Dayananda Saraswati was born in 1824, in Tankara town situated in the princely state of Morvi in Gujarat. His father, Amba Shankar, was a wealthy banker in the town and was also the hereditary jamaadar or headman of a small village. Amba Shankar grounded Mul Shankar – as Dayananda Saraswati was christened at birth - in the tenets of Saivism. By his fourteenth year, Dayananda Saraswati memorized the bulk of Vedas and mastered Sanskrit grammar.
Dayananda Saraswati was an iconoclast who opposed the traditional rituals of Hinduism– idol worship, conventional priesthood and the caste barriers. His new vision of Hinduism appears to have arisen from an incident that occurred while he was keeping vigil (staying awake) during a Shivratri. He had great reverence for the Shiva lingam consecrated in the temple. But he noticed in the small hours of the morning a mouse creeping out of a hole; begin nibbling at the offerings to the god; and, still worse, run across the god’s body as if in defiance of his presence and powers.
This trivial incident changed Mul Shankar’s life. He lost faith in certain forms of worshipping divinity. The gods of Hindu pantheon fell from his esteem. It set him free from the trammels of tradition and parental control. After this incident, Mul Shankar became negligent towards customary religious practices. To escape from his father’s insistence on his observing religious practices, he went away to his uncle’s house. Unfortunately, two bereavements, of his uncle and later of his sister plunged Mul Shankar into deep gloom. He began to reflect on the mysteries of life and to search for Moksha, i.e. release from the continuous cycle of births and rebirths. Worried over the mental state of his son, Amba Shankar conceived, in the words of one writer, the idea “of marrying him off and thus killing his fine enthusiasms by the hum-drum routine which such a married life would impose on him”. But unwilling to become a householder, Mul Shankar ran away from home.
During the next twenty-five years (1845-1870), which he spent on travels, he met many Sannyasis noted for their learning and piety. He studied their teachings intensely, but from a critical perspective. Dayananda Saraswati’s religious views crystallized after he came under the influence of Swami Parmananda. Parmananda was a great advocate of Vedas as original springs of Hindu religious thought. It is from him that Dayananda Saraswati derived his battle cry “Back to the Vedas”.
To Dayananda Saraswati, the Vedas were the only revealed word of God; infallible, containing in them the secret not only of all religious truth, but also the promise and potentiality of all scientific discovery, of the latest philosophical view of life, of mechanical inventions and political theory. He was convinced that spiritual knowledge was to be found in its pristine purity in the Vedas. India’s only hope was, according to him, to rediscover the faith that was once delivered to the Munis and Rishis as these were enwrapped in holy meditation, grappling with the ultimate mysteries of life. These views have not gone unchallenged. We will consider them shortly.
Dayananda Saraswati expressed his views forthrightly in a Hindu meet which Maharajah of Benares convened in 1879. These are:
¤ Polytheism was a monstrous fraud devised by priests who were blind leaders of the blind.
¤ Caste is an iniquitous system that has lain like an incubus on social relations in India.
¤ Castewasoriginallydesignedto beonlyascientificdivisionoflabouronthebasisofinherited and developed skills, and on the various aptitudes that people respectively acquired.
¤ Ancient Hindu women were free and equals of men, entitled to respect, honour and the fullest use of their opportunities.
¤ Only the pure, learned and industrious could be called priests.
¤ Social degradation was possible only by reason of wasted talent and atrophied powers. Social elevation to the highest caste was open, even according to Manu’s Dharma Sastra, to persons of themeanest descent.
¤ India’s downfall was owing to her disloyalty to her splendid heritage.
¤ The path of salvation lies through renewed loyalty to the priceless revelations of truth as embodied in the Vedas.
Dayananda Saraswati was basically a reformer, not an original religious thinker. He drew inspiration from a particular corpus of Hindu scriptures, Vedas. He realised that life in the modern world presupposes abandoning of certain pernicious customs and cultivation of progressive outlook. To this end, he thought it best to appeal to the nation’s past as the means of weaning the masses from idol-worship, veneration of mere formalism and obscurantist practices.
Dayananda Saraswati as a practical reformer founded the Arya Samaj incorporating his views of Hinduism. Many educational, social and charitable activities were started under his inspiration.
D.A.V. educational institutions bear a standing testimony to his constructive vision. Sidney Webb’s introduction to Lala Lajpat Rai’s book The Arya Samaj mentions the instance of a high caste Brahmin and his wife teaching scheduled caste children and living under the same roof with them. This reflects Dayananda Saraswati’s progressive outlook and commitment to what is nowadays called ‘social inclusion’. Remarkably, it is born out of his interpretation of ancient Hindu scriptures.
Dayananda Saraswati opposed many obscurantist Hindu religious practices. He decried religious self-torture as a degrading penance, that is gross superstition without religious value. Shraddhas or food-offerings for the souls of departed relatives are seen as mere animistic rites. Child-marriages are strictlyforbidden. Many progressive Arya samajists followedthe practicethat men should marry after they are twenty-five and women after they are sixteen. An exchange of photographs between the contracting parties to a marriage was suggested by Dayananda as an improvement on the old- fashioned marriages, where the parties do not even see each other’s faces until they are married.
Arya Samajists created new meanings for certain Hindu Puranic terms and practices. Lala Lajpat Rai’s book, The Arya Samaj: AnIndian Movementsays:
“Devas (gods) are those who are wise and learned; asuras (demons) those who are foolish and ignorant;
Rakshas [are] those who are wicked and sin-loving; and pishachas, [are] those whose mode of life is filthy and debasing.
“Devapuja (or the worship of the gods) consists in showing honour and respect to the wise and learned, to one’s father, mother, and preceptor, to the preachers of the true doctrine, to a just and impartial sovereign, to lovers of righteousness, to chaste men and women”.
Some writers have questioned the ideas of Dayananda Saraswati. Many Indian philosophers like
S. Radhakrishnan regard Upanishads as the source of sublime Hindu metaphysics and of Sankara’s
Advaita doctrine. The philosophy of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda is also based on Upanishads.In fact, Radhakrishnanconsidersthe Vedas as the source of Hinduritualism. This is more a theological than a practical question. It is, however, Dayananda Saraswati who broke the hold of ceremonials and caste barriers on Hinduism.
Dayananda Saraswati, by holding that all human knowledge, including science and technology, is contained either explicitly or implicitly in Vedas, has overstated the case. Religious texts are documents frozen in time. Their moral and metaphysical insights are perennial. But where physical knowledge of world is concerned, they are overtaken by time.
Finally, Dayananda Saraswati‘s espousal of Hinduism is based on critical processes of self- cleansing. But in some quarters the religious hue of reformist ideas–even of Vivekananda, Tilak, and Bankim Chander Chaterjee and of Dayananda Saraswati occasions disquiet. They are seen as Hindu-centric, and not sufficiently inclusive. The religious reformers of Hinduism looked inwards for means of correcting the fault lines that developed in the system. They were searching for self- correctiveprocesses. Theirreligiousoutlookremained essentiallycatholicand universal.
We may conclude with a few assessments of Dayananda Saraswati. According to D.N. Bannerjea, “Judged by any standards, however severe or exacting, Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj … was indeed a great man, not only in the estimation of his friends and adherents, but what is still more striking in the judgment of his opponents as well”.
In the words of Madame Blavatsky: “It is perfectly certain that India never saw a more learned Sanskrit scholar, a deeper metaphysician, a more wonderful orator and a more fearless denunciator of any evil than Dayananda, since the time of Shankaracharya.”