Trace the rise and growth of socio-religious reform movements with special reference to Young Bengal and Brahmo Samaj.

Early nineteenth-century Bengal — exposed to western education, the printing press and missionary critique — produced India’s first organised socio-religious reform movements, which sought to purge social evils through reason and scriptural reinterpretation.

Brahmo Samaj

• Raja Rammohan Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha (1828), preaching monotheism, rejecting idolatry, priestcraft and caste rigidity, and drawing on the Upanishads as well as rationalism.
• His campaign against sati culminated in Bentinck’s Regulation XVII of 1829; he also championed women’s rights, modern education and a free press.
• Debendranath Tagore consolidated the movement (Tattvabodhini Sabha, 1839), while Keshab Chandra Sen radicalised it — promoting widow remarriage, inter-caste marriage and the Civil Marriage Act of 1872.
• Ideological differences produced the Brahmo Samaj of India (1866) and the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj (1878), but the movement seeded reform across India, inspiring the Prarthana Samaj in Bombay.

Young Bengal

• Henry Louis Vivian Derozio at Hindu College (1826–31) inspired a band of radicals who questioned orthodoxy, debated free will and rights in the Academic Association, and demanded rational inquiry.
• Their iconoclasm — and a narrow, elite social base — limited immediate impact, yet they pioneered free thought, press campaigns and later public agitation.

Together, the moderate reformism of the Brahmos and the radical rationalism of Young Bengal launched the Bengal Renaissance, creating the intellectual climate from which later reform and early nationalism grew.