Brahmo Samaj

Ram Mohan Roy came to the project through argument rather than through vision. He had published against image worship in Persian and in Bengali, had translated Upanishads into Bengali and English to show that the texts he regarded as authoritative taught one formless God, and had run the Atmiya Sabha from 1815 as a discussion society. The Brahmo Sabha, founded in Calcutta in August 1828, was the congregation that followed from the argument.

The trust deed of 1830 is the founding document and it is unusually specific about what may not happen in the building. No image, statue, carving, painting or picture may be admitted; no sacrifice or offering may be made; and no sermon or prayer may be delivered that reviles or disrespects any other religion or any other person's way of worship. A hall was to be open to all people, of every description and every persuasion, for the worship of the one eternal, unsearchable and immutable Being.

Roy's other campaign ran alongside it. He argued in print against sati on the ground that the Hindu scriptural authority claimed for it did not hold, and the practice was prohibited in the Bengal Presidency by regulation in 1829. He died at Bristol in 1833, and the society he founded was carried on chiefly by Debendranath Tagore, who reorganised it, gave it a covenant of membership in 1843 and ran the Tattwabodhini Sabha alongside it.

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.