The 19-Minute Leak: India’s Voyeurism Crisis and the Urgent Need for Digital Consent

A Controversy That Refuses to Die  

In February 2025, Madhya Pradesh Higher Education Minister Inder Singh Parmar sparked nationwide criticism when he described Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), widely regarded as the “Father of Modern India” and the founder of the Bengal Renaissance, as a “British agent” who allegedly promoted English education to facilitate mass religious conversion. Facing immediate backlash from historians, educators and civil society, the minister withdrew his statement and tendered an apology, calling it “unintentional”.  

Such apologies, however, do not erase the underlying pattern. Similar remarks targeting Bengal’s intellectual icons – from Rammohun Roy to Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay – have surfaced repeatedly in the last decade. These are not isolated slips of the tongue; they reflect a systematic attempt to reinterpret 19th-century reform movements through contemporary ideological lenses.  

In late 2025, seeks to place Rammohun Roy’s life and ideas and legacy in proper historical context, free from both uncritical adulation and motivated vilification. Understanding his real contributions remains essential because the questions he raised – about reason versus dogma, individual rights versus tradition, and the balance between cultural pride and universal values – continue to shape Indian public life two centuries later.

A Polymath in Search of Universal Truth  

Rammohun Roy was born in 1772 in Radhanagar, Hooghly district (present-day West Bengal), into an orthodox Brahmin family. From childhood he displayed an extraordinary curiosity about different faiths. He studied Persian and Arabic in a village madrasa and later in Patna, mastering the Quran in the original. Disillusioned with certain aspects of popular Hinduism, he travelled to Tibet to study Buddhism, but left after disagreements with Lama priests over ritual practices. He then moved to Varanasi to immerse himself in Sanskrit and the Upanishads.  

By his early thirties he had also acquainted himself with Jain texts, Tantric philosophy and Sufi mysticism. Few Indian thinkers before or since have engaged so deeply with Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Jainism and multiple schools of Hinduism while remaining rooted in rational inquiry.

In 1803 he joined the East India Company’s revenue service under British officers such as Thomas Woodforde and John Digby. During these years he learnt English, Greek and Hebrew – the last two specifically to read the New and Old Testaments in their original languages. His first published work, Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (1803–04), written in Persian with an Arabic preface, was a bold critique of idolatry and superstition across all organised religions. It argued for pure monotheism based on reason rather than revelation alone.

Reviving Vedanta and Founding Rational Worship  

After resigning from Company service in 1814 and settling permanently in Calcutta, Rammohun founded the Atmiya Sabha (1815), a discussion forum for theological and philosophical questions. When he discovered that the study of the Vedas and Upanishads had almost vanished among educated Bengalis, he began translating the principal Upanishads into Bengali and later into English (1816–1819). These translations played a pivotal role in the evolution of modern Bengali prose and made ancient philosophical texts accessible to ordinary readers for the first time in centuries.

In 1820 he published Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness, extracting what he considered the ethical core of Christianity while rejecting miracles and the doctrine of Trinity. The Serampore Baptist missionaries reacted sharply, accusing him of distorting Christian theology. Rammohun responded with a series of “Appeals” that demonstrated not only his command over Christian scripture but also his commitment to comparative religion based on reason.

Far from promoting conversion, he explicitly opposed missionary attempts to portray Hinduism as entirely idolatrous. His ultimate aim was to distil a universal ethical monotheism that transcended sectarian boundaries. This vision crystallised in the founding of the Brahmo Sabha in August 1828, which later became the Brahmo Samaj – India’s first modern theistic movement grounded in reason, rejection of image worship and social equality.

Social Reform: Beyond the Abolition of Sati 

Popular memory celebrates Rammohun chiefly for his campaign against sati (widow immolation). Between 1818 and 1829 he published pamphlets, organised public meetings and petitioned the government until Lord William Bentinck finally banned the practice through Regulation XVII of 1829. Yet his reform agenda was far broader:

• Campaign against polygamy and child marriage 
• Advocacy for women’s inheritance and education rights 
• Establishment (with David Hare and others) of Hindu College (1817) and Vedanta College (1825) to combine Eastern and Western learning  
• Support for female education – he helped establish several girls’ schools and the first Bengali women’s magazine Bambodhini Patrika (indirectly through later Brahmo activists)

Each of these initiatives faced fierce opposition from orthodox sections who branded him a “heretic” and “destroyer of dharma”.

