‘Raja Rammohan Roy stands in history as the living bridge over which India marches from her unmeasured part to her incalculable future.’ Explain.

The metaphor works because Rammohan (1772-1833) faced both ways at once. He did not import the West or defend the past; he argued with each in the other's language, and that is what makes him a bridge rather than a convert or a revivalist.

Religion. Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (1803-04), written in Persian with an Arabic preface, applied rational criticism to all revealed religion. He translated the Upanishads and the Vedanta Sutra into Bengali and English to show that monotheism was indigenous, not borrowed, and founded the Brahmo Sabha in 1828. In The Precepts of Jesus (1820) he took the ethics of Christianity while rejecting the Trinity and miracles, and was attacked by missionaries for it. He argued with orthodoxy from the shastras and with missionaries from reason.

Society. His campaign against sati produced Bentinck's Regulation XVII of 1829, and he defended it before the Privy Council against an orthodox appeal. He argued for women's property rights from the Dayabhaga, and against polygamy and child marriage — always from within the texts.

Education. His letter to Lord Amherst in 1823 opposed a proposed Sanskrit college and asked instead for instruction in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry and anatomy — not because Indian learning was worthless, but because a nation needed the knowledge of its own age.

Politics and the press. He protested the Press Regulation of 1823, edited Sambad Kaumudi and the Persian Mirat-ul-Akhbar, argued for Indians in the judiciary and for trial by jury, and followed European liberal and Latin American revolutions closely. He went to England in 1830 and died at Bristol in 1833.

The criticisms. He worked within colonial rule and did not question it; his social base was the Calcutta bhadralok; his reformism was selective. Even so, the bridge holds — the vocabulary of every later Indian reform argument, that tradition must be tested by reason and defended by evidence, is his.