Raja Ram Mohan Roy (22 May 1772 – 27 September 1833) was an Indian reformer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a social-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He was given the title of Raja by Akbar II, the Mughal emperor. His influence was apparent in the fields of politics, public administration, education and religion. He was known for his efforts to abolish the practices of sati and child marriage. Raja Ram Mohan Roy is considered to be the “Father of the Bengal Renaissance” by many historians.
Ram Mohan Roy was born in Radhanagar, Hooghly District, Bengal Presidency. His great grandfather Krishnakanta Bandyopadhyay was a Rarhi Kulin (noble) Brahmin. Among Kulin Brahmins – descendants of the six families of Brahmins imported from Kanauj by Ballal Sen in the 12th century – those from the Rarhi district of West Bengal were notorious in the 19th century for living off dowries by marrying several women. Kulinism was a synonym for polygamy and the dowry system, both of which Rammohan campaigned against. His father, Ramkanta, was a Vaishnavite, while his mother, Tarini Devi, was from a Shaivite family.
He was a great scholar of Sanskrit, Persian and English languages and also knew Arabic, Latin and Greek. One parent prepared him for the occupation of a scholar, the Shastri, while the other secured for him all the worldly advantages needed to launch a career in the laukik or worldly sphere of public administration. [citation needed) Torn between these two parental ideals from early childhood, Ram Mohan vacillated between the two for the rest of his life.
Ram Mohan Roy was married three times. His first wife died early. He had two sons, Radhaprasad in 1800, and Ramaprasad in 1812 with his second wife, who died in 1824. Roy’s third wife outlived him. The nature and content of Ram Mohan Roy’s early education is disputed. One view is that “Ram Mohan started his formal education in the village pathshala where he learned Bengali and some Sanskrit and Persian. Later he is said to have studied Persian and Arabic in a madrasa in Patna and after that he was sent to Benares to learn the intricacies of Sanskrit and Hindu scripture, including the Vedas and Upanishads.
The dates of his time in both these places are uncertain. However, it is believed that he was sent to Patna when he was nine years old and two years later he went to Benares.” The Persian and Arabic studies influenced his thinking about One God more than studies of European deism, which he didn’t know at least while writing his first scriptures because at that stage he couldn’t speak or understand English. Ram Mohan Roy’s impact on modern Indian history was his revival of the pure and ethical principles of the Vedanta school of philosophy as found in the Upanishads.
He preached the unity of God, made early translations of Vedic scriptures into English, co-founded the Calcutta Unitarian Society and founded the Brahma Samaj. The Brahma Samaj played a major role in reforming and modernizing the Indian society. He successfully campaigned against sati, the practice of burning widows. He sought to integrate Western culture with the best features of his own country’s traditions. He established a number of schools to popularize a modern system of education in India. He promoted a rational, ethical, non-authoritarian, this-worldly, and social-reform Hinduism. His writings also sparked interest among British and American Unitarians.
“Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the envoy of new age”, “morning star of Indian Renaissance”. Every one of these designations establish the unique spot involved by Raja Ram Mohan Roy in the Indian social history as he stands in the bleeding edge of track towards improving the Hindu society. In spite of the fact that Ram Mohan Roy was a man of adaptable genius, the administering energy of his life was religious change. During a period when the Bengal youth, under the influ-ence of Western learning, was floating towards Christianity, Ram Mohan Roy ended up being the champion of Hinduism.
He likewise tried to cleanse Hinduism of the misuse that had crawled into it. At 15 years old he examined heathen worship and upheld his perspective by quota-tions from the Vedas. He reinterpreted Hindu teachings and discovered adequate otherworldly premise for his humanity in the Upanishads. He began a battle for the abolition of Sati, criticized polygamy, criticized casteism, and pushed the privilege of Hindu widows to remarry.
He dismisses Christianity, precluded the godliness from securing Jesus Christ, and however acknowledged the humanism of Europe. He tried to impact a social combination between the East and the West. He is supposed as the forerunner of advanced India and an awesome path-finder of his times as he characterized the new soul of question, hunger for learning, wide humanity all to be accomplished in the Indian setting.
Roy’s importance in modern Indian history rests partly upon the broad scope of his social vision and the striking modernity of his thought. He was a tireless social reformer, yet he also revived interest in the ethical principles of the Vedanta school as a counterpoise to the Western assault on Indian culture. In his textbooks and treatises he contributed to the popularization of the Bengali language, while at the same time he was the first Indian to apply to the Indian environment the fundamental social and political ideas of the French and American revolutions.
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