Person · Gujarati reformer & journalist · India
Karsandas Mulji
Also known as Karsandas Mulji, Karsondas Mulji
Gujarati Bhatia reformer (1832-1871), educated at Elphinstone Institution Bombay, who edited the Gujarati reform weekly Rast Goftar from 1860 and challenged the Vallabhacharya Pushti Marg Maharajas' sexual conduct in the 1862 Maharaj Libel Case. The case was brought by Jadunathji Maharaj for an 1860 article in Satya Prakash; the Bombay Supreme Court trial exposed the Maharaj system of priestly sexual access to female devotees and the plaintiff's own practice, and the judgment in Mulji's favour on 22 April 1862 became the Bombay reform movement's most consequential early legal victory. Mulji later served as the deputy diwan of Rajkot and died there of smallpox at thirty-nine.
- Date
- 1832–1871
- Function
- Social reform & movement
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; INC proceedings and contemporary memoirs.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The Maharaj Libel trial lasted twenty-four days with 32 witnesses and became the Bombay Gujarati reform movement's defining case. Mulji's own writings — including the Gujarati Travels in England (1866), one of the earliest substantial Gujarati travel-books — described his year in London as part of the delegation accompanying the Nizam of Hyderabad's envoy. He was a close associate of Dadabhai Naoroji and Behramji Malabari in the Bombay Parsi-Gujarati reform circle.
About the place
Placed at Bombay where he lived and worked.
Connections (3)
- Disciple ofDadabhai Naoroji
Karsandas Mulji was Dadabhai Naoroji's close associate in the Bombay Parsi-Gujarati reform circle of the 1850s and 1860s — Naoroji was Mulji's teacher at Elphinstone Institution in the late 1840s and remained his political mentor through the Maharaj Libel Case and after. The Rast Goftar Gujarati reform weekly that Mulji edited was founded by Naoroji in 1851, and the two together ran the early phase of the Gujarati reform press from a Parsi-Hindu partnership that defined Bombay nineteenth-century public culture.
- Educated atElphinstone College, Bombay
Karsandas Mulji was a student at Elphinstone Institution Bombay in the late 1840s where Dadabhai Naoroji taught him and where his Gujarati reform orientation was formed. The Institution — which became Elphinstone College in 1856 — produced in the same decades Ranade, Mehta, Tyabji, Wacha and most of the Bombay reform generation; Mulji's generation of Hindu Gujarati students from the Institution formed the reform circle that staged the Maharaj Libel Case of 1862.
- Based atMumbai
Karsandas Mulji ran his Gujarati reform journalism from Bombay through the 1850s and 1860s — the Satya Prakash weekly, the Rast Goftar co-editorship with Naoroji, and the 1862 Maharaj Libel Case before the Bombay Supreme Court. His Bombay reform circle around the Parsi-Gujarati Elphinstone alumni gave the city its central nineteenth-century reform geography.