Rammohan Ray

Indian religious leader and social reformer

• Born: May 22, 1772
• Birthplace: Rādhānagar, Bengal (now in India)
• Died: September 27, 1833
• Place of death: Bristol, England

Remembered as the founder of modern India, Ray left writings that have become the putative source for almost all India’s social and religious reformist ideals. He saw the Hinduism of his day as a debased form of a purer monotheism practiced in India during a prehistoric Golden Age. He also found many social customs of his own day—the forced suicide of widows and child marriage, for example—as decadent, medieval accretions on the noble patterns of the Vedic age.

Early Life

Rammohan Ray was born into a Kulin family and married twice while still in his early teens. Among Bengalis of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, priests (Brahmans) of the Kulin class ranked only slightly lower than the gods. Their inferiors customarily addressed them as “Lord” (Thakur). They also emulated the Kulin’s dialect of Bengali and almost everything about their style. Kulin boys were much in demand as husbands and often had more than one wife.

Ray’s father’s ancestors had long before assimilated themselves into the culture of India’s Muslim rulers and had served in many governmental posts. His father was a landowner (zamindar) who fell on hard times in later life. In 1800, his father was jailed for debt, and he died in poverty in 1803. Ray’s mother’s family had not moved so close to Indo-Islamic culture and supported themselves as ritual specialists.

As a boy, Ray studied Arabic and Persian and was sent to Patna in Bihar, which, as a center for Muslim learning, offered better instruction than his hometown school. That was a common practice among Hindus who adopted the cosmopolitan culture of Muslims. Ray acquired a knowledge of Islamic doctrine as well as an interest in the mystical teachings of the Sufis. These two philosophies may have been responsible for his lifelong iconoclasm. According to his own autobiographical notes, while still a teenager he criticized his father’s devotion to images of the gods and was thrown out of the house. Ray seems to have romanticized his recollections of the next decade of his life, claiming a journey to Tibet to study Buddhism and a lengthy stay in Benares to learn Sanskrit. Because in later life he wanted to be considered an authority on ancient Hindu religious texts, he may have exaggerated his knowledge of the classical language.

Between 1797 and 1802, Ray seems to have spent much of his time in Calcutta, the burgeoning capital of Bengal and British India, where he acted as a moneylender. Many of his clients were young Englishmen employed by the East India Company. In this way his name became known in government circles, and he received an appointment in the Revenue Department. He eventually became a deputy district collector, the highest civil post an Indian could hold. During his active career, he invested in real estate, and by his early forties he had an ample fortune that allowed him to retire to Calcutta in 1815.

Life’s Work

Beginning during the 1770’s, a number of Englishmen began to expand their knowledge of India’s non-Muslim traditions. Sir William Jones and Henry Colebrooke, among others, acquired a better-than-rudimentary knowledge of Sanskrit. As they discovered that an enormous body of literature existed in that tongue, they conceded to ancient Indian civilization a classical status analogous to that of Greece and Rome in Western tradition. Their efforts in the reconstruction of the history of India earned for them the sobriquet “Orientalist.”

The work of the Orientalists had two institutional foci. The first was the Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784, and the second the College of Fort William, established in 1800. Although the former was a typical learned society of the period that met regularly to hear papers by members on a variety of subjects published in the society’s journal, the second was an unprecedented attempt to train the East India Company’s servants in the languages of the peoples they expected to govern. Few of those young men proved to be able scholars, but the professors of the College of Fort William, with the help of numerous Indian assistants, kept extending their knowledge of Sanskrit and the texts written in it.

During his earlier stays in Calcutta, Ray had contacts with Englishmen active in the college. He began to learn English and became fluent in the language. He was not, however, alone in his interests and contacts with the British. A number of other Bengali intellectuals had similar connections and concerns. They imbibed a number of ideas that had originated with British scholars such as Jones and Colebrooke. One of the most important of these was the notion that Hindu civilization had enjoyed a Golden Age during which India produced a lofty and subtle religiophilosophical system every bit as valuable as that of the Greeks and Romans. They also believed that, in that halcyon time, India’s society was well organized and featured a balance between the various classes.

