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Reformers of Bengal and western India, and the reform laws

Socio-religious reform movements · Part 1 / 2 · Fact-checked on 8 November 2026 · how we check

Written with AI from the sources listed at the bottom of this page, then fact-checked by a separate AI.

Why the reform movements arose; Raja Rammohun Roy, the abolition of sati (1829) and the Brahmo Samaj and its splits; Young Bengal; Vidyasagar and the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act (1856); the Paramahansa Mandali and the Prarthana Samaj; women's education and the reform laws up to the Age of Consent Act (1891); and the limits of early reform.

Over the 1800s a new class of educated Indians started asking whether practices treated for generations as religious duty were truly demanded by faith. English education, the printing press and a growing number of newspapers spread new ideas of reason and individual rights, while Christian missionaries criticised Hindu and Muslim practice and pushed Indians to defend or rethink their own traditions. Out of this pressure came the socio-religious reform movements. The movements split into two broad camps: one tested custom against reason and sought to cleanse faith of later additions, and the other, the revivalists, held up a golden age of the past as the pattern to return to. This part follows the first reformers of Bengal and western India and the laws they fought for; Part 2 takes up the revivalist, Muslim, Sikh, Parsi and anti-caste movements.

Raja Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) is usually seen as the first great figure of this movement. Learned in Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and English, he argued in his Persian work Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin that the worship of one God was the common core of all religions and that much of popular ritual and idol worship had no basis in reason. In Calcutta he founded the Atmiya Sabha in 1815 to discuss religious questions, translated parts of the Upanishads into Bengali and English to show that the old texts themselves taught monotheism, and set up a Vedanta College. He also supported English and scientific education and wrote on the rights of women and on freedom of the press. The Mughal emperor Akbar II gave him the title of Raja and sent him to England, where he died at Bristol in 1833.

Rammohun's best-known campaign was against Sati, the burning of a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He wrote tracts showing that the leading Hindu texts did not require it, and he organised petitions to the government. In 1829 the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, passed Bengal Regulation XVII, which declared sati illegal and made those who assisted in it liable to punishment as for culpable homicide. Orthodox Hindus in Calcutta formed the Dharma Sabha in 1830 to defend the practice and appealed to the Privy Council in London, but the appeal failed. Suppose a young widow in a Bengal village in 1830: under the new law, relatives or priests who pushed her towards the pyre could now be prosecuted. The episode set a pattern for later reform, in which Indian reformers built opinion and the colonial government passed the law.

In 1828 Rammohun founded the Brahmo Sabha, soon known as the Brahmo Samaj, a body for the worship of one formless God without idols or priests, open to all. After his death it was revived by Debendranath Tagore, who had set up the Tattvabodhini Sabha in 1839 and joined the Samaj in the early 1840s, giving it a clearer creed and discipline. The energetic Keshub Chandra Sen, who joined in 1857, wanted faster social change, such as intercaste marriage and an end to the sacred thread. The two leaders parted in 1866: Debendranath's group became the Adi Brahmo Samaj, and Keshub's the Brahmo Samaj of India. Keshub's campaign led to the Native Marriage Act of 1872, which allowed civil, intercaste marriage for those who declared they belonged to no recognised religion. When Keshub married his young daughter to the prince of Cooch Behar in 1878, against the age limits of that very Act, his followers broke away and formed the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj.

A more radical current appeared among the students of Hindu College in Calcutta. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, a young Anglo-Indian teacher there from 1826, encouraged his pupils to question everything, from religious authority to social custom, and to debate freely. His followers, known as Young Bengal, openly mocked orthodox practices, ate forbidden food and drank alcohol as a mark of freedom, and admired the French Revolution. Derozio was removed from the college in 1831 and died of cholera the same year, aged only twenty-two. Young Bengal did not become a mass movement: its defiance shocked more people than it persuaded, and it had little contact with ordinary people. Yet it spread the habit of rational inquiry, and several of its members later took part in public life, press debates and political associations.

Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891), a Sanskrit scholar and principal of the Sanskrit College in Calcutta, chose a different method: he fought custom with the authority of the scriptures themselves. Upper-caste Hindu widows, often married as children, were forbidden to remarry and lived hard lives of seclusion. Vidyasagar collected texts showing that the shastras permitted widow remarriage, wrote widely on the subject and gathered signatures for a petition. The result was the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856, which made such marriages legal and their children legitimate. He arranged and paid for several remarriages himself, though only a small number took place in his lifetime. Vidyasagar also worked for girls' schools, opened the Sanskrit College to students of castes other than Brahmins, and wrote simple Bengali primers that generations of children learned from.

Western India developed its own reform tradition. In Bombay the Paramahansa Mandali, founded in 1849, met in secret to reject caste and practise inter-dining, a sign of how risky open dissent still was. In 1867 the Prarthana Samaj was founded in Bombay by Atmaram Pandurang, after a visit by Keshub Chandra Sen. Like the Brahmos it preached the worship of one God, but it did not break sharply with Hindu tradition and drew on the devotional poetry of Maharashtra's saints, such as Tukaram. Its leading figures, the judge M. G. Ranade and the scholar R. G. Bhandarkar, put their energy into social work: widow remarriage, women's education, the abolition of child marriage and the uplift of the depressed classes. Ranade also helped found the Indian National Social Conference in 1887, which met alongside the Indian National Congress to discuss social questions the Congress itself left aside.

