Reckoning the millennia of Indian history, one can hardly think of a greater contrast than the one that existed between eighteenth-century and twentieth-century India. On the one hand India had a stagnating traditional culture and society at very low ebb, while on the other hand India possessed a still traditional society in the throes and the creative excitement of modernising itself, of emerging as a new nation, remaining thoroughly its own and rooted in its culture, yet taking its place in the contemporary world. The nineteenth century was the pivotal century that saw the initiation of this process that brought about an enormous transformation in the religious, social, economic, political, and cultural spheres.

The transformation came for the involvement of some interrelated factors among which the first is the total impact of the British Raj. It influenced Indian life through many channels: administration, legislation, trade, the creation of a network of communications, inchoative industrialisation and urbanisation, all had great influence not only on the many Indians who became directly involved in them, but also on society as a whole, because every measure in some way interfered with some traditional patterns of life. In the cultural field too the British exerted pressure through the work of scholars, educators, and missionaries, Orientalists, utilitarian, or evangelical. The entire effect of this influence acted on the life and ideas of the people in multiple ways, forcing them to adjust their patterns of life to the new circumstances and thus effecting a continuum of social change.

Under these circumstances, the reformers excelled as landmarks in this gradual adaptation to new conditions. These are the Indians who consciously reacted to the new situation and advocated deliberate changes in social and religious attitudes and customs, involving a break with tradition itself. They saw change not as a slow adaptive process, but as a positive value in itself, and contrasted it with the negativity of existing patterns. As a group they had a great impact on nineteenth-century India, though they were not by far the only factor in effecting change.

Social and religious reformers were, naturally, not a new phenomenon in Hinduism. In fact in some ways the very nature of Hinduism is to be continuously adaptive and reformist. Yet the nineteenth-century reform movement was in general distinguished from previous Hindu reform by a cluster of new characteristics. It became closely conjoined to a political movement, and consequently sought to influence political authority, administration, and legislation. This political movement became very soon an all-India nationalist movement, and reform acquired a nationalist flavour and an all-India extension. Whereas previously social reform was inextricably interwoven with religious motivation and religious reform, in the nineteenth century the relationship of the two oscillated, and sometimes secular and rationalistic motives were the decisive ones, though in fact the century did produce a few reformers who remained totally within the traditional pattern, and whose influence on the period remained insignificant. Among them the most noteworthy are Swami Narayana of Gujarat, initiator of a sect bearing his name, and Mahatma Ramalingam of Tamil Nadu.

The reformers themselves had no doubts as to the main stimulants of this new spirit. The British administration, English education, and European literature brought to India a constellation of fresh ideas which constituted a challenge to the new intellectuals. Rationalism as the basis for ethical thinking, the idea of human progress and evolution, the possibility of ‘scientifically’ engineering social change, the concept of natural rights connected with individualism, were all alien to traditional society. An equally strong influence was exerted by the ideas and the work of the Christian missionaries. Although some later nationalist writers tend to discount this influence, the nineteenth-century reformers themselves, starting with Ram Mohan Roy, did not hesitate to give credit where it was due, and acknowledged their indebtedness in no uncertain terms, even while vigorously opposing certain aspects of missionary activity.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, India had already produced a small new social group, the English-educated intelligentsia, mostly closely associated with British administration or British trade. It was amongst these people that several ideas of reform first arose and constant contact with Britishers and European ideas made them look upon some social and religious characteristics of their own society with horror and disgust. Social reform in this first stage was mostly prompted by the desire of these people to cope with the difficulties which they experienced themselves and which were experienced too by others belonging to their European-influenced group. There was not as yet any concern for the mass of the people, or any desire to transform the structure of society at large. What they wanted was to reshape their lives according to the new standards and values they were discovering. They sought to clarify their own ideas, and propagate them among their kindred intelligentsia. Thus, this first stage was a time when the reformer was almost exclusively concerned with his own group, a time also when political concern was inceptive and when it was generally held that personal social reform needed to be based upon the solid foundation of religious reform.

