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1828-1829 CEGeneral source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Ram Mohan Roy Founds the Brahmo Samaj and Ends Sati

A Bengali scholar argues that Hindu scripture never actually required widows to burn, and the British agree

On the timeline · around 1828-1829 CE · Early Modern and Colonial EncountersEarly Modern and Colonial EncountersModern and Global HinduismRam Mohan Roy Founds the Brahmo Samaj and Ends Sati170017251750177518001825185018751900

Quick facts

Brahmo Samaj founded
1828, Calcutta
Sati declared illegal
December 1829, under Lord William Bentinck
Roy's method
Argued reform from within Hindu scripture, not against it
Reputation
"Father of the Indian Renaissance"

What happened

In 1828, the Bengali reformer Ram Mohan Roy helped found the Brahmo Samaj, a reform society that held weekly congregational meetings patterned after Protestant services and promoted education and greater social mobility for Hindu women, seeking to strip away what Roy considered later, unscriptural additions to Hindu practice, including image worship and caste restriction, while retaining a rationalist monotheism he argued was closer to the Upanishads. Roy had spent years campaigning against sati, the practice of widow immolation, arguing that Hindu scripture did not require it; in November 1829 he circulated a memorandum making that case to British colonial officials, and the following month the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, and his council enacted a regulation declaring sati illegal and criminally punishable in British courts.

Why it matters

Roy's Brahmo Samaj was the first major organized Hindu reform movement to argue, from within Hindu scripture itself, that specific traditional practices were later corruptions rather than core religious requirements, a method of internal reform that every subsequent Hindu reform movement, from the Arya Samaj to Vivekananda's Ramakrishna Mission, would use in its own way, and Roy's role in ending state-tolerated sati made him, in later reputation, the Father of the Indian Renaissance.

How we know

Roy's arguments against sati survive in his own published pamphlets and in the November 1829 memorandum he submitted to British officials; the legal abolition of sati is recorded in the December 1829 regulation issued by Bentinck's council, both of which are documented in colonial administrative records and modern historical scholarship on the reform movement.

Sources

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Part of a timelineHistory of Hinduism26 events · Hymns memorized for three thousand years without writing them down, a philosophy that a self and the universe are the same thing, and a religion with no founder that became the world's third largestView all →