For the last one and a half centuries and a bit more, Rammohun Roy's memory has been firmly engraved in the growth of Indian national consciousness as well as in progressive international thought. There are many reasons for this. Nineteenth century Bengalis saw him as a towering personality who brought to Calcutta, then the British imperial capital in India, benefits created by knowledge about modern developments and the consequent growth of cross-cultural understanding (albeit through the medium of exploitative colonial practices, media and infrastructure). This knowledge, spread all over a sub-continent that had fallen into eighteenth century political disorder stemming from the date of Mughal demoralization, was seen in the early twentieth century by savants such as Rabindranath Tagore or his friend, Sir Brajendranath Seal, as a movement from cultural darkness into the enlightenment of modernity, in which they foresaw the ultimate mingling of East and West. Mid-20th century scholarship treated Rammohun's memory as the antithesis of Kipling's dire realism that 'the twain shall never meet'. His name was used in most history textbooks to intellectually iconise universalist cultural progress at the regional, sub-continental and post-colonial global levels.
It was only at the time of the bi-centenary of his birth anniversary from 1972 that this iconisation was challenged on two fronts. The historian of Hindu achievements, and what some interpreted as Hindu pre-dominance in the majoritarian element of Indian composite civilization, Dr. R C Majumdar, in an Asiatic Society, Calcutta, lecture On Rammohun Roy, delivered in 1972, started by challenging the Indian Government's decision to celebrate that year, and not 1974, as his bi-centenary. He then moved to a less trivial point, that the progressive views Rammohun propagated were unrepresentative of the majority of India's population and did not spread beyond a handful of his epigoni in the Brahmo Samaj elites in metropolitan centres and their neighbourhood. If progress did come to India, it came from reforms inner to the civilisational majority. In effect, the Indian Renaissance, of which Rammohun is seen as one of the founders, was depicted in this version's logic as really the Hindu Renaissance in a longue durée. This revisionism came after a decade of extremist and virulently overstated ultra-Marxism, of a peculiarly 1960s variant. That emphasized the narrow veneer or crust-like character of a Western-educated elite upper-class who, Macaulay-like, believed that their Renaissance would filtrate downwards permeating the Indian masses, something that had not really happened, even twenty-five years after Indian or Pakistani Independence. Not Rammohun alone, but an entire early national enlightened elite, were castigated in this version as fish floundering out of their indigenous water, unlike Mao Ze Dong, the great exemplar of this ideology of small town as well as metropolitan student revolt's metaphor, revolutionaries working within their indigenous cultural terrain.
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