Arya Samaj

The most profound reform movement in the late 19^th Century India was the Arya Samaj. It started in the western India and Punjab and gradually spread to a large part of the Hindi heartland. It was founded by Dayanand Saraswati in 1875. He wrote Satyarth Prakash (light of truth) in the same year and founded the Arya Samaj in Bombay. In 1877 the Lahore Arya Samaj was founded and subsequently Lahore became the epicenter of the Arya movement.

Dayanand opposed a ritual ridden Hindu religion and called for basing it on preaching of the Vedas. Only Vedas, along with their correct analytical tools, were true. He attacked Puranas, polytheism, idolatry and domination of the priestly class. He adopted Hindi for reaching out to the masses. He also opposed child marriage. He was fiercely opposed to multiplicity of castes which he thought was primarily responsible for encouraging conversion of lower castes into Christianity and Islam.

After Dayanand’s death in 1883, the Samaj lay scattered. Most important attempt to unite the Samaj and its activities was the founding of the Dayanand Anglo Vedic Trust (DAV Trust) in Lahore in 1886. In the same year, this society opened a school. However, some leaders of the Samaj were opposed to Anglo-Vedic education and wanted DAV trust to focus only on Sanskrit, Vedic scriptures and Aryan ideology while taking educational initiatives. Conflicts arose over the control of DAV management society leading to a formal division of the Arya Samaj in 1893 into DAV Group led by proponents of English education led by Lala Lajpat Rai  and Gurukul Group led by Swami Shraddhanand who initiated a gurukul-based education

The two wings of Arya Samaj had differences on the question of education but were united on important political and social issues of the time. The Arya Samaj as a whole opposed conversion of Hindus to Islam and Christianity and therefore advocated re-conversion of recent converts to Hinduism. This process was called Shuddhi. They also advocated greater usage of Hindi in Devnagri script and organized movement against cow slaughter.