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Reform Hinduism

Reform movements have risen up within the Hindu tradition from the late 18th century to the present. Prior to these movements, the religious life of Hindus consisted of a localized folk religion, alongside a high Sanskritic tradition, shaped mainly by the learning of the Brahman caste and expressed in a centuries-old high culture of Vedantism and other related philosophical traditions.

The Brahmo Samaj

The rise of Reform Hinduism began with the impact of colonialism. By the early 19th century, new currents in imperialism, paradoxically shaped by a civilizing mission, utilitarianism, liberalism, and evangelism, influenced Hindu society, and Indian philosophers responded to this challenge. There remains a debate as to whether this response was indigenous and came from the modernity of tradition or was derived from the challenge from without. Its most powerful expression, the Bengal Renaissance, was in the area most exposed to British influence, but there were parallel movements elsewhere, in Maharashtra and in Tamil Nadu. Most significant was the Brahmo Samaj (“Society of God,” sometimes described as the “Society of Friends”), formally set up in 1828 by a former civil servant of the East India Company, Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833). He shared the liberal imperialist opposition to certain social practices in India such as sati (suttee) or widow burning; it was on a visit to Britain to contribute to a debate in the Privy Council on sati being made illegal that he died prematurely and was buried in Bristol. Roy seemingly appropriated Unitarian ideas in his understanding of Hinduism to affirm the monotheism of the Vedantic tradition. Intriguingly, though, it was Roy who converted his Baptist friend William Adam to Unitarianism, and his monotheist beliefs were made clear in his early work Tohfat al Muwabhiddin (A Gift to Deists, 1804). Under the charismatic leadership of Keshab Chandra Sen (1838–1884), who worked for the Bank of Bengal, the Samaj, much influenced by evangelical Christianity, became something of a missionary organization, but its Christian style of worship and its radical social program, attacking caste and favoring intercaste marriage, imposed strains on the Samaj, and it split in 1866 into a conservative branch under Debendranath Tagore—he kept the Samaj going after Roy's death—and Sen's more radical wing.

Subsequently, in 1878, the more committedly social-radical Brahmos broke away to form the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj. They felt betrayed by Sen for marrying off his daughter at a young age to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar and using a traditional ceremony they did not accept. But all these various expressions of the Brahmo Samaj always remained an elite formation, though Sen had attracted a following from the villages and towns of East Bengal and extended the Samaj outside Bengal. A loner who should also be cited as a Hindu reformer was Vidyasagar (1820–1875), who built on Roy's campaigning against sati to bring about the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856. The plight of Hindu widows, a concern of the high castes, remained a touchstone of the reform movements throughout the 19th century.

The Arya Samaj and the Theosophical Society

By the late 19th century, more populist reform movements had emerged. The Arya Samaj, centered in the Punjab, founded by Swami Dayanand Sarasvati (1824–1883), was a proto-nationalist response. In his early life, he had undertaken an extraordinary journey through the sacred landscape of North India in search of moksha, or release. Subsequently, he became an expert on Sanskrit grammar, but it was a meeting with Keshab Chandra Sen in 1872 that drew him into the reform movements. In his key text the Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth, 1875), Dayanand made claims for the revealed authority of the Vedas every bit as polemical as the Christian evangelicals did for the Bible. Here was a populist movement that reached out to the lower castes with its anticaste agenda—it saw caste as the basis for a meritocratic society rather than as an ascriptive phenomenon—and also through its championing of Hindi and attack on cow slaughter. This was to inspire an increasingly communal program that prompted a defensive response from the Muslim community and led to Hindu-Muslim tensions in the 1890s, which were the first signs of the Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India that would mar the 20th century. The Arya Samaj was the movement that the disaffected truth seekers of the Theosophical Society, set up in New York in 1875, under Colonel Olcott and Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–1889), first turned to when they came to India in 1879, prior to transplanting their international headquarters to Adyar, Chennai. Here was a society relevant to the history of the international occult that was to mesh with the Hindu reform movements, though it rapidly fell out with the Arya Samaj. Its most extraordinary presence was Madame Blavatsky, of Russian aristocratic background, who had immersed herself in Gnostic beliefs on her leaving Russia in 1849, possibly in western Tibet, possibly in the Middle East, and who quickly made her mark on her arrival in New York in 1873 as a leading player in the spiritualist movement. But in its early years in India, Theosophy privileged Buddhism over Hinduism; Blavatsky in her childhood in Saratov had lived near the Kalmuch Buddhists, and hers was a claim for a Gnostic religion over and above all religions in her The Secret Doctrine (1888–1889). It was left to Annie Besant (1847–1933), another of the extraordinary personalities who shaped the movement, who became the society's president on the death of Colonel Olcott in 1907, to emphasize its Hindu associations. Prior to her being converted to Theosophy by a reading of The Secret Doctrine, she had been a passionate supporter of atheism, socialism, and birth control. Given the Indian affront at the Christian missionary attack on Hinduism—and it cannot be emphasized enough that there was a strange symbiosis between Christian missions and the Hindu reform movements—here was an intellectual outlook highly attractive to Indians, and lodges of the society quickly spread. But Besant's was a conservative and romantic view of Hindu society and tended to endorse the caste system. And Theosophy was always more an international movement, appealing to all faiths and reaching out to those seeking spiritual answers in a post-Darwinian world. This international appeal only faded when J. Krishnamurti reneged on his training to become the world teacher of Theosophy in 1929.

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