Roy in Two Ideas
the essentialsRational monotheism
The Upaniṣads teach one formless God; idol worship is a later corruption.
Against satī
His campaign helped bring the 1829 ban on widow-burning.
Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) was a Bengali scholar and social reformer, often called the “father of modern India” and of the Bengal Renaissance. A brilliant linguist who studied Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and English, and who read the Qur’an, the Bible and the Upaniṣads, he argued that the original religion of the The Upaniṣads was a rational monotheism, worship of a single formless God, and that idol-worship and many customs of contemporary Hinduism were later corruptions. He translated several Upaniṣads into Bengali and English, founded the Brahmo Sabhā (1828, later the Brahmo Samāj), a reformed Hindu movement of congregational worship, and campaigned against satī (widow-burning) — which the British banned in 1829 — polygamy, child marriage and caste rigidity, and for women’s property rights, Western scientific education and freedom of the press. He travelled to England in 1830 as an envoy of the Mughal emperor, who gave him the title “Raja”, and died in Bristol in 1833.
Curiosities
did you know?- He knew Bengali, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Hebrew and Greek.
- He died in Bristol, England, where his tomb stands at Arnos Vale cemetery.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Can a tradition be reformed by returning to its oldest texts?
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsGitanjali
Tagore’s 1912 collection of devotional prose-poems, translated by himself from Bengali, which won the 1913 Nobel Prize — intimate songs to a God found in nature, in human labour, in love and in death.
Īśā Upaniṣad
The shortest of the principal Upaniṣads — eighteen verses that begin “All this is pervaded by the Lord” and reconcile renunciation with action, knowledge with works, and the one with the many.
Dayānanda Sarasvatī
The Gujarati ascetic (1824–1883) who founded the Ārya Samāj with the cry “Back to the Vedas!” — rejecting idol-worship, caste by birth, and the Purāṇas, and calling for a rational Vedic religion, education for women and the reconversion of those who had left Hinduism.
Kena Upaniṣad
The “By whom?” Upaniṣad — by whom is the mind sent forth, the breath set going, speech uttered? Its answer is the paradox that Brahman is known only by those who know they do not know it — and a story of the gods humbled by a blade of grass.
Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad
The Upaniṣad of the “shaven head” — it distinguishes the “lower knowledge” of the Vedas and sciences from the “higher knowledge” of the imperishable, compares ritual to leaky boats, gives the image of two birds on one tree, and India its national motto, “Truth alone triumphs”.
Summa Theologiae
Aquinas’s unfinished masterpiece — a systematic theology in some 3,000 articles, each a model of fair argument, synthesizing Aristotle and Christian revelation.