Bengal was first to undergo significant British influence and to produce the new English-educated group. By the early 1800s a crystallization of different reactions to Western influence was noticed, and there emerge three distinct groups, the radicals, the reformers, and the conservatives. Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833) was the first great modern reformer, and has for good reason been called ‘The Father of Modern India’. In the religious sphere Ram Mohan’s main target of attack was the Hindu system of idolization, its mythology and cult. He proposed as an alternative a deistic type of theism, strongly influenced by European deism and the ideology of the Unitarians. As a social reformer, Ram Mohan’s interest was mainly in the appalling condition of women in Hindu society, an interest that was to dominate the social reform movement for many decades. He is rightly famous for his long and successful campaign for the abolition of sati, the self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, and he fought incessantly against child marriage and for female education. The crowning achievement of Ram Mohan’s organizational efforts was the foundation of the Brahmo Sabha (later known as Brahmo Samaj) in 1828. The Socio-Religious Reform movements of the 19th century in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab aimed at checking the influence of Christian Missionaries. The missionaries wished to convert Indians to Christianity. They also wished to purge Hindu society of social evils such as Sati and infanticide. The aim of Brahmo Samaj was to save middle class families of Bengal from adverse effects of Christianity.

After the death of Ram Mohan Roy, Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905) took over its leadership and gave it a new direction. He drew up a declaration of faith, established a theological school, sent out the first Brahmo missionaries, and created a new liturgy, the ‘Brahmo Rites’. He himself was inclined towards the contemplative and the bhakti aspect of Hinduism, and averse to Ram Mohan’s rationalism. With a stress on devotion, ethical duties, and the near-Vedic but non-idolatrous Brahma rites, the Samaj moved closer to the mainstream of Hinduism, as it grew quickly in numbers.

Later with Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-84) a new wind started to blow in the Samaj. He was an iconoclastic reformer, repudiating all Hindu cults, rejecting caste and the seclusion of women. In religion he had a new ‘universalistic’ tendency, with strong leanings towards Christianity. During this time Bengal also produced the scholar Iswara Chandra Vidyasagar (1820-91) who took up the widow remarriage movement, the first social reform cause that was taken up all over the country, and who saw it to a successful conclusion. The reform he advocated and saw become law, namely that a high-caste widow could legally remarry, affected few individuals and in fact was taken advantage of by very few for many years to come. Nevertheless, the widow remarriage movement was very important because it became the inspiration of other reform movements all over the country.

The growing religious and social reform awareness started in Maharashtra from 1840. In this early stage, Gopal Hari Deshmukh (1823-92), known as Lokahita-wadi, denounced loudly that typical feature of Maharashtra, the absolute intellectual and moral dominance of Brahmans over Hindu life. His friend and collaborator Jotiba Govind Phule (1827-90), of low caste, took up this fight against brahmanic oppression in his voluminous prose and poetic works, and gave it concrete form in his organization for the uplift of the low castes, the Satyasodhak Samaj. In 1867 Maharashtra brought forth its own organization of religious and social reform, the Prarthana Samaj. The theism of the Prarthana Samaj was similar to that of its Bengali counterpart, but it was consciously linked with the bhakti tradition of the Maharashtrian saints. They invoked their own medieval bhakti tradition as another reform movement that was evolutionary, not revolutionary. They also had a different attitude towards the connection between religious and social reform.

Another important figure of Indian Socio Religious reform movement was Dayananda Saraswati (1824-83) who in 1875 published his major work the Satyarth Prakash and founded his reform society, the Arya Samaj. Dayananda’s theological vision was one that emerged neither from a personal mysticism nor from Western ideas, but from the intimate observation of the corrupt Hinduism of his day. He attacked polytheism, idolatry, and the many superstitious beliefs and rites connected with them, and the stranglehold of the brahmans on sacred lore and religious practice. He had the vision of a primeval monotheism, above the paraphernalia and hostilities of all human creeds. According to him, this religion was in fact the original Vedic religion, which was contained in the four Vedas. It was his aim to propagate the truth of that religion, to reinstate it in its purity, and thereby to reinstate the Indian people in their forgotten glory. Thus Dayananda’s religion, whilst denouncing much of contemporary Hinduism, kept close to orthodoxy in several basic ways: belief in the Vedas, and in karma and transmigration, and allegiance to the six darshanas and to the various Hindu names for the one God.

From 1880 two important tendencies which had been stirring in the previous decades occupied the Indian scene: nationalism and political action. From now on individuals and groups openly identified themselves with an Indian nation, a new concept in Indian history. This predominance of nationalism and politics now began to exert influence on the ideas of religious and social reform which had previously prevailed. Nationalism itself developed two patterns, a religious one and a secular one, and each school assigned a different place to social reform.

