Ram Mohun Roy

Ram Mohan Roy and David Hare found Hindu College, Calcutta, on January 20, 1817, offering instructions in Western languages and subjects.

The British East India Company's education policies in the 1830s tend to reinforce existing lines of socioeconomic division in society rather than bring general liberation from ignorance and superstition.

Whereas the Hindu English-educated minority spearheads many social and religious reforms either in direct response to government policies or in reaction to them, Muslims as a group had initially failed to do so, a position they now endeavor to reverse.

Western-educated Hindu elites seek to rid Hinduism of its much criticized social evils: idolatry, the caste system. child marriage, and sati.

Religious and social activist Ram Mohan Rov (1772-1833), who founds the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Brahma) in 1828, displays a readiness to synthesize themes taken from Christianity, Deism, and Indian monism, while other individuals in Bombay and Madras initiate  literary and debating societies that give them a forum for open discourse.

The exemplary educational attainments and skillful use of the press by these early reformers enhances the possibility of effecting broad reforms without compromising societal values or religious practices.

Education in early British India had for the most part been left to the charge of Indians or to private agents who imparted instruction in the vernaculars, but by 1813, the British had become convinced of their "duty" to awaken the Indians from intellectual slumber by exposing them to British literary traditions, earmarking a paltry sum for the cause.

Controversy between two groups of Europeans—the "Orientalists" and "Anglicists"—over how the money was to be spent had prevented them from formulating any consistent policy until 1835 when William Cavendish Bentinck, the governor-general from 1828 to 1835, finally breaks the impasse by resolving to introduce the English language as the medium of instruction.

English replaces Persian in public administration and education.

Ram Mohan Roy (also written as Rammohun Roy, or Raja Ram Mohun Roy) had been an accomplished linguist employed by the British East India Company until 1815 when he began his writing career.

He has since won fame for his translation of the Upanishads but is most well known for his efforts to abolish the practice of sati, a Hindu funeral custom in which the widow sacrifices herself on her husband’s funeral pyre.

He has also made people aware that polygamy, which is extremely prevalent in the Bengal of his time, is in fact contrary to law.

Challenging the authority of Hindu priesthood, he has pointed out that it is only under specific circumstances (e.g., if a wife is infertile or has an incurable disease) that a man is permitted to take a second wife while the first is still alive.

Roy founds the Brahmo Samaj, or Brahma Society, one of the first Indian socio-religious reform movements, in Calcutta in 1828.

The new religious movement, which is in some ways a fusion of Indian and Christian religions, is intended to restore Hinduism’s original purity.

Brahmo Samaj, which literally means the society of worshipers of One True God, challenges Hindus to distance themselves from the baseline Buddhist principles of idol veneration, karma, and the transmigration of souls, as well as to modify the caste system and to reject the institution of widow suicide.

Britain launches a successful campaign in Bengal, led by English Baptist missionary and linguist William Carey, to stamp out the practice of the “suttee”, the ostensibly voluntary self-immolation of the widow on her husband’s pyre. (In practice, a widow who refuses self-immolation is often forcibly thrown on the pyre by relatives and friends of her husband to forestall the visitation of plague or death upon the village).

The practice is abolished on December 4, 1829, when, in the face of fierce opposition, British Lord William Bentinck, who had been appointed Governor-General of India in 1827, carries a regulation declaring that all who abet suttee in India are guilty of culpable homicide.

Bentinck’s principal concern is to turn around the loss-making British East India Company, in order to ensure that the British government will renew its charter.

The British authorities also begin the active suppression of the fraternity of the Thugee, professional assassins and religious fanatics devoted to Kali, one of the Hindu Tantric Goddesses.

Bentinck engages in an extensive range of cost-cutting measures, earning the lasting enmity of many military men whose wages are cut.

Although his financial management of India is quite impressive, his modernizing projects also include a policy of westernization, influenced by the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, which is more controversial.

Reforming the court system, he makes English, rather than Persian, the language of the higher courts and encourages western-style education for Indians in order to provide more educated Indians for service in the British bureaucracy.

Although his reforms meet little resistance among native Indians at the time, it will later be argued that they bring on the dissatisfaction that ultimately leads to the Great Mutiny of 1857.

His reputation for ruthless financial efficiency and disregard for Indian culture leads to the much-repeated story that he had once planned to demolish the Taj Mahal and sell off the marble.

According to Bentinck's biographer John Rosselli, the story arose from Bentinck's fund-raising sale of discarded marble from Agra Fort and of the metal from a famous but obsolete Agra cannon.

The General Assembly's Institution (today the Scottish Church College) one of the pioneering institutions that ushers in the Bengal Renaissance, is founded in Calcutta on July 13, 1830, by Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Alexander Duff, the first overseas missionary of the Church of Scotland to India.

Ram Mohun Roy, having turned to secular education after establishing the Brahmo Samaj, has asked the British to improve the teaching of the sciences in India.

He dies in September of 1833 in the midst of his efforts to plot a new course of self-determination for his compatriots.