The rising tide of nationalism and democracy, which led to the struggle for freedom, also found expression in movements to reform and democratise the social institutions and religious outlook of the Indian people.

Many Indians realised that social and religious reformation was an essential condition for the all-round development of the country on modern lines and for the growth of national unity and solidarity.

The growth of nationalist sentiments, the emergence of new economic forces, the spread of education, the impact of modern Western ideas and culture, and increased awareness of the world not only heightened the consciousness of the backwardness and degeneration of Indian society but further strengthened the resolve to reform. Keshub Chandra Sen, for example, said:

What we see around us today is a fallen nation a nation whose primitive greatness lies buried in ruins. Its national literature and science, its theology and philosophy, its industry and commerce, its social prosperity and domestic simplicity and sweetness, are almost numbered with the things that were.

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As we survey the mournful and dismal scene of desolation spiritual, social and intellectual which spreads around us, we in vain try to recognise therein the land of Kalidas the land of poetry, of science, and of civilization.

Similarly, Swami Vivekananda described the condition of the Indian people in the following words: Moving about here and there emaciated figures of young and old in tattered rags.

Whose faces bear deep-cut lines of the despair and poverty of hundreds of years; cows, bullocks, buffaloes common everywhere aye, the same melancholy look in their eyes, the same feeble physique, on the wayside, refuse and dirt; this is our present day India!

Worn out huts by the very side of palaces, piles of refuse in the near proximity of temples, the Sannyasin clad with only a little loin cloth, walking by the gorgeously dressed, the pitiful gaze of lustreless eyes of the hunger stricken at the well-fed and the amply-provided; this is our native land!

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Devastation by violent plague and cholera; malaria eating into the very vitals of the nation; starvation and semi-starvation as second nature; death-like famine often dancing its tragic dance.

A conglomeration of three hundred million soles, resembling men only in appearance; crushed out of life by being down-trodden by their own people and foreign nations without any hope, without any past, without any future of a malicious nature befitting a slave.

To whom the property of their fellowman is unbearable; licking the dust of the feet of the strong, withal dealing a death-blow to those who are weak; full of ugly, diabolical superstitions which come naturally to those who are weak, and hopeless of the future; without any standard of morality as their backbone.

Three hundred millions of souls such as these are swarming on the body of India, like so many worms on a rotten, stinking carcass; this is the picture concerning us, which naturally presents itself to the English official.

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Thus, after 1858, the earlier reforming tendency was broadened. The work of earlier reformers, like Raja Rammohan Roy and Pandit Vidyasagar, was carried further by major movements of religious and social reform.

Religious Reform

Filled with the desire to adapt their society to the requirements of the modern world of science, democracy and nationalism, and determined to let no obstacle stand in the way, thoughtful Indians set out to reform their traditional religions.

For religion was in those times a basic part of people’s life and there could be little social reform without religious reform. While trying to remain true to the foun­dations of their religions, they remodeled them to suit the new needs of the Indian people.