Raja Ram Mohan Roy: Celebrating 246th birth anniversary (22nd May) |

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General Awareness is an equally important section containing the same weightage of 40 or 50 questions in Banking and Insurance exams and has an even more abundant importance in some other exams conducted by IBPS. Generally, there are questions asked related to Important events.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy
(Father of the Indian Renaissance)

Raja Ram Mohan Roy is considered as the pioneer of modern Indian Renaissance for the remarkable reforms he brought in the 18th and 19th century India.

Raj Ram Mohan Roy was born on May 22, 1772, at a time when society was cursed with the iniquities clad in the fabrics of religion.

His father Ramkanta was a Vaishnavite, while his mother, Tarinidevi, was from a Shivaite family.

He is remembered for his fight for women’s rights at a time when the country was suffering from harsh societal norms and traditions which included the practice of Sati.

His efforts were also instrumental in eradicating the purdah system and child marriage.

In 1814 he settled in Calcutta and in 1815 founded the Atmiya Sabha.

In 1828 he established the Brahmo Samaj, “One God Society.”It is considered to be one of India’s first socio-religious reform movements.

Brahmo Samaj attacked the age-old social taboos and tried to make Indian society more secular than before. The Samaj was lesser of a religion and more of an intellectual approach.

In 1830, Raja Ram Mohan Roy traveled to the United Kingdom as an ambassador of the Mughal Empire to ensure that Lord William Bentinck’s Bengal Sati Regulation, 1829 banning the practice of Sati was not overturned.

The title ‘Raja’ was given to him by the Mughal Emperor Akbar II in 1831.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy also brought reforms in the field of education by establishing The Hindu College, the City College, Vedanta College, and English Schools were established in Calcutta through his efforts.

He contributed a lot for the development of Bengali, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English language and wrote books in these languages.

Through the efforts of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Charles Metcalfe removed all the restrictions imposed on Press in 1835 and gave freedom and autonomy to the newspapers in publication and management.

Roy was a journalist also who supported freedom of press. He published in different languages like English, Hindi, Persian and Bengali. Atmiya Sabha used to publish a weekly called ”Bengal Gazette’, a news paper in Persian called ‘Miratul-Akbar’ and a Bengali weekly called ‘Sambad Kaumudi’.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy died on September 27, 1833 in Bristol due to meningitis.

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in his book ‘The India Struggle’ called him “the apostle of a religious revival” in India.

Note:
On her 246th birth anniversary, Google on Friday honored renowned social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy with a doodle on its homepage.