The Reformers: How the Nineteenth Century Remade Hinduism

In December 1829, the colonial government in Calcutta declared the burning of widows a crime. Behind that line of law stood a Bengali, not a British official. Raja Ram Mohan Roy had spent more than a decade marshalling the Hindu scriptures themselves to argue that sati had never been commanded by them. When the orthodox appealed the ruling to London, Roy sailed to England to defend it in person, and there, in Bristol, in 1833, he died.

Picture the man clearly, because he holds the paradox of a whole century. He was a Hindu using the Upanishads as a weapon against a custom defended in the name of the Upanishads.

That paradox runs through the nineteenth century, the century when a generation of Hindus set out to do something the tradition had rarely done so deliberately before: to reform itself, from the inside, under the eyes of the world.

The pressure that made them

The reformers did not appear from nowhere. They were answering a pressure none of their ancestors had faced.

By the early nineteenth century much of India lay under British rule. Christian missionaries attacked Hindu practice as idolatry and superstition. Orientalist scholars, whose own story has its account on this site, were editing and judging the Sanskrit texts and telling Hindus what their tradition really was. Social practices, sati above all, but also the ban on widow remarriage and the weight of caste, were held up as proof of a civilisation in decay.

The reformers absorbed this critique, and then they turned it. Some accepted that the tradition had decayed and set out to purify it. Some denied the charge and set out to prove the tradition’s depth to its accusers. Almost all of them did their work in the new language of print, pamphlet, and public argument that colonial modernity had brought. They were the first Hindus to defend Hinduism in English, to an audience that included its critics.

Roy and the rational god

The first of them, and in many ways the father of them all, was Raja Ram Mohan Roy.

Roy reached past the crowded world of popular ritual and image worship to what he held to be the pure core of the tradition, the monotheism of the Upanishads. In 1816 he published an English translation of a Vedanta digest, and in its introduction he set out his purpose without apology, writing of his wish to free his countrymen from “the inconvenient or, rather, injurious rites introduced by the peculiar practice of Hindoo idolatry,” and “by making them acquainted with their scriptures, enable them to contemplate, with true devotion, the unity and omnipresence of nature’s God.”

In 1828 he founded the Brahmo Samaj, a society for the worship of the one formless God, without images, drawing on the Upanishads and open to reason and to the best of Western thought. It was a rationalist, reforming Hinduism, and it set the template: go back to the oldest texts, strip away what later centuries had added, and meet the modern world on its own ground. After Roy, the Brahmo movement passed to Debendranath Tagore and then the fiery Keshab Chandra Sen, and split as reform movements do, over how far to go and how much to keep.

Dayananda and the return to the Vedas

A generation later came a reformer who reached back further still, and in a fiercer key.

Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in 1875. Where Roy had looked to the Upanishads, Dayananda looked past them to the Vedas alone, declaring almost everything that came after, the Puranas, the image worship, much of popular practice, to be corruption. His great Hindi treatise, the Satyarth Prakash, the Light of Truth, argued the case at length. The cry he is remembered by, back to the Vedas, was a call to Vedic purity and learning rather than to Vedic times, a reformer’s appeal to the oldest authority against the accretions of the present.

Dayananda’s movement did something the Brahmos had not. Through the rite of shuddhi, purification, it sought to bring back into the fold those who had converted to Islam or Christianity, turning reform into an assertive, organising, and at times combative force. That assertiveness gave Hinduism a new confidence under colonial pressure, and it also, in the judgment of some historians, hardened the boundaries between communities in ways whose legacy is still debated. The treatise names that debate without settling it.

The wider wave

Around these two great movements ran a wider current of reform.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a scholar of immense learning and stubbornness, marshalled the scriptures as Roy had done and drove the legalisation of widow remarriage in 1856. The Theosophical Society, founded in the West in 1875 and soon headquartered at Adyar near Madras, became an outside amplifier of Hindu revival, its later leader Annie Besant proclaiming the glory of the tradition to Indians and foreigners alike. And there was the stream that ran from the mystic Ramakrishna to his disciple Vivekananda, whose own moment on the world stage has its account here, carrying a reformed and confident Vedanta to Chicago and back.

Different as they were, these movements shared a project: to defend the tradition, to re-present it to a sceptical age, and to argue, against the missionaries and the Orientalists, that Hinduism was a living philosophy that could stand among the religions of the world, not a dying superstition.

What reform did

It is worth weighing honestly what this century of reform actually did, because the reformers had blind spots as real as their courage.

They were, almost all of them, upper-caste, English-educated, urban men. Their record is uneven. On sati and widow remarriage they showed genuine bravery. On the deeper structure of caste they reached far less far. They could even betray their own principles: Keshab Chandra Sen, the great Brahmo reformer, married his young daughter to a prince with the very orthodox rites he had preached against, and split his own movement doing it. The tradition they defended was, in important ways, a tradition they were also remaking, and the people it still excluded had to wait.

And there is the deepest question, which scholars genuinely dispute. Did the reformers reform Hinduism, or did they invent a modern version of it? A strong line of scholarship argues that the reformers and the Orientalists together helped build a more unified, text-centred, world-religion Hinduism that earlier centuries would not have recognised, with the Vedas and Vedanta at its head and much of lived, local practice pushed to the margins. Others see real continuity, the reformers drawing genuinely on classical Vedanta and bhakti. The argument is not settled, and the treatise presents both rather than choosing.

What is not in doubt is the result. The defensive, apologetic posture of the early reformers hardened, by the century’s end, into something more confident and assertive. The generation that had answered the missionaries left behind a tradition newly sure of its own worth, ready to speak to the world in its own voice.

The reformers used the oldest texts to remake the present.

What they built is the Hinduism, confident and contested, that the next century inherited.