A portrait of Raja Ram Mohan Roy (Source - englishliterature.info)

thumbnail_Raja Ram Mohan Roy.jpeg

Raja Ram Mohan Roy.jpeg

If you have been privy to or engaged with the mainstream academic contents of Indian history then you would not think twice before calling Raja Ram Mohan Roy the "Father of Indian Renaissance" and if you are a Bengali by mistake then chances are that Raja Ram Mohan Roy is one of your top idols to claim your progressive and liberal Bengali cultural capital in a room full of people. 

> Whenever an individual is blown out of proportion and made into a larger than life character, history is not kind to them. There are a lot of shades of grey, elements of nuance and scope of ambiguity that must be added to Raja Ram Mohan Roy's legacy.

 For starters, one must take heed of his associations with institutions and individuals. Many might not know that Raja Ram Mohan Roy was actually an employee of the East Indian Company operating out of Calcutta. He also has had close ties with William Carey who was an Evangelist Baptist known for his Hindu phobia. Thus, all of his negotiations, resistance and reformations took place as long as he conformed to the ideals and tenets of the individuals and institutions he was aligned to. 

The British also found him to be a pretty interesting personality. They found a well-educated, soft-spoken, upper-caste elite Bengali Brahmin who was well versed in multiple languages and had immense cultural knowledge. Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the lens through which the British could access the diverse cultures of the Indian subcontinent very conveniently. He could speak on behalf of the Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs etc. Thus, Raja Ram Mohan Roy was palatable to British tastes. 

Just like many consider him to be the source individual for a revamped modern neo-Hindu religion which had many Christian elements attached to it, a huge demographic also consider him to be the source material for replacing the Sanskrit medium of education with the Anglicized medium of education. This fed into the age-old British narrative of the British being the ones who painstakingly took up the responsibility of civilizing the barbaric Indian's sharing what they called, "The White Man's Burden".

> Raja Ram Mohan Roy started an entire campaign in England to de-Sanskritize India's indigenous education system and replacing it with a system that would inject colonial narratives into the people who got access to the anglicized education making their very epistemology subservient in nature. He would only further the process of dismantling everything that was indigenous to India and replacing it with the British, especially their education, spirit and thought. This would be later taken up by Thomas Babington Macaulay who absolutely loathed everything and everyone that was Indian. Ram Mohan Roy argued that Sanskrit did not have rationality, logic and science and that it would only aid in keeping the natives in darkness. He might have been very poor in his understanding of the open architecture and rationality of Sanskrit texts such as Sushruta Samhita and Rig Veda as he mentions none of it while he blatantly dismisses the benefits of a properly democratized Sanskrit education structure.

Lord Macaulay's Address to the British Parliament on the 2nd February, 1835 (Source - thewire.in)

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In his letter to the then Governor-General of Bengal, Raja Ram Mohan writes – *"The Sanskrit system of education would be best to keep this country in darkness. But as the improvement of the native population is the object of the British Government, it ought to promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy, with other sciences which may be accomplished by employing a few gentlemen of talents and leaning educated in Europe."* Such an apologetic response was very well received by the British government. Thus before we talk about Macaulay toying with the Indian education system for his own benefits we must introspect on some of our national heroes too. 

> An interesting caveat to this was that when India was busy de-Sanskritizing themselves with the help of individuals like Macaulay and Raja Ram Mohan Roy, all major European universities were adding Sanskrit departments and chairs to their universities as they realized the potential gold mines that were embedded within the Sanskrit texts which were not accessible to them before. Thus while the popularity of Sanskrit knowledge was declining in India, it was parcelled and exported to the western world.

There is no denying Raja Ram Mohan Roy's integral position in formally abolishing a practise as abhorrent as Sati. But a country can very well succeed, thrive, modernize and radicalize itself without foregoing its indigenous knowledge and civilizational sense. Japan and China are two countries that are the scientific and technical hub of the modern world and these two counties have a very rooted and strong sense of native culture, traditions, customs and civilization. If the same lens would have been applied to India it would be observed that knowledge is vast and the civilizational sense is limitless.

Father of Indian Renaissance, abolisher of sati, creator of the modern neo-Hinduism, these are only some of the prefixes and suffixes that are tagged along with Raja Ram Mohan Roy's name. Was he really all that good and noble or was he just a stooge for the British colonizers furthering the "White Man's Burden"?