For the Orientalists, as well as for such Indians as Ray who subscribed to their ideas, a major problem was explaining how the Golden Age had disappeared to be replaced by the polytheism, idolatry, and caste inequalities of their own day. Following the British lead, Ray and others saw Muslims as the cause of that decline. Despite a Muslim presence in the subcontinent of more than nine hundred years’ duration, as well as the prominence of Hindus in Muslim governments from the beginning of their rule, they began describing Muslims as foreign tyrants whose oppression brought on Hindu decadence. Because Ray maintained close personal ties to Muslims—in 1831, he became the Mughal emperor’s first ambassador to the Court of Saint James—perhaps he espoused this opinion only as a way of inspiring his coreligionists, never thinking that the notion would have so long a life or such ultimately fatal consequences.

In 1815, Ray published Translation of an Abridgment of the “Vedant”: Or, Resolution of All the Veds, the Most Celebrated and Revised Work of Brahminical Theology . In this book, he emphasized monotheist religious views, claiming that a pure monotheism was the true doctrine taught by Indian religious texts, especially the Upanishads, also known as the “End of the Vedas” (Vedanta). To reinforce these assertions, Ray translated several of the more than three hundred Upanishads. In his emphasis on monotheism—belief in a personal God—rather than monism—the assertion that all reality is an impersonal, featureless “One”—Ray seems to be reflecting his dependence not on the original Sanskrit texts but on Persian translations of them ordered by the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh.

The Upanishads tended to stress monism, but as a Muslim Dara slanted his translations toward monotheism in order to make it seem that the texts were closer to Islam. Some of Ray’s more perceptive critics pointed out that his interpretations proved that he did not have the Sanskrit learning required to give authoritative explanations of sacred literature. Ray’s other concerns also provoked opposition.

As did most other religious critics in India’s history, Ray soon became embroiled in controversies over social practices. He made the fate of Bengali women his special cause. At the time, women were uneducated, treated as weak creatures subject to the whims of their brutish husbands, and never allowed to leave their homes. Ray supported many measures to protect them. He championed attempts to outlaw the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. Though followed by only a few high-status families, the custom dictated that a woman volunteer for this fate, thus proving herself a “virtuous female” (satī). In practice, relatives used the occasion to avoid, through murder, having to support an unwanted female. He also opposed the practice of child marriage, which sometimes created widows who were eight or nine years old. Even though they were not consigned to the mortuary fires, these girls were forced to lead dreary lives either as the celibate servants of their in-laws or as unmarriageable burdens on their own parents and brothers.

Though many of his views derived ultimately from the Orientalists, Ray did not invariably support all of their schemes. For example, when some proposed the establishment of a Sanskrit college, he opposed the move, believing that it was better to teach English to Indians than to immerse them in an archaic language. In this instance, he seems to have anticipated the anti-Orientalist reaction that arose in the government of India during the 1840’s and that dominated educational policy throughout the British period.

Ray’s interest in religion blossomed in Calcutta. He became a defender of his purified version of Hinduism against attacks by missionaries. He found himself drawn closer to the teaching of the Unitarians, who were emerging during the 1820’s as a distinct and, to the minds of most Christians, heretical sect. Their monotheism, iconoclasm, and refusal to assert the absolute superiority of Christian revelation attracted Ray. He began corresponding with leading Unitarians in England and the United States; at one point, he contemplated finishing his life in the United States in order to be close to William Ellery Channing . The Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness, published in 1820, displayed the Unitarian influence. In it, he selected only those passages of the New Testament that contained some moral injunction and ignored those mentioning miracles or that contained assertions of Jesus’ divinity. Although Ray often said that his heart was with the Unitarians, he never formally joined their church, preferring always to be known as a Hindu.

