Modern Hinduism and the Paradigm of Reform

A typical point of discussion among the urban intellectual élites of colonial India is whether the reform of religion should be considered as a necessary antecedent for social and political reforms or, rather, be treated as a non determinant factor. For the Indian case, I would propose to call “paradigm of reform” the very idea of an interdependence between all kinds of reform – the religious, the social and the political one - provided that it doesn’t eventually exclude the influence of the reform of religion on the reform of society and politics. This essay is an attempt to sketch very broadly the main lines of the history of the attitudes of modern Hinduism towards what I call the “paradigm of reform”. It deals with the positions represented, among others, by Rammohan Roy, Dayananda Sarasvati, Keshub Chandra Sen, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Vivekananda, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.