Rishi Dayananda And Modernism - Part 1

Many of Rishi Dayananda’s detractors found fault with his call of Back to the Vedas. They thought that the reformer was beckoning all of India to go back to a dead past that could never again come alive in the current age. The truth, however, is that Dayananda swept India like a whirl-wind calling for radical change in people’s outdated habits and modes of thinking. He established the supremacy of reason, argumentation and free discussion. He discredited the medieval culture sunk in ideas of high and low, birth and privilege, caste and gender and encouraged us to face challenges of the modern world with the universal wisdom of the Vedas that responds to the needs of all humanity in all times and climes. People, the Rishi asserted, must not be a slave to the past, but must prudently examine the past and ascertain its relevance to the present. When Dayananda came on the scene in India, no Hindu family event, from birth to death, could take place without the brahmin priests’ astrological approval and benign presence. Their style of operation was always accompanied by gift and fee [called Daan and Dakshinaa]. To keep people in further ignorance, these brahmins made a law prohibiting all travels abroad, especially by crossing the black seas [Kala Pani]. They claimed that such crossing of the seas caused a loss of one’s social respectability, as well as defilement in one’s cultural character and posterity. Today, with Dayananda’s relentless assault on such old, unfair practices and pursuit of modern thinking, that class of brahmin-priests and all their ‘laws’ have all but gone.