BRAHMO SAMAJ

Both Ramakrishna and Vivekananda were associated with Brahmo Samaj at one point in their lives.  Brahmo Samaj, or the Society of Brahma (Society of God) was a Bengali movement founded in 1829 by Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), a Bengali brahmin.  The movement was based upon a unitarian approach to God.

Roy, who was raised in Patna, then a center of Muslim learning, was influenced by Islamic teachings that rejected images, although, for him, some images for people who needed them were acceptable.  Later, in Calcutta, he was exposed to Christianity where, drawing upon certain aspects of the Gospels, he sought a purified way, free of superstition and idolatry. At the same time he did not want to abandon his own Hinduism.

A remarkable scholar, Roy not only knew Bengali, Sanskrit, and other Indian tongues, but also Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and, in his search for unifying doctrines, he read many of the world's scriptures in the original tongues. What he was looking for, though, he found in his own background, the eighth-century B.C. Upanishads, which contained many unitarian teachings. 

But he did not rely completely upon the past.  He advocated that Indians learn Western sciences, such as mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, and anatomy.

A few years after Roy’s death his work was taken over by the young Devandranath Tagore (1817-1905), a saintly man who reorganized the now dispirited Samaj.  Tagore did not accept the Vedas, the Upanishads, and other texts as infallible, and he rejected Christian doctrines as compromising the transcendence of God.  The Hindu books were guides, he felt, but the primary authorities should be reason and conscience.

A crisis came to the Samaj in 1865 when a young member, Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-84), objecting to certain conservative practices of Tagore's, led a schism of the majority of the members and founded Brahmo Samaj of India.  The original group now called itself Adi Samaj, or Original Society, and became increasingly conservative.  It was Keshab who "discovered" Ramakrishna.

Keshab introduced not only readings from other religions but also certain Hindu folk practices, such as devotional singing and dancing.  He also campaigned for the education of women and their emancipation, and against child marriages and for intercaste marriages.  However, to the dismay of his followers, his daughter, then thirteen, was married, with his blessing, to the prince Cooch Behar in an orthodox rite.  This led to still another schism, the founding of the Sadharan (universal) Brahmo Samaj, while Keshab's group was renamed the Church of the New Dispensation.

The Sadharan Brahmo Samaj was run not by a single figure but by an elected group of one hundred members, who chose their directors.  Since then, the entire movement has declined considerably in influence, with more schisms and offshoots in various parts of India.  It has almost always been confined to the upper castes and classes of Bengalis and rarely included the general population.

But its legacy has been a large number of educated, intelligent, progressive Bengalis who are open to new ideas and who generally eschew the barriers of caste and national group.  They often marry outside their community, and are active in their country.