Person · Brahmo reformer · India
Rammohan Roy
Also known as Rammohan Roy, Raja Rammohan Roy, Ram Mohan Roy, Rammohun Roy
Nineteenth-century Bengali reformer who founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, campaigned successfully for the abolition of sati by Lord Bentinck in 1829, promoted Western education and English-language instruction in the Hindu College of 1817 that he co-founded with David Hare, and argued in Vedantic terms for monotheism and against image worship. He went to England in 1830 representing the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II and died at Bristol in 1833; his tomb in Arnos Vale cemetery is the one unmistakably Indian presence in English nineteenth-century religious history. The Bengal renaissance begins with his writings.
- Date
- 1772–1833
- Function
- Social reform & movement
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He corresponded with Thomas Jefferson, read Hebrew and Arabic as well as Sanskrit and Persian, and wrote Vedanta tracts in English for European audiences. His Precepts of Jesus, Guide to Peace and Happiness (1820) extracted Jesus's ethical teaching from the Trinitarian theology, which was far enough from Christian orthodoxy that the Serampore Mission tried to censor him for it. His Bristol memorial statue was commissioned by the Brahmo Samaj in 1997.
About the place
Placed at Calcutta where he founded the Brahmo Sabha and the Hindu College.
Connections (4)
- FoundedPresidency College, Calcutta
Rammohan Roy co-founded Hindu College at Calcutta in 1817 with David Hare, Prasannakumar Tagore and others — the subcontinent's first modern Western-style college and the institutional centre of the Bengal renaissance. Roy's own argument for the college was that English-language learning and Western science and reason were the pedagogical instruments through which Hindu society would reform itself; the college later renamed Presidency College in 1855 remained his most consequential institutional legacy.
- Affiliated withSerampore & the Mission Press
Rammohan Roy worked closely with the Serampore mission from the 1810s onward — his Precepts of Jesus (1820) was printed on the Serampore press and he corresponded with William Carey and Joshua Marshman on comparative religion. The relationship was difficult: the missionaries treated him as a potential convert and he treated them as colleagues in Hindu reform; neither party was satisfied, but the Precepts and Roy's exchange with the Serampore Baptists on Trinitarianism are canonical early documents of modern Indian-Christian intellectual exchange.
- Based atKolkata
Rammohan Roy ran his reform programme from Calcutta from about 1815 — founding the Atmiya Sabha in 1815, then the Brahmo Sabha in 1828 that became the Brahmo Samaj. His Jorasanko and Simla neighbourhood houses were the Bengal renaissance's early centres, and his campaign against sati — which cost him his family's traditional livelihood but succeeded in the 1829 Bentinck regulation — was conducted from a Calcutta base. He sailed from Calcutta to England in 1830 and never returned.
- PrecursorBelur Math
Rammohan Roy's Brahmo Sabha of 1828 — which became the Brahmo Samaj — is the direct institutional ancestor of the nineteenth-century Hindu reform movement that produced the Ramakrishna Mission at Belur Math six decades later. Vivekananda, as a young Narendranath, attended Brahmo Samaj meetings in Calcutta in the 1870s before meeting Ramakrishna in 1881. The two institutions represent sequential phases of Bengal reform: Roy's Vedantic monotheism and Vivekananda's practical Vedanta.