Ram Mohan Roy continued his connections with the British East India company will into
Ram Mohan Roy's Blue Plaque in London
the turn of the 19th century. The Baptist William Carey, who had recruited Roy and who was a partner in the creation of the fake Hindi tome (see Part One), engaged Roy to undermine various tenets of Hinduism, notably the priestly Kulin class. While the British saw this as vital Christian missionary work, Roy saw it as religious reform in his own country and subsequently refused an offer to convert. Quite possibly he was also irked by calculations he had performed about where Indian tax money was going; half of all revenue at that point was headed out of the country and towards England.
In the 1820s his zeal for religious and social reform led him to produce a number of written works on various subjects concerning life in turn of the century India. These included Brief Remarks on Ancient Female Rights, Prospects of Christianity in India, Answer of a Hindu to the Sacred Authorities and several treatise on the wrongs of the caste system. Roy was also one of the leading proponents of a ban on Suttee, the practice of a widowed woman burning herself (by force or voluntarily) on her late husband’s funeral pyre. The practice was outlawed in 1829.
It was during this period that almost all of his social reforming work was done. Now, he is most strongly associated with the following:
- the outlawing of Suttee
- property inheritance rights for women
- the Brahmo Samaj, a Bengali organisation to push social reform
- modernising Hinduism to appear legitimate by Western standards
- arguing against child marriage and polygamy
- the use of education in social and religious reform
Many of Roy’s reforms were influenced by the British in India and he must have walked a fine line between supporting the occupiers and his own patriotism. He finally visited England in 1830, remaining for three years before dying in 1833 near Bristol in the South West. He is buried there in the Arnos Vale Cemetery.