Brāhmo Samāj Versus Ārya Samāj

In March 1875, about a year before the death of his mother, the Master met Keshab Chandra Sen, a worthy representative of modern India.

Keshab was the leader of the Brāhmo Samāj, one of the two great movements that, during the latter part of the 19th century, played an important part in shaping the course of the renascence of India.

The Brāhmo movement was founded in 1828 by the great Rājā Rāmmohan Roy (1774-1833). He was born in an orthodox brāhmin family. But he showed great sympathy for Islam and Christianity.

He had gone to Tibet in search of the Buddhist mysteries. He had extracted from Christianity its ethical system, but had rejected the divinity of Christ as he had denied the Hindu Incarnations.

Islam influenced him, to a great extent, in the formulation of his monotheistic doctrines. But he always went back to the Vedas for his spiritual inspiration.

The Brāhmo Samāj was dedicated to the “worship and adoration of the Eternal, the Unsearchable, the Immutable Being, who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe”.

The Samāj was open to all without distinction of colour, creed, caste, nation, or religion.

The real organizer of the Samāj was Devendranāth Tāgore (1817-1905), the father of the poet Rabindranāth. His physical and spiritual beauty, aristocratic aloofness, penetrating intellect, and poetic sensibility made him the foremost leader of the educated Bengālis.

These addressed him by the respectful epithet of Maharshi, the “Great Seer”.

The Maharshi was a Sanskrit scholar and, unlike Rājā Rāmmohan Roy, drew his inspiration entirely from the Upanishads. He was an implacable enemy of image worship and also fought to stop the infiltration of Christian ideas into the Samāj.

He gave the movement its faith and ritual. Under his influence the Brāhmo Samāj professed One Self-existent Supreme Being who had created the universe out of nothing, the God of Truth, Infinite Wisdom, Goodness, and Power, the Eternal and Omnipotent, the One without a Second. Man should love Him and do His will, believe in Him and worship Him, and thus merit salvation in the world to come.

By far the ablest leader of the Brāhmo movement was Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884). Unlike Rājā Rāmmohan Roy and Devendranāth Tāgore, Keshab was born of a middle-class Bengāli family and had been brought up in an English school.

He did not know Sanskrit and very soon broke away from the popular Hindu religion. Even at an early age he came under the spell of Christ and professed to have experienced the special favour of John the Baptist, Christ, and St. Paul. When he strove to introduce Christ to the Brāhmo Samāj, a rupture became inevitable with Devendranāth.

In 1868, Keshab broke with the older leader and founded the Brāhmo Samāj of India, Devendra retaining leadership of the first Brāhmo Samāj, now called the Ādi Samāj. Keshab had a complex nature. When passing through a great moral crisis, he spent much of his time in solitude and felt that he heard the voice of God.

When a devotional form of worship was introduced into the Brāhmo Samāj, he spent hours in singing kirtan with his followers. He visited England in 1870 and impressed the English people with his musical voice, his simple English, and his spiritual fervour. He was entertained by Queen Victoria.

Returning to India, he founded centres of the Brāhmo Samāj in various parts of the country. Not unlike a professor of comparative religion in a European university, he began to discover, about the time of his first contact with Sri Ramakrishna, the harmony of religions.

He became sympathetic toward the Hindu gods and goddesses, explaining them in a liberal fashion. Further, he believed that he was called by God to dictate to the world God’s newly revealed law, the New Dispensation, the Nava-vidhān.

In 1878, a schism divided Keshab’s Samāj. Some of his influential followers accused him of infringing the Brāhmo principles by marrying his daughter to a wealthy man before she had attained the marriageable age approved by the Samāj. This group seceded and established the Sādhāran Brāhmo Samāj, Keshab remaining the leader of the Navavidhān.

Keshab now began to be drawn more and more toward the Christ ideal, though under the influence of Sri Ramakrishna his devotion to the Divine Mother also deepened. His mental oscillation between Christ and the Divine Mother of Hinduism found no position of rest.

In Bengāl and some other parts of India the Brāhmo movement took the form of Unitarian Christianity, scoffed at Hindu rituals, and preached a crusade against image worship. Influenced by Western culture, it declared the supremacy of reason, advocated the ideals of the French Revolution, abolished the caste-system among, its own members, stood for the emancipation of women, agitate for the abolition of early marriage, sanctioned the remarriage of widows, and encouraged various educational and social-reform movements.

The immediate effect of the Brāhmo movement in Bengāl was the checking of the proselytising activities of the Christian missionaries. It also raised Indian culture in the estimation of its English masters. But it was an intellectual and eclectic religious ferment born of the necessity of the time. Unlike Hinduism, it was not founded on the deep inner experiences of sages and prophets.

Its influence was confined to a comparatively few educated men and women of the country, and the vast masses of the Hindus remained outside it. It sounded monotonously only one of the notes in the rich gamut of the Eternal Religion of the Hindus.

Ārya Samāj

The other movement playing an important part in the nineteenth-century religious revival of India was the Ārya Samāj.

The Brāhmo Samāj was a movement of compromise with European culture, tacitly admitting the superiority of the West.

But the founder of the Ārya Samāj was a pugnacious Hindu sannyāsi who accepted the challenge of Islam and Christianity and was resolved to combat all foreign influence in India.

Swāmi Dayānanda (1824-1883) was a great scholar of the Vedas, which he explained as being strictly monotheistic. He launched this movement in Bombay in 1875. Soon, its influence was felt throughout western India.

He:

• preached against the worship of images
• re-established the ancient Vedic sacrificial rites
• decreed that the Vedas were the ultimate authority on religion
  • He accepted every word of them as literally true.

The Ārya Samāj became a bulwark against the encroachments of Islam and Christianity. Its orthodox flavour appealed to many Hindu minds.

It:

• led many movements of social reform
• attacked the caste-system
• liberated women from many of their social disabilities
• greatly encouraged education
• was against early marriage
• advocated the remarriage of Hindu widows

Its influence was strongest in the Punjab, the battleground of the Hindu and Islamic cultures.

A new fighting attitude was introduced into the slumbering Hindu society. Unlike the Brāhmo Samāj, the influence of the Ārya Samāj was not confined to the intellectuals. It spread to the masses.

It was a dogmatic movement intolerant of those disagreed with its views, and it emphasized only one way, the Ārya Samāj way, to the realization of Truth. Sri Ramakrishna met Swāmi Dayānanda when the latter visited Bengāl.