Two early outstanding examples of the new religious nationalism are Bankim and Tilak. It is very striking how the religious nationalism of both in fact had deep provincial roots, and may be seen as Bengali and Maharashtrian nationalism respectively. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-94) found Bengal divided between the traditionalist orthodox and the progressive reformers. His religion combines the humanism of Positivism with the activist interpretation of the Krishna myth and of the Bengali cult of the Mother Goddess. His novels in particular awoke in the Bengalis, first the middle class, and later the masses, a self-confidence and pride in their language and their religion. Another personality from Maharashtra, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1857-1920) took initiative to promote Hinduism as the only basis of this new spirit. He also inaugurated new Hindu festivals, the Ganapati festival and the Sivaji festival, thus reaching the populace with his ideas of Hindu nationalistic activism, instilling in them a pride in their glorious Maharashtrian past. He advocated the severance of social reform and political agitation.

It was in the 1880s that the social reform movement in India at last became organised on a national basis. It was a Bombay Parsi, Behramji Malabari (1853-1912), who launched the issue that set social reform on its way to becoming consciously national: the campaign for the legal checking of infant marriage by an Age of Consent Bill. Further in 1892 the Madras Hindu Social Reform Association came into being, led mostly by radical reformers. In Bengal, where social change had advanced rapidly, social reform went into a depression. Reformations like uplifting of women and widows, society, religion, castes etc. It was in the north that the first new caste organizations arose. Castes were traditionally well organized and held effective power over their members. What was new was that associations of related castes came into being. These were voluntary bodies to which caste leaders attached their own groups. Their prime concern was the welfare of the members, but their programme included many of the ideals and principles advocated by social reformers, so that the National Social Conference officially acknowledged them as reform societies.

In 1887 the Kayastha Conference was formed in Lucknow, comprising the group of subcastes. The early split of the organization into a reformist and an orthodox section testifies to the eager reformist ideas of a good number of its leaders. Another important organization was that of the Vaishyas, established in 1891. In this period the caste organizations kept away from politics, but in the twentieth century they assumed in several areas of India very great political importance, in fact frequently dominating the political game.

The first two decades of the twentieth century saw Indian politics engaged in the great debate between the moderates and the extremists, and in their struggle for control of the Congress. The development of the social reform movement, however, was intimately connected with that debate and that struggle. The main objections of the extremists against the moderate leadership were two: that in aims and methods the moderates were completely British-oriented and therefore slow and unpatriotic; and that they did not reach down to the mass of the people. The extremists’ advocated militancy based on national and religious identification and wanted involvement of the masses.

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century social reform was dominated by the nationalistic secularists. The revivalist extremists naturally opposed this approach vehemently, as being denationalizing and degrading because it was based on European ideas and aspired to European models. So an intense debate between the reformers and the revivalists ensued. The revivalists succeeded in demonstrating that a purely nationalistic motive and a Hindu model could be the inspiration for whatever reform the reformer envisaged. But they proved more than that: they showed that Hindu nationalism and an ideal Hindu society had a mass appeal that was absent in Western-type reform. These arguments were irresistible, and the reform movement as a whole changed its image and its model in the direction of revivalist Hindu nationalism, and swerved towards a concern for the mass of the people.

Moreover, under the impact of British rule India was transformed into one administrative unit with the same legal system all over the country. The country has also become united economically as one unit with the development of all India’s internal trade and foreign trade. This action was greatly helped by the development of new means of transport such as railways. It also included communication system such as new postal system and telegraph. This administrative and economic unification greatly contributed to the generation of national consciousness. The very existence of foreign rule acted as a unifying factor. All over the country people saw that they were suffering at the hands of the same enemy, and that is British rule.

By the 1920s the Indian religious and social reform movement had lost its peculiar identity as an important and distinct phenomenon of Indian life. Among the many reasons of this, one was the appearance on the national stage of Mahatma Gandhi. Another important factor was that agitation for social reform dispersed itself more and more into the practical business of organizing social service in different special fields, such as the education and uplift of women by the All-India Women’s Conference, village development projects, the organization of the depressed classes, and the foundation of labour unions. But, in the final instance, these new attitudes and approaches, while pushing ‘social reform’ as a specifically identifiable label into the background, owe their very existence to those leaders and organizations that, from Ram Mohan Roy to Lajpat Rai, worked for the emergence of national identity and social reform, and for their successful integration.