Social and Religious Reform, Education and the Press

In western India an early secret society, the Paramahansa Mandali (1849), had already attacked caste. Inspired by a visit from Keshub Chandra Sen, Atmaram Pandurang founded the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay in 1867. Its members, among them M. G. Ranade and R. G. Bhandarkar, kept close to the devotional tradition of the Maharashtrian saints and put their energy into social work — inter-caste dining, widow remarriage, women’s education, the uplift of the depressed classes. Ranade also founded the Widow Remarriage Association (1861), the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (1870) and, with others, the Indian National Social Conference (1887). D. K. Karve opened a home for widows near Poona (1896) and founded the Indian Women’s University (1916), later SNDT.

Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824–83), born Mool Shankar in Gujarat, founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay on 10 April 1875; its centre soon shifted to Lahore (1877), and it grew strongest in the Punjab and western United Provinces. His book Satyarth Prakash set out the programme: "Back to the Vedas" — the Vedas alone were infallible, and later accretions such as idol worship, polytheism, ritualism, child marriage and caste by birth were to be rejected. The Samaj promoted widow remarriage and women’s education, and its shuddhi movement reconverted people to Hinduism. After Dayanand’s death it divided (1893) into the DAV (Dayanand Anglo-Vedic) group, which opened the DAV school at Lahore (1886) under Lala Hansraj with an English curriculum, and the Gurukul group of Swami Shraddhanand, who founded the Gurukul Kangri near Haridwar (1902) for Vedic education.

Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–86), a priest at the Dakshineswar temple near Calcutta, taught through his own experience that all religions are paths to the same God. His disciple Narendranath Datta — Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) — carried this message to the world at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago (11 September 1893), and on his return founded the Ramakrishna Mission on 1 May 1897, with its monastery at Belur. The Mission joined Vedantic spirituality to service of the poor — famine relief, hospitals, schools — on the principle that serving man is serving God ("daridra narayana"). Vivekananda’s call to Indian youth to shed weakness and fear made him an inspiration to later nationalists, though he himself kept the Mission out of politics.

The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by the Russian Madame H. P. Blavatsky and the American Colonel H. S. Olcott. They came to India in 1879 and set up the headquarters at Adyar, near Madras, in 1882. Theosophy praised ancient Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, and Western admirers praising India gave educated Indians self-confidence. Annie Besant, a British socialist and freethinker of Irish descent, joined in 1889, came to India in 1893, founded the Central Hindu College at Benares (1898) — which became the nucleus of the Banaras Hindu University (1916) founded by Madan Mohan Malaviya — became president of the Society in 1907, and in 1916 launched a Home Rule League.

After 1857 the British treated Muslims with particular suspicion, and the Muslim upper classes, who had lost Persian as the language of office in 1837, were slow to take up English education. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–98), a judicial officer loyal to the British in 1857, set out to change both. He founded the Scientific Society (Ghazipur, 1864) to translate Western works into Urdu, the journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq (1870), and the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) School at Aligarh in 1875, which became a college in 1877 and the Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. He argued that the Quran and modern science could not conflict, and he criticised polygamy and purdah in their stricter forms. Politically he urged Muslims to stay away from the Congress, founding the Muhammadan Educational Conference (1886) instead.

The Samajs were led largely by upper-caste, English-educated men. A second wave of reform came from below, led by people of the castes that suffered most, and it attacked caste not as a corruption of religion but as a system of power. Jyotirao (Jyotiba) Phule (1827–90), of the mali (gardener) caste in Poona, opened a school for girls in 1848 with his wife Savitribai Phule, who taught in it and became a pioneer of women’s education. In Gulamgiri ("Slavery", 1873) he described Brahmanical dominance as a form of slavery, and on 24 September 1873 he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj ("Society of Truth-Seekers") to free the lower castes and women from priestly control. He was given the title "Mahatma" in 1888.

