Brahmo Samaj

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The Brahmo Samaj is a Bengali reform movement of monotheistic worship, founded in Calcutta in 1828, that set out to strip Hindu practice of image, sacrifice, and priesthood and to ground religion instead on the worship of one formless God. Its founder, Ram Mohan Roy, was a Bengali scholar at home in Sanskrit, Persian, and English, who read the Upanishads as teaching a single absolute beyond all representation and argued that the later cult of images was a corruption of that earlier insight. The body he established — first the Brahmo Sabha, soon the Brahmo Samaj — held services of scripture, sermon, and hymn, without idol or sacrificial fire.

Roy’s claim was at once devotional and polemical. He read the Brahman of the Upanishads as the one God whom reason could acknowledge, set that reading against image-worship as a falling-away, and was prepared to argue the case on the same rational ground his British contemporaries used against “superstition.” He campaigned as well against suttee, the burning of widows, and his religious reform and his social reform were of a piece: a single effort to recover what he held to be the rational core of an older faith.

After Roy’s death the movement passed to Debendranath Tagore — father of the poet Rabindranath — who gave it institutional shape and a clearer Vedantic footing, and then to Keshub Chandra Sen, whose more emotional, devotional, and Christian-inflected leadership drew the movement toward a universal theism open to all scriptures. The two impulses did not hold together. The Samaj divided: an older wing kept to the Upanishadic and Brahminical inheritance, while a reforming wing pressed further against caste and custom, and later split again. What had begun as one reform became a family of congregations differing over how much of the inherited tradition to keep.

The Brahmo Samaj is often read as the first of the modern Indian reform movements, and its mark on later Hindu thought is real — its insistence on one formless God, on ethics over rite, and on a scripture read critically rather than performed shaped much of what came after. The resemblance to contemporary European movements of liberal religion is genuine, and the contact was direct: Roy corresponded with Unitarians, Sen toured England. The likeness is worth following, though it can mislead, for the Samaj also held itself the recovery of something indigenous and ancient — not an import but a return. Its worship was small in scale and large in consequence: a handful of congregations whose argument about what religion essentially is outlived them.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, SBE, 1884)

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