By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, India had produced a small English-educated intelligentsia. British administration, English education and European literature brought a new wave of thought that challenged traditional knowledge. Rationalism, the idea of human progress and evolution, and the concept of natural rights associated with the Enlightenment led to what has been termed the Indian Renaissance. Bengal was the first province to be affected by British influence, and so several ideas of reform originated there.
1. Emergence of Reform Movements
- The British claimed Indian society was caught in a vicious circle of superstitions and that only their intervention could deliver Indians from it – a self-serving argument of missionaries and Utilitarians to justify British rule.
- Utilitarians: believers in the doctrine of the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
- What gave these movements ideological unity were rationalism, religious universalism and humanism.
- Keshab Chandra Sen: "Our position is not that truths are to be in all religions, but that all established religions of the World are true."