United States or Greenland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In these changed times it will hardly be believed that Rammohan Roy only ventured to argue against any form of compulsion being put upon the widow, and that the orthodox champions of the practice appealed against the abolition not only to the Governor-General, but also to the King in Council, the petition having been heard in the House of Lords in 1832.
Returning to Bengal, it would seem from Rammohan Roy's evidence that in 1820 the standpoint of the learned at that time was exactly what we have called the standpoint of an intelligent individual among the masses to-day, namely, a plea that the multitude of gods were agents of the one Supreme God.
The great jogi, Buddha, although not a brahman, was rediscovered as a religious hero for Hindus; at the commencement of the century he was a heretic to the brahmans. "The head of a sect inimical to Hinduism," the great Rammohan Roy calls him. So Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia had a great vogue some twenty years ago.
Even in 1824, when Government, then under "Orientalist" influence, founded the Sanscrit College in Calcutta for the encouragement of Sanscrit learning, a numerous body of native gentlemen, with the famous Raja Rammohan Roy at their head, petitioned that a college for the study of Western learning might be established instead.
Bose, himself an Indian, author of a recent work on Hindu Civilisation under British Rule. And Raja Rammohan Roy, the famous Bengali reformer of the beginning of the nineteenth century, we have already heard denouncing the caste system as "destructive of national union." From what then, during the nineteenth century, has the national consciousness come forth? Many causes may be cited.
When Rammohan Roy, the theistic reformer, opened his church in Calcutta in 1830, he introduced among Hindus congregational worship and united prayer, before unknown among them and confessedly borrowed from Christian worship. The public worship in all these bodies is indeed not unlike many a Christian service, consisting of Prayer to God, Praise of God, and expositions of religious truth.
And, as at once an Anglican Christian and an adopted Brahmaist, I make the attempt to bring East and West religiously together. The one began by being a reformer of the Muḥammadan society or church, the other by acting in the same capacity for the Indian community and more especially for the Brahmo Samaj a very imperfect and loosely organized religious society or church founded by Rammohan Roy.
Rammohan Roy himself disclaimed the title, but writing in 1817, he speaks of "the system of idolatry into which Hindus are now completely sunk." Many learned brahmans, he says in the same pamphlet, are perfectly aware of the absurdity of idol worship, indicating that the knowledge belonged only to the scholars.
Raja Rammohan Roy, the brave man who made a voyage to Britain in defiance of caste, the champion of the widow who had often been virtually obliged to lay herself on her dead husband's pyre, the strenuous advocate of English education for Indians, the supporter of the claim of Indians to a larger employment in the public service, has not yet received from New India the recognition and honour which he deserves.
But one of the dangers ahead undoubtedly is that, like one of the other religious movements of the past century, or like the Ethiopian Church in South Africa, the Indian Church may become infected with the political rather than the religious aspect of the idea. It was founded in Calcutta in 1828 by the famous reformer, Raja Rammohan Roy, first of modern Indians.
Word Of The Day