Keshab Chandra Sen
Keshab Chandra Sen ( Bengali : কেশব চন্দ্র সেন , Keśab Candra Sen ; born November 19, 1838 , † January 8, 1884 ) was a Bengali social reformer and founder of religion at the end of the 19th century.
Life path
Keshabchandra Sen came from the house of the Sena- Rajas. his grandfather Ram Kamal Sen († 1844) was divan of the Calcutta Mint and Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal . His father Piari Mohan Sen died in 1848 when the boy was 10 years old. He attended the Hindu, Metropolitan and Presidency College (now the University of Calcutta ) in Calcutta .
As a youth he had a lot of contact with Christian missionaries. In 1857 he joined the Brahmo Samaj founded by Rammohan Roy . From 1859 to 1861 he was an employee of the Bank of Bengal. He gave up the position to work as a Brahmo missionary. He was ordained a priest by Debendranath Tagore in 1862, and on a missionary trip in the same year he established branches of the religious community in Bombay and Madras .
Keshab Chandra Sen was one of the progressive representatives of Brahmo Samaj. In 1860/61 he published the "Tracts for the Times". There are 13 publications that took place monthly. In the first tract he called for the reformation of society, also through religion, which he saw as urgently necessary. In the following years there were repeated conflicts between Tagore and himself regarding questions of the brahmin string, remarriage of widows and other Hindu traditions, which is why he left the organization in 1866.
The trigger for his exit from the Brahmo Samaj was a, for the time, special wedding: cross-castes, on the one hand, and the remarriage of a widow, on the other. After this marriage, Keshab Chandra Sen and other progressive representatives were removed from their offices within the Brahmo Samaj.
Keshab Chandra Sen then founded his own Brahmo Samaj of India on November 11th, in contrast to the Adi ("old") Tagores. During this time his work Great Men falls , in which he explains that besides Jesus Christ there were other outstanding people. After the opening of his Brahmo Mandir (Brahmo Temple) on August 22, 1869, he went on a missionary trip through Bombay and north-west India.
At a meeting with the Viceroy Lord Lawrence in Shimla in 1869, he succeeded in having a law drafted which recognized marriages concluded according to the Brahmo rite. This was passed as the Brahmo Marriage Act 1872 . He also called for the establishment of a general school system. From March to September of that year he toured England and Scotland, where he spoke publicly over seventy times.
Upon his return he founded the India Reform Association. With this, Keshab Chandra Sen pursued the development of a stable society with a broad middle class. For this purpose, there were several departments in the India Reform Association that dealt with the subject of education and training and set up a training apparatus in Indian society. The opening of the Bharat Ashram followed in 1872. Relations with the Brahmo Samaj improved again between 1875 and 1878.
His popularity declined when he married his daughter Suniti Devi to the young Maharaja of Cooch Behar Nripendra Narayan in March 1878 , as neither of them had reached the legal minimum age. As a result, there was a schism and the Sadharan Brahmo Samaj arose on May 15th.
Sen then fell into depression that lasted until the end of his life. In January he proclaimed Nava Vidhana - his ideal of the harmony of all religions.
Literature and Sources
- The General Council of the First International 1870-71. Minutes . Moscow 1974, pp. 258 and 530
- Baillie, Laureen (Ed.): Indian Biographical Archives; Munich, ISBN 3-598-34104-0 , Fiche 417
- Horst Krüger: The I. International and India . In: Contributions to the history of the labor movement . Berlin 1978, No. 3, pp. 415-427
- Francis L. Damen: "Crisis and Religious Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj (1860-1884) A Documentary Study of the Emergence of the" New Dispensation "under Keshab Chandra Sen." Leuven Department Orientalistiek, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 1983.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lethbridge, Roper; Golden Book of India; London 1893, p. 269.
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sen, Keshab Chandra |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Sen, Keshub Chander |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Bengali social reformer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 19, 1838 |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 8, 1884 |