The position of women stood at the centre of almost every reform debate. Education was the first step: John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune founded a girls' school in Calcutta in 1849, later known as the Bethune School, and reformers in Bengal and Bombay opened others. Pandita Ramabai, a Sanskrit scholar who had herself been widowed young, founded the Arya Mahila Samaj in Pune in 1882 and the Sharada Sadan in Bombay in 1889, a home and school for widows. The law moved slowly. The Female Infanticide Prevention Act of 1870 required the registration of births in districts where the killing of girl infants was suspected. After a campaign led by the Parsi journalist Behramji Malabari, the Age of Consent Act of 1891 raised the age below which sexual relations with a girl, even within marriage, counted as rape from ten to twelve. Orthodox opponents, including some nationalist leaders, called it interference in religion, showing how bitterly such laws could be contested.

The reform laws of the period are easiest to remember as a sequence, each the result of years of argument. Sati was banned in 1829. The Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850 protected the inheritance of anyone who left his caste or religion. The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act followed in 1856, the Female Infanticide Prevention Act in 1870, the Native Marriage Act in 1872 and the Age of Consent Act in 1891. Each began with Indian reformers writing, petitioning and quoting texts, and ended with a colonial legislature acting. After 1857, however, the government grew wary of offending religious feeling, so later laws came more slowly and only with strong Indian backing.

These early movements had clear limits. Their members were mostly upper-caste, English-educated men of Calcutta, Bombay and Pune, and the peasant majority hardly heard of them. They often depended on the colonial state to enforce change, which let opponents paint reform as foreign and allowed the government to present itself as the protector of Indian women. Many reforms were slow to take hold: few widows remarried, and child marriage continued widely. Yet their effect went far beyond their numbers. They made reason, conscience and human dignity accepted tests of custom, created associations, journals and public meetings where Indians argued with one another, and trained a generation that would soon turn the same methods to political questions.

Taken together, the reformers of this part shared a method more than a creed. Rammohun and the Brahmo Samaj appealed to reason and to a purified reading of the Upanishads; Vidyasagar used the shastras against custom; the Prarthana Samaj worked through social service within the Hindu fold; Young Bengal simply rejected authority. All of them asked whether a practice such as Sati or the ban on widow remarriage could be justified, rather than accepting it because it was old. Their questions about women, caste and conscience were taken up, often in sharper form, by the revivalist and anti-caste movements of Part 2.

Exam traps

• The Atmiya Sabha (1815) came before the Brahmo Sabha (1828); both were founded by Rammohun Roy in Calcutta.
• Sati was banned by Bengal Regulation XVII of 1829 under Lord William Bentinck; the Dharma Sabha (1830) was formed to oppose the ban, not to support it.
• The 1866 split produced the Adi Brahmo Samaj (Debendranath Tagore) and the Brahmo Samaj of India (Keshub Chandra Sen); the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj broke away from Keshub in 1878.
• The Tattvabodhini Sabha (1839) was founded by Debendranath Tagore, not by Rammohun Roy.
• The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856 is linked with Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, not Rammohun Roy, who had died in 1833.
• The Prarthana Samaj was founded in 1867 by Atmaram Pandurang; Ranade and Bhandarkar were its leading members, not its founders.
• The Age of Consent Act (1891) raised the age from 10 to 12 after Behramji Malabari's campaign; it is often confused with the much later Child Marriage Restraint Act.
• Young Bengal was the following of Henry Vivian Derozio at Hindu College, not a branch of the Brahmo Samaj.

Recap

• English education, the press and missionary criticism set off reform; reformers either purified religion by reason or looked to an ideal past.
• Rammohun Roy: Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin, Atmiya Sabha (1815), Brahmo Sabha (1828), Vedanta College; died at Bristol in 1833.
• Sati banned by Regulation XVII of 1829 (Bentinck); the Dharma Sabha (1830) opposed the ban and lost at the Privy Council.
• Brahmo Samaj: Debendranath Tagore (Tattvabodhini Sabha 1839), Keshub Chandra Sen; splits in 1866 and 1878; Native Marriage Act 1872.
• Young Bengal: Derozio at Hindu College, removed in 1831; radical but without mass support.
• Vidyasagar: Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act 1856, girls' schools, Sanskrit College opened to non-Brahmins.
• Western India: Paramahansa Mandali (1849), Prarthana Samaj (1867), Ranade and Bhandarkar, Indian National Social Conference (1887).
• Women: Bethune School (1849), Pandita Ramabai (1882, 1889), Female Infanticide Prevention Act (1870), Age of Consent Act (1891).
• Limits: urban, upper-caste, dependent on colonial law; impact: reason and dignity as tests of custom, and a trained public.

Practice questions

Sources

• Bengal Regulation XVII of 1829; the Caste Disabilities Removal Act, 1850 (Act XXI of 1850); the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856 (Act XV of 1856); the Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870; the Native Marriage Act, 1872 (Act III of 1872); the Age of Consent Act, 1891 — https://www.abhilekh-patal.in
• The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I (Descriptive: religions) and Vol. IV (Administrative: education), Government of India, 1907–09 — https://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gazetteer/
• Records of the Home and Legislative Departments on social legislation, 1829–1891; National Archives of India, Abhilekh Patal — https://www.abhilekh-patal.in