Raja Rammohun Roy: The Representative Man (An Old and Rare Book)

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Raja Rammohun Roy was a child of India-'a descendant of the Rishis', and also a representative man of the modern age. This unique combination of elements-ancient and modern- resulted in the birth of a system of thought and a programme of action which were at once religious and social, national and universal and, in a sense, pragmatic, but essentially eternal. It is this system and this programme that chalked out the path for renascent India. Rightly, therefore, Rammohun came to be called the path-finder of modern India.

Renan called Petrarch 'the first modern man' and by 'modern man' Renan meant the freed individual who had secured the full emancipation of his spirit, Swami Vivekananda, another maker of modern India, attributed to Raja Rammohun the same quality when he described him as 'the first man of new regenerate India'. The emancipation of the spirit in a renaissance personality is essentially of an acquired character. It is self-emancipation. In the Raja the spirit of self-emancipation is clearly discernible in all matters to which he applied his discriminating intellect, keen social sense and encyclopaedic knowledge. And he applied these qualities to all aspects of life. This is because life, for him, was an integrated whole.

It was a natural corollary of the Raja's acceptance of Vedanta, the cardinal tenet of which is unity. To perceive unity one requires freedom. And freedom was the song of Rammohun's soul.

Freedom postulates growth and Raja Rammohun's thought is essentially growth oriented. Applying his discriminating intellect the Raja found the key to growth in 'preservation by reconstruction." Thus, although the Raja welcomed Western knowledge with open arms, he refused to be blinded by its dazzling character. In fact, in no way did he become denationalised and he died, in England with the sacred thread on his body.

This quest for preservation by reconstruction led Rammohun to strive hard for the redemption of our own culture. As a result there dawned not only an era of the revival of Vedic culture in Bengal but of literary renaissance as well. In addition to a number of songs that came to enrich Bengali literature, the Bengali language itself was cast in a new mould and put under proper discipline.

But above all, Rammohun was a universal man. With him the salvation of India lay in the service of Humanity. He was not only a builder of unity on the racial or national plane but was a true prophet of humanism-which is the cardinal message of the Renaissance. Thus he championed rights of men and women everywhere under the sun. This has been interpreted as liberalism pure and simple, but in reality it reflected the humanist, which was also the Vedantic, attitude to life. There is certainly no atntithesis between humanism and Vedantism, but this synthesis in Rammohun is unique. The Eastern and the Western values stand in wonderful correlation with one another producing true freedom, which inter alia implies freedom from the fetters of the freedom-giver.

This is the emancipation of reason and spirit which, for the development of a fully integrated personality, must be supplemented by the emancipation of the conscience. The Italian Renaissance became complete only when it was supple- mented by what is called the Teutonic Renaissance. Raja Rammohun did it from the very beginning. With his unitarian approach there was, for him, no duality between reason and and spirit on the one hand and conscience, on the other. He was thus a liberated individual in the true sense of the term.