Defender of Press Freedom and Peasant Rights  

In 1823, when Governor-General John Adams imposed the Press Ordinance requiring licences for all publications, Rammohun organised the first constitutional agitation in Indian history. He drafted a petition to the Supreme Court and later an appeal to the King-in-Council, arguing that freedom of expression was a natural right. The ordinance was eventually relaxed.

In 1826 he opposed the Jury Act that allowed Europeans to sit on juries judging Asians but denied Asians reciprocal rights in cases involving Europeans – an early critique of racial legal inequality.

Despite personally benefiting from the Permanent Settlement as a landowner, he repeatedly highlighted the plight of ryots (peasants) crushed by exorbitant rents. In memoranda sent to the British Parliament and the Board of Control in the early 1830s, he advocated reduction of land revenue, protection of tenancy rights and replacement of highly paid European officials with qualified Indians – proposals remarkably ahead of his time.

Contextualising His Relationship with British Rule  

Historians have long debated Rammohun’s attitude toward colonial rule. He admired Britain’s constitutional liberties, rule of law and scientific progress, and believed Indians should have equal access to these benefits. At the same time, he consistently criticised specific oppressive policies – high land revenue, racial discrimination in juries, censorship and cultural arrogance of some officials.

As historian Rajat Kanta Ray has observed, Rammohun belonged to an early generation of Indian elites who had not yet witnessed the full consolidation of colonial exploitation that became evident after the 1857 Rebellion. Expecting him to articulate a fully fledged anti-colonial nationalism in the 1820s would be anachronistic. His strategy was reform within the framework of dialogue with liberal British opinion, a method shared by contemporaries such as Dwarkanath Tagore and Ram Camul Sen.

Importantly, he never converted to Christianity despite intense pressure from Unitarian friends in England, nor did he encourage others to do so. When he sailed to England in 1830 as an unofficial ambassador of the Mughal emperor Akbar II, his mission was to secure better terms for the emperor and to lobby for press freedom and judicial equality – hardly the actions of a “British agent”.

Why the Legacy Distortion Matters in 2025  

In an era when school textbooks, social media and political speeches routinely reshape historical narratives, attempts to portray Rammohun Roy as a collaborator serve multiple purposes:

1. To delegitimise the rationalist, inclusive and reformist strand within modern Hindu thought that he pioneered.  
2. To present 19th-century social reform as a foreign-inspired rupture rather than an indigenous response to internal crises.  
3. To weaken Bengal’s distinct cultural identity, which has historically resisted majoritarian monocultural projects.

Such revisionism is not merely academic; it influences curriculum design, public memory and electoral discourse. When a sitting minister echoes long-debunked conspiracy theories, it signals that evidence-based history remains under pressure.

Reclaiming Reason and Pluralism  

Raja Rammohun Roy died in Bristol, England, on 27 September 1833. Almost two hundred years later, the core of his message – that religious truth must withstand rational scrutiny, that no society can progress while oppressing half its population, that freedom of thought is non-negotiable – remains strikingly contemporary.

India in 2025 faces new challenges: algorithmic echo chambers, renewed debates over personal laws, questions of scientific temper versus faith, and the balance between cultural pride and cosmopolitan openness. In meeting these challenges, citizens and policymakers alike would do well to revisit the life of a man who studied the Quran in Patna, the Upanishads in Varanasi, the Bible in Greek and Hebrew, and yet insisted that ethical monotheism and human dignity were universal rather than sectarian possessions.

Distorting his legacy does not diminish Rammohun Roy; it diminishes our capacity to engage honestly with our own past and to build a future that honours both reason and pluralism. The task before us is not to deify or demonise historical figures, but to understand them in their fullness – warts and all – so that we may learn from their courage, their mistakes, and above all, their refusal to choose between tradition and modernity when both could be reconciled through critical thought.

That reconciliation remains, in 2025 as in 1825, the unfinished project of modern India.

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