, your Memorialists are therefore extremely sorry to observe, that a complete stop will be put to the diffusion of knowledge and the consequent mental improvement now going on, either by translations into the popular dialect of this country from the learned languages of the East, or by the circulation of literary intelligence drawn from foreign publications. And the same cause will also prevent those Natives who are better versed in the laws and customs of the British Nation, from communicating to their fellow subjects a knowledge of the admirable system of Government established by the British, and the peculiar excellences of the means they have adopted for the strict and impartial administration of justice. Another evil of equal importance in the eyes of a just Ruler is, that it will also preclude the Natives from making the Government readily acquainted with the errors and injustice that may be committed by its executive officers in the various parts of this extensive country; and it will also preclude the Natives from communicating frankly and honestly to their Gracious Sovereign in England and his Council, the real condition of his Majesty’s faithful subjects in this distant part of his dominions and the treatment they experience from the local Government; since information cannot in future be conveyed to England, as it has heretofore been, either by the translations from the Native publications inserted in the English Newspapers printed here and sent to Europe, or by the English publications which the Natives themselves had in contemplation to establish, before this Rule and Ordinance was proposed.
Makers of Modern India Page 4