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 The truth, however, is that Dayananda swept India like a whirl-wind calling for radical change in people’s outdated habits and modes of thinking.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.
The Industrial Revolution took place in the western world between 1760 and 1830. This revolution brought new machines, new power sources and mechanized manufacturing that made existing industries more productive and efficient. Rishi Dayananda was aware of such progress in Europe during his time. He knew that because Britain was ruling India at that time, the Industrial Revolution was knocking at India’s doors. He also knew that India of the Golden Age had also made use of science contained in the Vedas and had boasted of industrial progress similar to that of Europe. The ancient Aryas, the Rishi claimed, had known of the principles of fire, electricity and energy. With these they invented steam-ships, airplanes, mechanized chariots [automobiles] and other technological inventions. They knew of rotation and revolution of the earth, of gravitation, of the distances of sun and moon in relation to earth, of astronomy and other sciences related to the universe. India gave the world the concept of numerals, zero and decimal. The Swami exhorted his countrymen to move away from anachronisms, from ideas of the past no longer applicable in the current times and realize that the Age of Science was now at hand, waiting to be embraced. He strongly advocated that India could overcome its poverty if only it made use of industrialization, and for this, he, in his time, encouraged the Indian youth to go to the West to learn how to set up industries. To make this possible, he even contacted German universities to verify the existence of any such possibilities.
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