He traveled widely before returning home. After his return Raja Ram Mohan Roy's family married him in the hope that he would change. But this did not have any effect on him. When his father died in he returned to Murshidabad.
He then worked as a moneylender in Calcutta, and from to , he served in the Revenue Department of the East India Company. Atmiya Sabha tried to initiate social and religious reforms in the society.
Raja Ram Mohan Roy campaigned for rights for women, including the right for widows to remarry, and the right for women to hold property. In he joined the East India Company as a subordinate official and was evidently employed in that fashion until , when he retired from government service with a lucrative income from landed property.
After settling in Calcutta in , Ram Mohun challenged the orthodox defenders of the contemporary religious and social systems. In the Abridgement of the Vedanta , Translation of the Cena Upanishad , and the Defense of the Monotheistical System of the Vedas he condemned such common practices as caste distinction, idolatry, Kulin polygamy, and sati or suttee; burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands as excrescences upon the authentic Hindu tradition.
Scripturally, that authentic tradition consisted of the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Vedanta Shastras. To be candid, however, I must add that. Roy assured him that this would not violate religious liberty because it was, in his estimation, an optional rite and not a true part of Hindu religion.
Roy supported the government decision, briefed Bentinck on how to respond to pro-sati petitions, and wrote a tract, Abstract of the Arguments regarding the Burning of Widows Considered as a Religious Rite , In this he called sati "cruel murder, under the cloak of religion.
There was, nevertheless, much opposition the new regulation. Roy's opponents formed a pro- sati organization, Dharma Sabha , , and sent representatives to England to argue against sati 's criminalization. In Roy sailed to England to provide Parliament with a native Indian perspective on judicial and revenue systems in India during the debate over the renewal of the East India Company charter, to oppose repeal of the Sati Act, to lobby for funds for the Moghul emperor who granted him the title Raja , and to make a pilgrimage to understand the heart of European civilization.
When he arrived in Liverpool, Roy was greeted with great fanfare, and was honored by aristocrats, reformers, and scholars. He made friends with English Unitarians, though he made it a point to visit Christian churches of all denominations. Roy's political career in England was fairly successful. The Emperor got an increase in his stipend, though not nearly as much as he had requested. Roy lobbied for equality under the law for Indian and English people, independent of religious affiliation.
The Indian Jury Act was passed in He convinced Parliament to allow imported salt to compete with the salt monopoly in India. His testimony and Remarks on the Settlement in India by Europeans , , led to the Charter Act of , allowing Europeans to settle, without license, in certain areas of India.
He was consulted by the lawyers in the sati case, and in was present during the entire three day's hearing before the Privy Council, who upheld Bentinck's law. While in England Roy became a partisan of the Reform Bill. After it passed, he confessed that had it failed he would have renounced the country, and, writing to the Unitarian Liverpool merchant, William Rathbone, prayed that "the mighty people of England" might succeed at last in "banishing corruption and selfish interests from public proceedings.
His Unitarian friends, including Bristol minister Lant Carpenter, provided support. They arranged for him to stay, with his Hindu servants and his adopted son Rajaram Roy, at the home of Carpenter's daughter, Mary.
Roy's general health had been poor since While in Bristol he contracted meningitis. He died saying the sacred Hindu word Om , and wearing the Brahman thread. Carpenter preached a funeral sermon to a crowd of a thousand people at Lewin's Mead Chapel. Since that time an annual remembrance service has been held at his grave in Arno's Vale Cemetery on the outskirts of Bristol. The service is conducted by the Unitarian minister in Bristol, and attended by the Indian High Commissioner.
His greatest legacy was the dream of a universal religion based on the belief of a Divine Unity. Rabindranath Tagore declared that Roy "realized that a bond of spiritual unity links the whole of mankind. As to their inferiority in point of understanding, when did you ever afford them a fair opportunity of exhibiting their natural capacity? How then can you accuse them of want of understanding? If after instruction in knowledge and wisdom, a person cannot comprehend or retain what has been taught him, we may consider him as deficient; but as you keep women generally void of education and acquirements, you cannot, therefore, injustice pronounce on their inferiority.
You charge them with want of resolution, at which I feel exceedingly surprised: for we constantly perceive, in a country where the name of death makes the male shudder, that the female, from her firmness of mind, offers to burn with the corpse of her deceased husband; and yet you accuse those women of deficiency in point of resolution. With regard to their trustworthiness, let us look minutely into the conduct of both sexes, and we may be enabled to ascertain which of them is the most frequently guilty of betraying friends.
If we enumerate such women in each village or town as have been deceived by men, and such men as have been betrayed by women, I presume that the number of the deceived women would he found ten times greater than that of the betrayed men. Men are, in general, able to read and write, and manage public affairs, by which means they easily promulgate such faults as women occasionally commit, but never consider as criminal the misconduct of men towards women.
One fault they have, it must be acknowledged; which is, by considering others equally void of duplicity as themselves, to give their confidence too readily, from which they suffer much misery, even so far that some of them are misled to suffer themselves to be burnt to death.
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