When Madhya Pradesh higher education minister Inder Singh Parmar branded Raja Rammohan Roy a “British agent”, he was not mistaken — he was intentional. This was not an amateurish slip, nor a provincial misunderstanding of history. It was a deliberate act of historical vandalism.

Such claims are not merely inaccurate; they reveal the deeper anxiety of a politics that cannot digest a Hindu reformer who combined reason, moral courage, and pluralism. As Ramachandra Guha notes in Rammohan Roy: The First Liberal of India, Roy embodied an Enlightenment spirit shaped indigenously, even as he engaged the world intellectually. To attack him today is to attack that liberal foundation.

Rammohan Roy’s real “crime” in today’s ideological climate is straightforward: he represents a Hinduism of introspection, critique, and ethical universalism — qualities antithetical to the homogenising, militarised version of Hindu identity that Hindutva seeks to impose.

Roy fought against Sati, child marriage, polygamy, caste dogma, and religious superstition. He defended women’s rights and championed modern education. His reformist thought, as O.P. Dwivedi documents, was not derivative of British ideas but anchored in indigenous moral traditions that he reinterpreted with intellectual courage.

He built a Hindu reform movement grounded in Vedantic ethics, not sectarian rage. This is precisely what today’s ideologues cannot accommodate. To call such a man a “British agent” is an act of moral and intellectual self-incrimination.

The historical record flatly contradicts Parmar’s........

© National Herald