CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 61 of 120

Correct — B, Vedas. Dayanand Saraswati rested his entire reform programme on one claim: that the four Vedas alone are revealed and infallible, and that everything layered on top of them — image worship, the Puranic pantheon, pilgrimage, hereditary caste, child marriage, the ban on widow remarriage — is later human accretion that a reformer is free to strip away. That is the argument of his 1875 tract Satyarth Prakash, and it is why the Arya Samaj, which he founded at Bombay in April 1875, is remembered by the slogan 'Back to the Vedas'. The move is worth understanding rather than memorising: by making a text older than all the practices he disliked the sole authority, Dayanand could attack those practices from inside the tradition instead of from outside it, which is exactly what a reformer arguing with orthodox pandits needed.

• (a)Puranas — The Puranas are the body of literature Dayanand argued against, not from. He treated Puranic mythology and the image worship that goes with it as precisely the accretion the Vedas do not authorise.
• (c)Medieval saints — The medieval bhakti and Sufi saints founded devotional communities around a teacher; Dayanand's authority was a text, not a lineage of saints, and he did not present himself as continuing Kabir, Nanak or Tulsidas.
• (d)Sufism — Sufism is the mystical strand of Islam. Dayanand engaged with Islam and Christianity in Satyarth Prakash only to argue against them, and drew nothing from Sufi practice.

The Arya Samaj is the Vedic-revivalist wing of nineteenth-century Indian reform. Where the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal drew on rational theism and where Ramakrishna's circle stayed inside devotional Hinduism, Dayanand Saraswati took the position that the Vedas are the only revealed scripture and that the test of any belief or custom is whether the Vedas support it. The Samaj built on that a working programme: education through the DAV schools and colleges, opposition to untouchability and child marriage, support for widow remarriage, and shuddhi, the reconversion of those who had left the fold.

This is a one-line association question, and the whole of it turns on the phrase 'Back to the Vedas'. The three wrong options are each a plausible source of inspiration for some other nineteenth-century figure, which is what makes them tempting — but Dayanand is unusual precisely because he rejected all three. A useful cross-check: he was born in Tankara in Kathiawar in 1824 and died in 1883, and his Satyarth Prakash spends far more space refuting Puranic Hinduism than refuting other religions, which tells you where he located the problem.

• Dayanand Saraswati lived from 1824 to 1883 and was born at Tankara in the Kathiawar region of present-day Gujarat.
• He founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay in April 1875; the same year saw the first edition of his Satyarth Prakash.
• His position was that the four Vedas alone are revealed and infallible, and that the Puranas and image worship are later additions.
• The Arya Samaj ran the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic schools and colleges, campaigned against untouchability and child marriage, supported widow remarriage, and practised shuddhi.
• Lala Lajpat Rai and Swami Shraddhanand are the best-known Arya Samajists of the next generation.

• Crediting Dayanand with founding the Arya Samaj at Lahore. Lahore became its strongest centre, but the founding was at Bombay in 1875.
• Reading 'Back to the Vedas' as antiquarianism. Dayanand used the Vedas as a lever for social change in his own present.
• Pairing the Prarthana Samaj with M. G. Ranade as founder — Atmaram Pandurang founded it in 1867 and Ranade joined later.

Usually as a one-line source-of-authority question, or as an organisation-to-founder or organisation-to-year pairing involving the Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj and Prarthana Samaj.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The tract Satyarth Prakash was written by which one of the following reformers?

  • (a)Rammohun Roy
  • (b)Dayanand Saraswati
  • (c)Keshab Chandra Sen
  • (d)Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar

  Answer(b) Dayanand Saraswati — Satyarth Prakash, first published in 1875, sets out his case that the Vedas alone are authoritative.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The practice of shuddhi, the reconversion of people who had left the fold, is associated with which one of the following bodies?

  • (a)Brahmo Samaj
  • (b)Prarthana Samaj
  • (c)Arya Samaj
  • (d)Theosophical Society

  Answer(c) Arya Samaj — shuddhi was one of the movement's distinctive activities, taken up energetically by Swami Shraddhanand.