In Kerala, where caste rules included untouchability at a distance, Sri Narayana Guru (1856–1928), from the Ezhava community, consecrated a Shiva idol at Aruvippuram in 1888 — a direct challenge to the Brahmin monopoly of temple ritual. The Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana (SNDP) Yogam, founded in 1903 with Dr. Palpu and the poet Kumaran Asan, spread his message of "One caste, one religion, one God for man". Ayyankali (1863–1941), from the Pulaya community, defied the ban on lower castes using public roads by driving a bullock cart through them (1893), founded the Sadhu Jana Paripalana Sangham (1907) and led struggles for the right of Pulaya children to attend school.

B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) gave the anti-caste struggle a modern political and legal form. He started the paper Mooknayak (1920), founded the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (1924), led the Mahad Satyagraha (1927) to assert the right of untouchables to draw water from the public Chavdar tank, and publicly burnt the Manusmriti on 25 December 1927. He attended all three Round Table Conferences, demanded separate electorates for the depressed classes, and after the Poona Pact (1932) accepted reserved seats instead. He founded the Independent Labour Party (1936) and the Scheduled Castes Federation (1942). Gandhi’s approach was different — he called untouchables Harijans, founded the Harijan Sevak Sangh (1932) and saw untouchability as a sin Hindus must expiate, without rejecting varna; the two men’s debate is itself a frequent subject of questions.

The colonial state legislated on social questions cautiously — usually only when Indian reformers had built a case from the scriptures and public opinion, and almost never after 1857, when it feared another revolt. The landmark laws are few, and each has a name, a year and a reformer attached to it.

• Savitribai Phule — taught at the Poona girls’ school from 1848; ran a home for widows’ children; died in 1897 nursing plague patients.
• Pandita Ramabai — Sanskrit scholar; founded the Arya Mahila Samaj (1882) in Poona and the Sharada Sadan (1889) for widows in Bombay; wrote The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887); later the Mukti Mission at Kedgaon.
• Tarabai Shinde — her Marathi essay Stri Purush Tulana (1882) compared the standards applied to women and men, a sharp early feminist critique.
• Anandibai Joshi — the first Indian woman to qualify in Western medicine (MD, Philadelphia, 1886); Kadambini Ganguly and Chandramukhi Basu — first women graduates of Calcutta University (1883); Kadambini later practised as a doctor and spoke at the Congress session of 1890.
• Rukhmabai — refused to join a husband married to her in childhood; the court case (1884–88) fed the age-of-consent debate; she later became a doctor.
• Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain — wrote the utopian story Sultana’s Dream (1905) and founded a girls’ school in Calcutta (1911).
• Women’s organisations — Bharat Stree Mahamandal (1910, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani), the Women’s Indian Association (1917, Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, Dorothy Jinarajadasa) and the All India Women’s Conference (1927).

At first the Company patronised Oriental learning, partly to win the goodwill of Indian elites and partly to train officials in Indian law: Warren Hastings founded the Calcutta Madrasa (1781), Jonathan Duncan the Sanskrit College at Benares (1791), and Wellesley the College of Fort William (1800) to teach Indian languages to young civil servants. The Charter Act of 1813 set aside Rs 1 lakh a year for education but did not say what kind. In the 1820s and 1830s a sharp controversy divided the Orientalists, who wanted the money spent on Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian learning, from the Anglicists, who wanted Western knowledge taught in English. Missionaries such as William Carey at Serampore pressed for vernacular schooling, and Indian reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy asked for English and science.

Wood’s Despatch of 19 July 1854, sent by Sir Charles Wood, President of the Board of Control, is called the "Magna Carta of English education in India". It recommended: a Department of Public Instruction in each province; universities at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras on the model of the University of London — they were set up in 1857; a graded system of vernacular primary schools in villages, Anglo-vernacular high schools and colleges in district towns; grants-in-aid to private schools; training of teachers; and attention to women’s education and vocational instruction. English was to be the medium of higher education, the vernaculars of primary education.

India’s first newspaper was the English weekly Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (also called the Calcutta General Advertiser), started by James Augustus Hicky on 29 January 1780; it attacked Warren Hastings and was seized in 1782. Indian-language journalism began in the reform movement — the Serampore missionaries’ Bengali Samachar Darpan (1818), and Ram Mohan Roy’s Bengali Sambad Kaumudi (1821) and Persian Mirat-ul-Akhbar (1822). In the second half of the century nearly every nationalist leader ran a paper, and the press became the main school of political opinion.