Bharat Ek Khoj | Episode-41 | The Bengal Renaissance and Raja Rammohun Roy

Bharat Ek Khoj—The Discovery of India A Production of Doordarshan, the Government of India’s Public Service Broadcaster Episode 41: The Bengal Renaissance and Raja Rammohun Roy With Anang Desai as Rammohun Roy, Urmila Bhatt as Mother, Tom Alter as Derozio, Richard Lane-Smith as Edward Hyde East, John Holyer as Benfinck, Arjun Raina as Ram Kamal, Vishnu Sharma as Dwarakanath, Narayan Pati as Radhakant, Sankalp Dubey as Krishna Mohan, and Satish Kaushik as Ram Gopal. Playback is by Jolly Mukherjee, the consultant on Brahmo Samaj is Indrani Acharya, and the script is by Gulan Kripalani. Nehru observes that as the British became dominant in India as the foremost global power, they represented a new historic force that ushered in many changes inducted from the West. Bengal witnessed and experienced these agrarian, technical, educational and intellectual changes long before any other region of India, as it had a clear 50 years of British rule before it spread over wider areas. In the 18th century, a towering personality arose in Bengal, Raja Rammohun Roy, who combined in himself the old learning and the new. More than a scholar he was a reformer and tried to reform his own faith, ridding it of evil practices like Sati, that were associated with it. The drama opens with a hapless girl being dragged to the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Rammohun discovers to his horror that it was his sister-in-law, just widowed, who had committed Sati with his mother’s tacit approval. Revolting against the cruel custom, he calls for a gathering of scholars, where he forcefully argues against it and calls it murder quoting religious treatises. They vow to spread the message to schools and colleges against Sati and Koolin polygamy that makes several women widows at one stroke. There is immediate social repercussion from the orthodox community, forcing Rammohun to resign from the membership of Hindu College, which he had founded. The movement, however, spreads and the British educational evangelist, Derozio, supports it along with protests against child-marriage. Deeply versed in Indian thoughts and philosophy, a scholar in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic and adept in Greek, Latin and Hebrew besides English, Rammohun proves a formidable force against the diehard orthodoxy spearheaded by Radha Kanta Deb and forges ahead against idolatry of Hinduism and resolves to establish a monistic Brahmo Sabha. He also persuades a reluctant William Bentinck, the British Viceroy, to persuade the Press to support the reformist movement. We hear the new Brahmo Sabha singing choral Dhrupad to praise one God and to profess egalitarianism against all castes and creeds. Rammohun proceeds to translate the Upanishads into Bengali to spread religious awareness. Against stiff resistance, even from within his family, Rammohun carries on with the reformist movement, when Radha Kanta Deb’s group puts up contrary petitions to the Privy Council. Derozio’s drive for modern education, with readings from his inspiring poetry in the Hindu College, also gathers momentum, but he himself gets expelled. Rammohun decides to travel to England to carry his message in the teeth of opposition against sea-voyage. Meanwhile, Bentinck legally prohibits Sati and Rammohun has the additional task of countering the mass petitions. He never returns from England, dying there in 1833. Nehru concludes that the spread of new knowledge continued till the 20th century and Bengal played a dominant role in British Indian life.



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