Who founded the Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta in 1828?

Correct — B. Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha at Calcutta in 1828, the body that came to be known as the Brahmo Samaj.

It preached one formless God and rejected idol worship, priestly ritual and caste distinction, arguing from the Upanishads that image worship was a later corruption rather than the tradition itself.

Roy had built towards it with the Atmiya Sabha of 1814, and he is the reformer behind the campaign that ended sati in 1829.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Ramabai Ranade — Ramabai Ranade belongs to the later nineteenth century — she was not born until the 1860s — and her work was in women's education and women's associations in Poona, not the founding of a Calcutta society in 1828.
• (c)
  Swami Vivekanand — Swami Vivekananda was born in 1863, thirty-five years after the Samaj was founded. He is associated with the Ramakrishna Mission and Belur Math.
• (d)
  Gopal Krishna Gokhale — Gopal Krishna Gokhale was a moderate Congress politician of the next century, remembered for the Servants of India Society of 1905, not for a religious reform society of 1828.

Nineteenth-century reform is asked as a table: founder, society, city, year. Ram Mohan Roy fills the first row.

His argument was that idolatry and ritual were later additions, and that the Upanishads themselves taught worship of one formless God.

The Brahmo Samaj carried that into practice — congregational prayer without images, opposition to caste and to sati, support for women's education and for English and scientific learning.

The Samaj later split under Debendranath Tagore and Keshab Chandra Sen, but the founding line stays with Roy.

Key facts

• Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Sabha, later the Brahmo Samaj, at Calcutta in 1828.
• He had earlier founded the Atmiya Sabha in 1814.
• Sati was outlawed in 1829 by a regulation under Governor-General Lord William Bentinck, a measure Roy campaigned for.
• Gopal Krishna Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society in 1905.

Common traps

• The Atmiya Sabha of 1814 and the Brahmo Sabha of 1828 are both Roy's, and SSC asks for one year or the other.
• Vivekananda and Gokhale are famous enough to feel plausible, but both were born after 1828.

No directly related past PYQ was found.