ĀRya SamĀj
ĀRYA SAMĀJ. The Ārya Samāj ("society of honorable ones") is a modern Hindu reform movement founded in Bombay, India, in 1875 by Dayananda Sarasvati (1824–1883), advocating Hindu renewal by a return to Vedic religion. The basic principles of the Ārya Samāj were developed by its founder, Dayananda, a Gujarati brahman who became a saṃnyāsin ("renunciant") in 1847 and spent the rest of his life in religious quest. From 1847 to 1860 Dayananda lived as a wandering yogin searching for personal salvation, and later, after three years of Sanskrit study in Mathura with his guru, he worked as a reformer seeking to revive Hinduism.
Dayananda's sense of what Hinduism needed was gradually shaped by his guru, by debates with sectarian pandits in the western areas of Uttar Pradesh, and by discussions of religious issues with members of the Brāhmo Samāj and a variety of Hindu scholars and intellectuals in Calcutta. By the time he founded the Ārya Samāj on April 10, 1875, he had written a statement of doctrinal principles that was published two months later as Satyārth prakāś. A handbook on the daily Five Great Sacrifices, the Pañcamahāyajñavidhi, was published later in 1875, and a manual on the family life cycle rituals, Saṃskārvidhi, was published in 1877. Although these publications contained Vedic quotations in Sanskrit, the works themselves were composed in Hindi to make them accessible to the widest possible audience. Dayananda revised each of these basic guides over the next few years; as the mature product of his thinking, the revised editions were Dayananda's lasting legacy to the Ārya Samāj.
The central element in Dayananda's position was his belief in the truth of the Vedas. His guru had convinced him that the only true writings were those of the ṛṣis ("seers") who flourished before the composition of the Mahābhārata and that all subsequent scriptures contained false sectarian views, but Dayananda had to arrive at his own understanding of the line between truth and falsehood. He had lost his faith in image worship as a youth and was an active opponent of Vaiṣṇava sectarianism after 1863, but it took longer to reject the worship of Śiva and even longer to abandon the advaita ("nondualistic") philosophy of the Upaniṣads. By the second edition of Satyārth prakāś, however, he had decided that neither the Upaniṣads nor the Vedic ritual texts, the Brāhmaṇas, had the authority of revelation; this was an honor due only to the collections of Vedic hymns, (i.e., the four mantra saṃhitās of the Ṛgveda, Sāmaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda), because they alone were directly revealed by God to the ṛṣis. True religion, that is Aryan religion, must thus be based only on the hymns, which convey eternal knowledge of the one true God.
The religion that Dayananda established on this base was derived from Vedic sources, but its particular features were his own creation. Although a brahman by birth, Dayananda, rejected Brahmanic control of Vedic religion. He insisted that Vedic knowledge should be available to everyone, including women and members of the traditionally impure śūdra castes. Membership in the Ārya Samāj was open to any person of good character who accepted its beliefs, and the Vedic rituals Dayananda prescribed could be performed by any Ārya, or member of the movement. Caste was irrelevant, since the same dharma (duties) applied to all: to perform Vedic rituals, to study and propagate Vedic knowledge, and to promote social well-being.
The theology that Dayananda bequeathed to the Ārya Samāj was as innovative as his social reform program and his attitude toward Vedic knowledge. He was convinced that the Vedic hymns proved the existence of a single supreme God. God is not, however, the only reality; rather, God is eternally coexistent with the jīvas (conscious and responsible human selves) and with prakṛiti (the unconscious material world). In their ignorance, the jīvas bind themselves to rebirth in the world by their karman (actions). God cannot release the jīvas from responsiblity for their deeds, but in his mercy he has revealed the Vedas to guide the jīvas to mokṣa (freedom from rebirth and union with God). However, since the cause of mokṣa is finite human action, mokṣa itself must be finite, and the jīvas must eventually be reborn into the world. Each jīva, according to Dayananda, is thus eternally active, moving from worldly involvement to freedom in God's bliss and then back again into the world.
Dayananda's views were rejected by every branch of Hindu orthodoxy, most vehemently by orthodox brahmans. In Bombay, though, Dayananda found a group of progressive Hindus led by members of several merchant castes who were eager to adopt his teachings and to organize, in 1875, the first chapter of the Ārya Samāj. The second important chapter, and the leading chapter from that point on, was founded in Lahore in 1877, led by a rising elite also predominantly from the merchant castes. The simple set of membership rules developed by the Lahore chapter was adopted by new chapters that sprang up rapidly elsewhere in the Punjab and in western Uttar Pradesh. Dayananda's emphasis on individual responsiblity and full religious participation appealed to the merchants and professionals who joined, and they in turn proved to be excellent organizers. Dayananda gave each chapter full responsibility for its affairs within the general rules, so that when he died in 1883 the Ārya Samāj was not only a self-sustaining movement, but it was able to begin active expansion in new directions.
The Dayanand Anglo-Vedic school was established in Lahore in 1886 and became a college in 1889, providing a model for an extensive system of schools and colleges. The practice of śuddhi, or reconversion by purification initiated by Dayananda on an individual basis, was expanded into a movement to reconvert Hindus who had become Christians or Muslims. Āryas were active in social reform programs and in the Indian nationalist movement, the more militant helping to form the Hindu Mahāsabhā party. The partition of India in 1947 placed Lahore and other centers in the Punjab within Pakistan, but the organization recovered from the loss to remain a significant force for Hindu education and social causes. With chapters in almost every city and town in northern India and with an estimated membership of over one million, it has proved to be the most successful of the nineteenth-century reform movements.
Brāhmo Samāj; Dayananda Sarasvati.
Bibliography
There is much less literature in English on the Ārya Samāj than on other nineteenth-century movements such as the Brāhmo Samāj and Ramakrishna Mission, partly because most of the movement's own publications are in Hindi and partly because Westerners (and westernized Indians) have been less attracted by it. The best general treatment of the movement by a member, though now dated, is the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai's The Ārya Samāj (London, 1915). An early Western critique that reflects Christian resentment of the movement's militant Hinduism is found in J. N. Farquhar's Modern Religious Movements in India (New York, 1915), pp. 101–129. For the founder's autobiography up to 1875, supplemented by a statement of his basic doctrines, a chronology of his life, and an annotated list of his publications, see Autobiography of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, edited by K. C. Yadav (New Delhi, 1976). The most scholarly and authoritative study of the founder and the early movement is J. T. F. Jordens' Dayānanda Sa-rasvatī, His Life and Ideas (Delhi, 1978). A more detailed study of the Ārya Samāj's development in the region of its greatest early strength is Kenneth W. Jones's Ārya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Punjab (Berkeley, 1976). A survey of the movement's main developments up to 1947 is provided by Kenneth W. Jones's, "The Ārya Samāj in British India," in Religion in Modern India, edited by Robert D. Baird, (New Delhi, 1981), pp. 27–54.
New Sources
Llewellyn, J. S. The Ārya Samāj as a Fundamentalist Movement: A Study in Comparative Fundamentalism. New Delhi, 1993.
Prakash, Satya. Speeches, Writings, and Addresses by Svami Satya Prakash Sarasvati. Delhi, 1987.
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