Ram Mohan Roy: LII/ILE

"If mankind are brought into existence, and by nature formed to enjoy the comforts of society and the pleasure of an improved mind, they may be justified in opposing any system, religious, domestic or political, which is inimical to the happiness of society, or calculated to debase the human intellect."

"The present system of Hindus is not well calculated to promote their political interests… It is necessary that some change should take place in their religion, at least for the sake of their political advantage and social comfort."

The second line is the man in miniature: a religion examined as a system, found logically and consequentially defective, and recommended for redesign. Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), the "father of Indian Renaissance", did not feel his way out of "orthodox" Hinduism (to the extent such a thing exists at all) the way an ethical type might, he reasoned his way out in print. The base type here is likely LII with a heavy ILE accent (could be the reverse, really) supplying the appetite for the new and reasonably heterodox, and the willingness to detonate the old. Maybe, in his more-than-average administrative abilities, there's a hint of slightly increased LIE column, too.

Roy was born into a Brahmin family in 1772. He learned Bengali and Sanskrit, then Persian and Arabic at a Patna madrasa, then the Vedas and Upanishads at Benares, and later, on his own initiative as an adult, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and English. He was systematizing the world's theologies, comparing them, looking for the general pattern underneath. His mature religious position — a monotheism he claimed to find already latent in the Upanishads, cross-checked against the Qur'an, eighteenth-century Deism, and Unitarian Christianity — is a classification result. He sorted the world's religions into the superstitious and the rational and reported the underlying law: one God, no idols, no miracles, the rest is local accretion.

His first book, Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (A Gift to Monotheists, 1804), written in Persian with an Arabic preface, is a Deism-like (whether he was closely familiar with European Deist arguments by that time is disputed) frontal logical attack on belief in miracles — the LII sensitivity to reasoning errors and irregularities, noticing them at a glance, here aimed at the logical holes of organized religion as such. One scholarly verdict on the book is revealing in our terms: an amateurish eclecticism, which gives him some ILE points, too. His publication list from 1820–1830 is a portrait of a man who could not stop opening fronts: appeals to the Christian public, a Persian newspaper, a Bengali newspaper, attacks on Trinitarian Christianity, attacks on his own Brahmin clan, a memorial on the liberty of the press, tracts on caste, on widows' rights, on famine relief, the first complete Bengali grammar, a treatise against caste, petitions against sati. He picked fights with the Serampore Baptist missionaries and with the orthodox pandits simultaneously, siding with neither camp, recognizing no "his own" tribe. Talanov's note on the ILE is exact here: "the voice of blood in him is weak, he does not divide people into his own and strangers." Roy's own clan, the Kulin Brahmins, were a primary target. A type more bound to in-group loyalty could not have aimed there. 

He fought for alpha-NT style freedom of the press as a matter of principle. His religion explicitly refused a fixed place or time of worship. He wanted Western learning added to Indian education, not crudely substituted for it. Roy spent a career attacking prohibitions that limit people's potentials and possibilities: on widow remarriage, on press freedom, on cross-cultural learning, on the freedom of Hindus to not burn their wives. The corollary principle he stated explicitly, that "if reason demanded it, even a departure from the scriptures is justified", is anti-authoritarian rationalism in pure form, especially given his upbridging.

He read the Upanishads as teaching an original monotheism that the later development of the many deities had corrupted; he read the New Testament (in the Precepts of Jesus, 1820) as containing a moral-philosophical core that could be separated from the miracle stories; he drew on Unitarian Christianity for its rejection of the Trinity and on Islam for its strict monotheism. The ranging across heterogeneous traditions, the finding of unexpected connections across boundaries that more bounded minds treat as fixed, and the synthesis of an integrative rational-religious position is Ne-style multivariance applied to comparative religion. The fact that he was charged by his opponents with "Christianising Hindustan in a surreptitious manner" while simultaneously being attacked by the Serampore Baptists for rejecting Christian miracle shows the position exactly: he belonged to none of the traditions he synthesized from, because his real commitment was to the rational core he believed underlay all of them.

The founding motive seems ethical in flavor: as a young man he witnessed his own teenaged sister-in-law dragged to her husband's pyre and burned alive while the crowd chanted "Maha Sati" ("Great wife"), her screams underneath. However, Roy went into the scriptures and argued, textually, that sati had no real sanction in the authoritative Hindu sources — that it was a later corruption, a logical-historical error in the tradition. His 1818 tract is literally staged as A Conference between the Advocate for, and an Opponent of, the Practice of Burning Widows Alive: a structured disputation, both sides laid out, the practice defeated on the merits of the argument. 

He was enterprising enough to have an LIE accent, since he made a fortune as a moneylender to overextended Company Englishmen and concluded, with a businessman's logic that has discomfited admirers ever since, that freer European settlement and free trade might improve Indian economy. He cultivated useful patrons (the wealthy Dwarkanath Tagore financed his campaigns), traveled to England as a working envoy, and successfully lobbied Parliament and the King, getting the nominal Mughal emperor Akbar II's stipend raised by £30,000 and guarding the sati ban against repeal. The pure LII does not lobby this well. 

He was, by the strong testimony of those who knew him, more at ease with foreign Unitarians than with most of his countrymen — the ILE's desire to unite with people who are identical to himself, found, characteristically, on the other side of the world. Tagore's defense of him against Gandhi (who was, arguably, some sort of EIE/EII, and definitely a more "aristocratic" character, WSS's IEI diagnosis for him is a touch off-base in Talanov, but within the same range) captures the temperament precisely: "He was never a school boy of the West, and therefore had the dignity to be a friend of the West." 

His EIE-style craving to stand in the focus of human passion was moderate at best, and his self-presentation was that of a scholar making a case, not a prophet seizing an audience, so I doubt that he had any significant accent on this type more than your average Alpha NT. "Father of the Indian Renaissance" is, as titles go, an unusually apt one: it was a T type's comparative-logic rediscovery of buried sources.


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