Raja Ram Mohan Roy 1772 – 1833

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a Bengali religious and social reformer and one of the founders of the Indian Renaissance of the nineteenth century. Educated in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and English and possessed of a deep knowledge of the religious scriptures of India, he founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828 to advance a reformed and rationalist Hindu monotheism in dialogue with Islam and Christianity. He campaigned against sati, against child marriage, and for the modern education of Indian women and men, and he is widely regarded as the father of modern India. He died in Bristol while serving as an emissary of the Mughal emperor.

Ram Mohan Roy was born in May 1772 at Radhanagar in the Hooghly district of Bengal into a wealthy Brahmin family. He studied Persian and Arabic at Patna and Sanskrit at Benares, mastered English, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin in his maturity, and from 1803 served as munshi to British East India Company collectors in Bengal, retiring on a comfortable income in 1814. From his retreat at Calcutta he founded the Atmiya Sabha (Society of Friends) in 1815 and the Brahmo Sabha — later the Brahmo Samaj — in 1828. He worked closely with the governor-general William Bentinck for the 1829 abolition of sati, the burning of widows on the husband's funeral pyre, and travelled to England in 1830 as the envoy of the last titular Mughal emperor, where he remained until his death.

His writings include the early Persian Tuhfat al-Muwahhidin (Gift to Monotheists, 1804), the Bengali and English translations of the Vedanta Sutras and the principal Upanishads (1815–1820), A Defence of Hindoo Theism (1817), the Precepts of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness (1820) and its three Appeals to the Christian Public, and a long series of pamphlets against sati and on caste, education, and the press.

Roy combined the rigorous monotheism he found in the Upanishadic Brahman with a Unitarian reading of the ethical teaching of Jesus and a vigorous engagement with Mughal jurisprudence and English liberalism. He founded the modern Hindu reform movement, was a leading early advocate of female education and women's rights, and is widely honoured as one of the architects of the Bengal Renaissance and modern Indian thought. He died at Stapleton near Bristol in September 1833.