The Schisms, and a Reach Far Beyond the Congregation

The society divided twice in a generation, and both divisions were about how far reform should go. Keshub Chandra Sen pressed for the abandonment of the sacred thread by Brahmo ministers, for intercaste marriage and for the admission of women to worship on the same terms as men; the older leadership under Debendranath Tagore would not go so far, and in 1866 the body split into the Brahmo Samaj of India under Sen and the Adi Brahmo Samaj. A second split followed in 1878, when Sen's own followers left to found the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, in part over the marriage of his daughter below the age his own campaigning had helped to establish in law, and in part over the increasingly personal character of the movement he was then leading.

Its formal membership was never large and is now very small. Its effect was out of all proportion to it. The Special Marriage Act of 1872 was passed to allow marriages that did not fit any existing religious law, largely because Brahmos needed it. Brahmo households were central to women's education, to the widow remarriage campaign and to Bengali literary and intellectual life; the Tagore family belonged to it. The Prarthana Samaj in western India was formed on the same model. David Kopf's study argues that the movement is best understood as the institutional core of what is usually called the Bengal Renaissance, and that reading is widely followed.