Dharma Sabha was formed in 1830 in Calcutta by Radhakanta Deb. The organization was established mainly to counter the ongoing social reform movements led by protagonists such as Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Henry Derozio. More specifically, the impetus of forming the organization came from a new law enacted by the colonial British rule which banned the practice of burning widows alive (sati) in the country; the focus of the new association was to repel the law which was seen as an intrusion by the British into the religious affairs of the indigenous people by some sections of the Hindu community. [1] The Dharma Sabha filed an appeal in the Privy Council against the ban on Sati by Lord William Bentinck as, according to them, it went against the assurance given by George III of non-interference in Hindu religious affairs; however, their appeal was rejected and the ban on Sati was upheld in 1832. [2] [3] It published a newspaper called Samachar Chandrika.
The Dharma Sabha campaigned against the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act, 1856 and submitted a petition against the proposal with nearly four times more signatures than the one submitted for it by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. However [4] [5] Lord Dalhousie personally finalized the bill despite the opposition and it being considered a flagrant breach of Hindu customs as prevalent then, and it was passed by Lord Canning. [6] [7]
The organization soon morphed into a 'society in defense of Hindu way of life or culture'. [8] Its executive body included a president, a board of directors, a secretary, and a treasurer, and its members regularly organized committees for special purposes. [8] [9] Furthermore, the organization conducted its meetings strictly according to the rules of parliamentary procedure, a form of Westernization adopted through interactions with the British. [8] [9] All of which serves to demonstrate the organization's deep-seated Western orientation. [8] [9]
Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian reformer and writer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a socio-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He has been dubbed the "Father of Indian Renaissance." He was given the title of Raja by Mughal emperor Akbar II.
The Indian Independence Movement was a series of historic events in South Asia with the ultimate aim of ending British colonial rule. It lasted until 1947, when the Indian Independence Act 1947 was passed.
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.
Company rule in India refers to regions of the Indian subcontinent under the control of the British East India Company (EIC). The EIC, founded in 1600, established their first trading post in India in 1612, and gradually expanded their presence in the region over the following decades. During the Seven Years' War, the East India Company began a process of rapid expansion in India which resulted in most of the subcontinent falling under their rule by 1857, when the Indian Rebellion of 1857 broke out. After the rebellion was suppressed, the Government of India Act 1858 resulted in the EIC's territories in India being administered by the Crown instead. The India Office managed the EIC's former territories, which became known as the British Raj.
Sati or suttee was a historical practice in which a widow is forced to be immolated alive by sitting atop her deceased husband's funeral pyre. It has been linked to related Hindu practice in regions of the Indian subcontinent. Sati appears in some post-Vedic Hindu texts as an entirely voluntary and optional practice. Greek sources from around c. 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati, but it likely developed into a real fire sacrifice in the medieval era within northwestern Rajput clans to which it initially remained limited, to become more widespread during the late medieval era.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 was a major uprising in India in 1857–58 against the rule of the British East India Company, which functioned as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown. The rebellion began on 10 May 1857 in the form of a mutiny of sepoys of the company's army in the garrison town of Meerut, 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Delhi. It then erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions chiefly in the upper Gangetic plain and central India, though incidents of revolt also occurred farther north and east. The rebellion posed a military threat to British power in that region, and was contained only with the rebels' defeat in Gwalior on 20 June 1858. On 1 November 1858, the British granted amnesty to all rebels not involved in murder, though they did not declare the hostilities to have formally ended until 8 July 1859.
Lieutenant General Lord William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, known as Lord William Bentinck, was a British military commander and politician who served as the governor of Fort William (Bengal) from 1828 to 1834 and the first governor-general of India from 1834 to 1835.
Ishwar Chandra Bandyopadhyay, popularly known as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, was an Indian educator and social reformer of the nineteenth century. His efforts to simplify and modernise Bengali prose were significant. He also rationalised and simplified the Bengali alphabet and type, which had remained unchanged since Charles Wilkins and Panchanan Karmakar had cut the first (wooden) Bengali type in 1780.
Hindu law, as a historical term, refers to the code of laws applied to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs in British India. Hindu law, in modern scholarship, also refers to the legal theory, jurisprudence and philosophical reflections on the nature of law discovered in ancient and medieval era Indian texts. It is one of the oldest known jurisprudence theories in the world and began three thousand years ago whose original sources were the Hindu texts.
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 Indian Renaissance," born in 1772. Nitish Sengupta stated that the movement "can be said to have … ended with Rabindranath Tagore," Asia's first Nobel laureate.
Criticism of Hinduism has been applied to both the historical and the current aspects of Hinduism, notably the caste system and the sati practice.
The Revolutionary movement for Indian Independence was part of the Indian independence movement comprising the actions of violent underground revolutionary factions. Groups believing in armed revolution against the ruling British fall into this category, as opposed to the generally peaceful civil disobedience movement spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi.
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 has been variously termed as a war of independence, a rebellion, and a mutiny. Several Indian writers, who consider it as a part of the Indian independence movement that ultimately led to the country's independence in 1947, have termed it as "The First War of Independence", the "great revolution", the "great rebellion", and the "Indian freedom struggle". Several British writers, who view it as a military disturbance, have termed it as "sepoy revolt", "sepoy war", "Indian rebellion", and the "great revolt". Since the 19th century, a section of British writers have challenged the choice of the word "mutiny" to describe the events.
Adi Dharm refers to the religion of Adi Brahmo Samaj the first development of Brahmoism and includes those Sadharan Brahmo Samajists who were reintegrated into Brahmoism after the second schism of 1878 at the instance of Devendranath Tagore. This was the first organised casteless movement in British India and reverberated from its heart of Bengal to Assam, Bombay State, Punjab and Madras, Hyderabad, and Bangalore.
The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act 1856, also Act XV, 1856, passed on 16 July 1856, legalised the remarriage of widows in all jurisdictions of India under East India Company rule. The law was enacted on 26 July 1856. It was drafted by Lord Dalhousie and passed by Lord Canning before the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was the first major social reform legislation after the abolition of sati pratha in 1829 by Lord William Bentinck.
Hindu nationalism has been collectively referred to as the expression of political thought, based on the native social and cultural traditions of the Indian subcontinent. "Hindu nationalism" is a simplistic translation of Hindū Rāṣṭravād. It is better described as "Hindu polity".
The Bengal Sati Regulation, or Regulation XVII, A. D. 1829 of the Bengal Code was a legal act promulgated in British India under East India Company rule, by the then Governor-General Lord William Bentinck. The act made the practice of sati—or the immolation of a Hindu widow on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband—illegal in all jurisdictions of British India and subject to legal prosecution.
Chandranath Basu (1844–1910) was an Indian litterateur. A staunch Hindu, Chandranath coined the term Hindutva and has been regarded as a doyen of economic and Indian nationalism in Bengal.
Samachar Chandrika was a weekly newspaper founded in 1822 by Bhabani Charan Bandyopadhyay it was an orthodox Hindu newspaper of the Dharma Sabha. It campaigned against social reforms including the ban on Sati by Lord William Bentinck. It was published for over 32 years.
Bharat Dharma Mahamandala was a Hindu organization founded in colonial India in 1887 by Pandit Din Dayalu Sharma in Haridwar. It had purpose to unify and support orthodox Hindu communities in colonial India during a period marked by religious and social reform. The Mahamandala emerged during a period of social and religious reform movements in India. It positioned itself as a defender of orthodox Hinduism against critiques and alternative interpretations from groups like the Arya Samaj, Theosophists, and Ramakrishna Mission.