Avatara and Sakti : Traditional symbols in the Hindu renaissance

Abstract

The Hindu Renaissance is commonly regarded as having begun seriously in the 1870's, consequent upon the foundation in 1875 of the Ārya Samāj in the West of India.' But this is in many ways a date of convenience. The roots of the movement go back, particularly as far as Bengal is concerned, to the time of Rammohun Roy, when on the one hand there was created a serious, though small-scale. Hindu reform movement, and on the other there was introduced into Calcutta the remarkable catalyst of Western education. Hindu reform and Western education were closely linked for the greater part of the nineteenth century. The early Hindu reform movements to a very great extent shared the same characteristics: small-scale and elitist, they were not designed to appeal, and did not appeal, to the masses. The Brāhma Samāj, for instance, never succeeded in achieving popularity; it began and continued very largely as a somewhat rarefied worship-society. But the years between 1893 and 1897 were the years of Swāmi Vivekānanda's "mission" to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago and his tours in the countries of the West. Perhaps it was in the figure of the Swāmi that the Indian national movement found its first powerful human symbol.