Contemporary groups, collectively termed Hindu reform movements, reform Hinduism, Neo-Hinduism, or Hindu revivalism, strive to introduce regeneration and reform to Hinduism, both in a religious or spiritual and in a societal sense. The movements started appearing during the Bengali Renaissance.
Mulk Raj Anand was an Indian writer in English, recognised for his depiction of the lives of the poorer castes in traditional Indian society. One of the pioneers of Indo-Anglian fiction, he, together with R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali and Raja Rao, was one of the first India-based writers in English to gain an International readership. Anand is admired for his novels and short stories, which have acquired the status of classics of modern Indian English literature; they are noted for their perceptive insight into the lives of the oppressed and for their analysis of impoverishment, exploitation and misfortune. He became known for his protest novel Untouchable (1935), followed by other works on the Indian poor such as Coolie (1936) and Two Leaves and a Bud (1937). He is also noted for being among the first writers to incorporate Punjabi and Hindustani idioms into English, and was a recipient of the civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.
Khatri is a caste originating from the Punjab region of South Asia that is predominantly found in India, but also in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the Indian subcontinent, they were mostly engaged in mercantilistic professions such as banking and trade. They were the dominant commercial and financial administration class of late-medieval India. Some in Punjab often belonged to hereditary agriculturalist land-holding lineages, while others were engaged in artisanal occupations and some were scribes learned in Sanskrit or Persian.
Brahmo Samaj is the societal component of Brahmoism, which began as a monotheistic reformist movement that appeared during the Bengal Renaissance.
Sir William Wilson Hunter was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service.
Kayastha denotes a cluster of disparate Indian communities broadly categorised by the regions of the Indian subcontinent in which they were traditionally located—the Chitraguptavanshi Kayasthas of North India, the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhus of Maharashtra, the Bengali Kayasthas of Bengal and Karanas of Odisha. All of them were traditionally considered "writing castes", who had historically served the ruling powers as administrators, ministers and record-keepers.
'Prince' Dwarkanath Tagore was one of the first Indian industrialists to form an enterprise with British partners. He was the son of Rammoni Tagore, and was given in adoption to Rammoni’s elder brother Ramlochan Tagore. He was the scion of the Tagore Family of Calcutta, father of Debendranath Tagore and grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore.
The Bengal Renaissance, also known as the Bengali Renaissance, was a cultural, social, intellectual, and artistic movement that took place in the Bengal region of the British Raj, from the late 18th century to the early 20th century. Historians have traced the beginnings of the movement to the victory of the British East India Company at the 1757 Battle of Plassey, as well as the works of reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, considered the "Father of the Bengal Renaissance," born in 1772. Nitish Sengupta stated that the movement "can be said to have … ended with Rabindranath Tagore," Asia's first Nobel laureate.
Sugata Bose is an Indian historian and politician who has taught and worked in the United States since the mid-1980s. His fields of study are South Asian and Indian Ocean history. Bose taught at Tufts University until 2001, when he accepted the Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. Bose is also the director of the Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata, India, a research center and archives devoted to the life and work of Bose's great uncle, the Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose is the author most recently of His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire (2011) and A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006).
Indian English literature (IEL), also referred to as Indian Writing in English (IWE), is the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language but whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio and Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo. R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao contributed to the growth and popularity of Indian English fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated, in some cases, with the works of members of the Indian diaspora who subsequently compose works in English.
Bengali Brahmins are the community of Hindu Brahmins, who traditionally reside in the Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent, currently comprising the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh.
Ram Sharan Sharma was an Indian Marxist historian and Indologist who specialised in the history of Ancient and early Medieval India. He taught at Patna University and Delhi University (1973–85) and was visiting faculty at University of Toronto (1965–1966). He also was a senior fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was a University Grants Commission National Fellow (1958–81) and the president of Indian History Congress in 1975. It was during his tenure as the dean of Delhi University's History Department that major expansion of the department took place in the 1970s. The creation of most of the positions in the department were the results of his efforts. He was the founding Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) and a historian of international repute.
Mahishya, also spelled Mahisya, is a Bengali Hindu traditionally agrarian caste, and formed the largest caste in undivided Bengal. Mahisyas were, and are, extremely diverse Bengali caste counting among themselves all possible classes in terms of material conditions and ranks.
Romesh Chunder Dutt was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata. He was one of the prominent proponents of Indian economic nationalism.
Satish Chandra was an Indian historian whose main area of specialisation was medieval Indian history.
Amiya Prosad Sen is a historian with an interest in the intellectual and cultural history of modern India. Currently he is Sivadasani Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, Oxford (UK). He was previously the Heinrich Zimmer Chair at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University. He has served as Professor of Modern Indian History at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He has been Agatha Harrison Fellow to the University of Oxford and Visiting Fellow to the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library, New Delhi. During 2007–08, he was Tagore professor at Vishwa Bharati, Shantiniketan.
Maharaja Bahadur Sir Prodyot Coomar Tagore KCIE was a leading land owner, philanthropist, art collector, and photographer in Kolkata, India. He belonged to the Pathuriaghata branch of the Tagore family.
Baidya or Vaidya is a Hindu community located in Bengal. A caste (jāti) of Ayurvedic physicians, the Baidyas have long had pre-eminence in society alongside Brahmins and Kayasthas. In the colonial era, the Bhadraloks were drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from these three upper castes, who continue to maintain a collective hegemony in West Bengal.
James Talboys Wheeler was a bureaucrat-historian of the British Raj.
Bengali Kayastha, is a Bengali Hindu caste originated from the Bengal region of Indian subcontinent, and is one of the main subgroups of the Kayastha community. The historical caste occupation of Kayasthas throughout India has been that of scribes, administrators, ministers and record-keepers; the Kayasthas in Bengal, along with Brahmins and Baidyas, are regarded among the three traditional higher castes that comprise the "upper layer of Hindu society." During the British Raj, the Bhadraloks of Bengal were drawn primarily, but not exclusively, from these three castes, who continue to maintain a collective hegemony in West Bengal.