In 1828, Ray and a few associates founded the Brahmo Sabha (later called the Brahmo Samaj), or “Society of God.” In general, this church was supposed to promulgate reformed religious and social principles. The Brahmo Sabha had little time to evolve as an organization before Ray in 1831 accepted the post of Mughal ambassador to England and left Calcutta forever. After his departure, the organization became moribund until it was revived some nine years later. By the time he left the city, Ray’s staunchest friends were either Muslims or British Unitarians. Most of his fellow Hindus either condemned or ignored him. In England, his health ebbed and his fortune dwindled. He became a much-revered figure among English Unitarians and died in one of their homes. A Unitarian minister preached his funeral sermon.

Significance

Though today universally acknowledged as the founder of modern India, Rammohan Ray was not fully recognized while he lived. The work of providing him with this identity began in the years following his death. Debendranath Tagore revived the Brahmo Sabha (calling it the Brahmo Samaj) in the years 1840 through 1842 and realized that the society required a spiritual leader to give it cohesion. Tagore, whose family produced several of Bengal’s leading intellectual and literary lights, began to edit Ray’s Persian, English, and Bengali writings. After K. C. Mitra published a biography of Ray in the Calcutta Review of 1845, the practice of crediting Ray for the invention of everything modern and progressive became common. Ray’s importance, however, may well have been in his being typical of an era when Indians of many faiths and Englishmen cooperated in securing European recognition of India’s civilization as one of the world’s most influential and important traditions.

Bibliography

Basham, A. L., ed. A Cultural History of India. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975. Contains thirty-five essays discussing almost every aspect of India’s history from ancient times to the present. By judicious reading, a beginner will be able to discover the broader intellectual and social context in which Ray and other reformist thinkers worked.

Bhattacharya, Haridas, ed. Religions. Vol. 4 in Cultural Heritage of India. Calcutta, India: Ramakrishna Mission, 1969. The last volume in a series of books cataloging many aspects of the religious and social traditions of Indian life. Shows that Hinduism is a term loosely connecting a number of very different religious tendencies. The essay on the Brahmo Samaj describes Ray’s influence on this group and its place in nineteenth and twentieth century India.

Farquhar, J. N. Modern Religious Movements in India. Reprint. Delhi, India: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967. Originally written by a sympathetic Christian missionary. The many reprintings of this book demonstrate its value as an introductory text. It has a clear style easily accessible to students. Although a number of its views should be modified by reference to the work of modern scholars, notably David Kopf’s books listed below, it remains a readable introduction to Ray and his era.

Hay, Stephen N., ed. Modern Indian and Pakistan. Vol. 2 in Sources of Indian Tradition. 2d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. A valuable anthology of translations from primary sources, introductory essays, and comments on the sources. Places brief selections from Ray’s writings in the context of his own time as well as relating them to the work of later generations of reformers.

Heimsath, Charles H. Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964. Makes the vital connection between religious/social reform, its critics, and India’s nationalist movement. The programs of both reformers and their critics must be understood as part of India’s long drive for independence. Also has the merit of covering reformist movements in all the major cultural regions of the subcontinent.

Kopf, David. The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Together with the book cited below, this work provides a comprehensive and insightful history of Bengali intellectual life from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. The first chapters give a succinct and penetrating appraisal of Ray’s influence on modernizing Bengalis. Also describes Tagore’s role in establishing Ray as the founder of modern India.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. This valuable work demonstrates the complex interchanges between Englishmen and Indians that added a new dimension to Bengali intellectual life. Provides a history of the College of Fort William and places Ray’s career in the context of Orientalist labors. Also charts the anti-Orientalist reaction of the 1830’s and 1840’s.

Robertson, Bruce Carlisle. Raja Rammahan Ray: The Father of Modern India. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1995. Robertson describes how Ray’s ideas set the agenda for modern India, creating a vision of an independent, pluralistic society based upon the principles of the Upanishads.

Salmond, Noel A. Hindu Iconclasts: Rammohun Roy, Dayananda Sarasvati, and Nineteenth-Century Polemics Against Idoltary. Waterloo, Ont.: Published for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004. Scholarly study analyzing the ideas of Ray and others who challenged Hindu practices of idolatry. Examines other aspects of Ray’s religious thinking.