Stop rewriting history: Rammohan Roy was a revolutionary, not a ‘British agent’

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 caricature. Dipesh Chakrabarty, writing on Roy’s role in the emergence of nationalist journalism, reminds us that Roy spearheaded India’s first organised protest against colonial authority: the 1823 agitation against press restrictions.

If he were serving the British, why did they suppress Mirat-ul-Akhbar, the Persian newspaper he used to challenge their policies? Why did they fear his critiques of revenue extraction, missionary aggression, and administrative despotism? Why did he demand Indian participation in governance decades before the first stirrings of formal nationalism? Agents do not launch the subcontinent’s first free-press movement against their supposed masters.

One of the laziest distortions is that Roy merely echoed colonial thinking on Sati. The historical truth, buttressed by Dwivedi’s meticulous research, is that Roy spent years campaigning, writing, petitioning, and mobilising public opinion against the practice. The British outlawed Sati in 1829 because Roy forced the question, not out of sudden moral enlightenment.

To imply that his legislative success makes him a “stooge” is as absurd as calling B.R. Ambedkar a colonial pawn for using constitutional mechanisms to fight caste oppression. This isn’t history. It is propaganda with footnotes removed.

Roy was not a provincial thinker. He was a global intellectual — fluent in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Bengali, and English — who argued that India’s civilisational strength lay in dialogue, not domination. Pavan K. Sharma underscores that Roy’s Vedantic interventions reflected a rationalist hermeneutics, challenging orthodoxy from within the Sanskritic tradition itself.

He believed in a Hinduism open to debate, infused with ethical reasoning and universalist inquiry. He saw India’s Hindu, Muslim, Persian, and European traditions not as threats but as enriching cross-currents. Such a vision terrifies those who require cultural purity and historical amnesia to sustain their politics.

A thinker who embraced pluralism must be defamed — because he disproves the ideological fiction that Hindu intellectual history begins and ends with triumphalism.

The vilification of Roy fits a wider pattern in contemporary right-wing politics: 

• Demonise reformers who used reason, not ritual

• Dismiss liberals as “agents” or “deracinated”

• Recast critiques of orthodoxy as betrayal

• Elevate unthinking obedience as the essence of nationalism

Partha Chatterjee, in The Nation and Its Fragments, notes that the battle over India’s reformist history is always a battle over the nation’s moral future. Roy stands at the intersection of colonial modernity and indigenous self-renewal — precisely the space today’s rulers want to erase. When power fears ideas, it goes after the thinkers who articulated them.

If someone as foundational as Rammohan Roy can be reduced to a colonial pawn, then no Indian reformer is safe — neither Tagore nor Vivekananda, neither Phule nor Ambedkar. Once history becomes hostage to propaganda, facts lose all public currency. A society that erases its reformers soon becomes incapable of reform. This is not merely about Roy’s legacy — it is about the future of India’s intellectual integrity.

Rammohan Roy gave India:

• Its first organised social reform movement

• Its first sustained press-rights agitation

• Its first modern reinterpretation of Hindu philosophy

• Its first coherent argument for women’s rights

• Its first pluralist, rationalist vision of society

To smear him is to smear the birth of Indian modernity. To distort him is to distort the very notion of India as a civilisation capable of ethical self-correction.

The more politics relies on polarisation and historical erasure, the more it will fear thinkers like Roy — men who believed that Hinduism was strongest not when it shouted, but when it reasoned. What Parmar offered was not history. It was a warning — of how easily the past can be disfigured for political convenience. And a reminder: to defend Rammohan Roy is to defend the India he struggled to build — open, rational, plural, and humane.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. You will find more of his writing here