Sanskritic Discourses of Divinity: Rammohun Roy’s Debate with Utsavānanda Vīdyāvāgīśa

Abstract

We will highlight some continuities and discontinuities across the thresholds of Hindu antiquity and colonial modernity through a study of the writings of Raja Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) on Vedāntic themes. In the sizeable body of literature on Roy, relatively less attention has been given to his Sanskritic styles of reasoning in his critiques of pandits such as Utsavānanda Vidyāvāgīśa, Mṛtyuñjaya Vidyālaṅkāra, and others. By delineating these styles in his responses in Sanskrit (1816–1817) to Utsavānanda, we will highlight the hermeneutic strategies through which he defended the Advaita Vedānta of Śaṅkara. We will indicate that Roy’s foundational commitment to Śaṅkara’s Advaita leads him – in his Sanskrit and Bengali writings (1815–1819) – to strike the “modernist” notes of social activism and religious universalism that would later be associated with the English writings of Swami Vivekananda, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and others.