In the early decades of the 19th century Raja Rammohun Roy, when introducing music as part of Vedic prayers in the Brahma Sabha, that was to become the Brahmo Samaj later in 1828, he made dhrupad as the foundation of such music. During that time in Bengal, due to the rise of the zamindar as a social and economic class with significant political power, music of all hues could be heard not only in the palaces but also among theatre and drama groups in villages and cities which the landed class promoted. The kirtan, baul, bhawaiyya, khayal, tappa were heard as also were the cruder forms of folk, jhumur and gombhira. Ramprasad Sen, with his devotional songs on Kali raged through the musicscape of Bengal. It was in this dense space that Rammohun resurrected the Dhrupad from a collective amnesia, wrote songs on tunes based on this form of music and circulated printed lyrics with notations, forestalling and forbidding deviations. His purpose in Dhrupad was a continuation of his other social reforms, most importantly the abolition of Sati. The establishment of Dhrupad and his fight against Sati were part of the same process, to fight the “low and popular” culture ridden with superstitions, obscene eroticism with the “high brow culture” of the Vedas.

Rammohun Roy’s family were employed in the imperial services in the revenue departments and lived in Murshidabad. They moved away to Burdwan, present day Bardhhaman due to the “caprice of the Nawab”, possibly meaning Siraj-ud-Daulah and became part of the ever-growing powerful lot of Hindu landed gentry. Ramakanta, Rammohun’s father despite owning property worth “lakhs of rupees” suffered insecurities as all those who suffer a fall from status do. Rammohun was sent off to Patna at the age of 9 to study Persian and Arabic for a formal degree. He returned home as an argumentative teenager questioning every aspect of religion and composed while still in his teens, a slim tract called the Tuhfat ul Muwahhidin in which he attacked anything that called for faith and belief. It was only in his late teens and early twenties when he visited Varanasi, he learnt the Vedas and the Upanishads in a structured manner that religion endeared to him as the worship of physical and natural forces without ever mentioning the word God.

Rammohun Roy was born in 1772 in Radhanagar close to Arambagh and Searsole, Bengal’s most cosmopolitan areas of the times. It was also here that much of Sati was concentrated. It is possible that the horror of the clearly identifiable sounds made him scared and eventually determined to move forces to eliminate this practice. Sati was believed to convert the widows burnt alive in the pyres of their husbands into Goddesses; it is also possible that Rammohun’s allergy towards idolatry could have stemmed from this nightmare. Vedas, as he discovered could deliver religion from the pitfalls of idols; atheism was not an option in his times as being a non-believer could also cost one titles of inheritance and ancestral wealth. Vedas, then this had to be. Rammohun’s establishment of the Dhrupad as central to Brahmo Samaj’s music fought the “idolatry” of the kirtans, gombhiras, khayals and others.

Rammohun is credited with the establishment of the first newspaper. This was in Persian, called Mirat ul Aakhbaar, or newspaper of reflections. True to its name, the newspaper was less of reporting of events and more of analysis of those. Interestingly, he found that histories of the world were constituted by universal forces; peasant, land, nobility, trader, merchant, royalty, ecclesia, sects, mobs, ascetics, banditry, violence, religious intolerance, and these variously formed themselves into the French Revolution, Spanish liberalism, Italian nationalism, and the oppression of Catholic Ireland by Protestant England. The paper was terminated, and we no longer have any surviving copy but through his interpretation of politics, he disregarded identities just as he dismissed idols underlining the need to understand politics as a play of impersonal and not interpersonal forces.

He developed the Bengali language in the form as we know of it today. After Rammohun’s death in 1833, the mission for Bengali was carried on by Bankimchandra Chattpadhyay and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and eventually found its pinnacle in Rabindranath Tagore. William Carey with his scholars in Fort William translated Sanskrit texts into Bengali and even compiled Bengali texts but the language of these texts was stiff and unformed. Rammohun’s translations, argumentative and discursive pieces on religion, philosophy and land titles raised Bengali into a rich language able to carry abstract thoughts and higher learning. When he also pioneered the teaching curriculum for schools and colleges which eliminated Sanskrit and introduced modern secular subjects albeit in the Bengali language. In his mind, Bengali was a more powerful language for carrying scientific ideals than English, which he felt often veered towards moralism!

Everywhere Rammohun can be seen to be separating the local, vernacular, “pagan” with a high culture with the ulterior aim of uprooting the belief system that held Sati, goddesses, infusing inanimate objects with sacred power. Dhrupad is part of that project, to hail the Vedas over the vernacular.

Dhrupad and the modern song perhaps would not have flooded the Bengali sensibilities if it were not for Tagore who continued in the tradition of Raja Rammohun Roy and composed some of his most elegant ones in the form of the Brahmo Sangeet. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, in his essays published in Bangadarshan continued the political and economic ideas of Rammohun while Iswarchandra Vidyasagar extended Rammohun’s battle on women’s education, rights of widows and scientific and secular education in the Bengali medium.