Socio-Religious Reform Movements in 19th Century India

The nineteenth century saw a wave of reform movements across India that challenged deeply entrenched social and religious practices: sati, child marriage, the ban on widow remarriage, restrictions on women's education, and caste-based discrimination. The spread of print, books, newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets, made these debates cheaper and more accessible than ever before, letting ordinary Indians read, argue, and organise around them in a way that hadn't been possible in the manuscript age. What follows is the core cast of reformers and organisations UPSC repeatedly tests.

Raja Rammohun Roy and the Brahmo Samaj

Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833) founded a reform association called the Brahmo Sabha in Calcutta, later known as the Brahmo Samaj. Well versed in Sanskrit, Persian, and several other languages, Rammohun used his scholarship to argue that practices like sati had no sanction in the ancient texts, a strategy of finding textual support against a harmful custom that later reformers repeatedly copied. His campaign contributed to sati being banned in 1829. He also translated an old Buddhist text critical of caste, extending his reform agenda beyond religion into the social order.

Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar and widow remarriage

Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar used the same ancient-text strategy to argue that widows could remarry. His campaign led British officials to pass a law permitting widow remarriage in 1856. The movement then spread beyond Bengal: Veerasalingam Pantulu formed an association for widow remarriage in the Telugu-speaking areas of the Madras Presidency, and Swami Dayanand Saraswati's Arya Samaj also backed the cause in the north. Despite the new law, the actual number of widows who remarried stayed low, since conservative groups continued to oppose it socially even where it was now legal.

The Arya Samaj

Swami Dayanand Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in 1875, an organisation that attempted to reform Hinduism. Alongside its support for widow remarriage, the Arya Samaj established schools for girls in Punjab, part of a wider late-nineteenth-century push, alongside Vidyasagar in Calcutta and Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra, to get girls into formal education despite fears that schooling would corrupt them or take them away from domestic duties.

Caste reform: from the Prarthana Samaj to Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj

Several organisations directly targeted caste inequality. The Prarthana Samaj worked within the Bhakti tradition's belief in the spiritual equality of all castes, while the Paramhans Mandali, founded in Bombay in 1840, worked for the abolition of caste, with members meeting secretly to break caste taboos around food and touch. Regional movements followed the same pattern from within non-Brahman communities: the Satnami movement, founded by Ghasidas in central India, organised among leatherworkers; Haridas Thakur's Matua sect worked among Chandala cultivators in eastern Bengal; and in what is now Kerala, Shri Narayana Guru, a guru from the Ezhava caste, argued that all humankind belonged to one caste, summed up in his statement "oru jati, oru matam, oru daivam manushyanu" (one caste, one religion, one god for humankind).

The most vocal of these leaders was Jyotirao Phule (1827-1890), educated in schools run by Christian missionaries. Phule argued that Brahmans had wrongly claimed superiority as descendants of the Aryans, and that the "low" castes were the true original inhabitants of the land. He founded the Satyashodhak Samaj to propagate caste equality, and in 1873 published Gulamgiri ("Slavery"), dedicating it to the cause of ending caste oppression the way slavery had just been ended in America.

Women write about women

By the late nineteenth century, women were no longer just the subjects of reform, they were reformers themselves. Pandita Ramabai wrote about the oppression of upper-caste Hindu women under Hinduism and founded a widows' home at Poona to shelter and train widows to support themselves economically. Tarabai Shinde published Stripurushtulna ("A Comparison Between Women and Men"), a direct critique of the double standards Hindu society applied to widows. This momentum eventually fed into the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929, which set minimum marriage ages of 18 for men and 16 for women, later raised further to 21 and 18.

The exam angle: don't mix up Brahmo Samaj and Arya Samaj

UPSC frequently tests the difference between these two: the Brahmo Samaj (Rammohun Roy, 1828) was a monotheistic reform movement influenced by Western rationalism, opposed to idol worship and ritual, while the Arya Samaj (Dayanand Saraswati, 1875) called for a return "back to the Vedas," seeking to purify Hinduism of later accretions rather than move away from it. Both supported widow remarriage and women's education, which is exactly why questions rely on the founder-organisation-year triplet, not the cause, to test whether you actually know which is which.

Quick revision points

• Raja Rammohun Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha/Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta; sati was banned in 1829.
• Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar's campaign led to the Widow Remarriage Act of 1856.
• Swami Dayanand Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in 1875; it also supported widow remarriage and girls' education.
• The Paramhans Mandali (Bombay, 1840) and the Satyashodhak Samaj (Jyotirao Phule, 1873) both worked against caste discrimination; Phule's Gulamgiri was published in 1873.
• Pandita Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde were among the women who wrote and organised on their own behalf; the Child Marriage Restraint Act followed in 1929.

Once you can match each reformer to their organisation and year without hesitating, practise the linked questions from this chapter.