Socio-religious reform movements with special reference to

Contact with English education and Western ideas did not just change what Indians read — it changed what many Indians believed was wrong with their own society. Between the 1820s and the 1890s, a series of reform movements argued, sometimes with each other as much as with orthodoxy, over idol worship, caste, widow remarriage and what “going back to the Vedas” actually meant. This topic is that argument, organised society by society.

In two minutes

The Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, Arya Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission and Theosophical Society each tried, in different ways, to reform Hindu belief and social practice for the modern age — some by rejecting ritual and caste, others by reclaiming what they saw as the pure Vedic tradition.

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