son’s heirs (including his wife and
daughters) become inheritors, not in
their own right, but as representatives of
the deceased heir. Under the Dayabhaga,
widowsand daughters can thus have a
share in family property, and they are
allowed to act as agents in their own
right. In theory this arrangement seems
far more advantageous to women, but
in fact it had some gruesome conse-
quences. When the British first settled
in Bengal in the late eighteenth centu-
ry, they were horrified by the preva-
lence of sati, the rite in which a widow
would be burned on her husband’s
funeral pyre. It seems that sati was not
nearly so common in many other parts
of India, and one theory is that this rite
was the family’s way to ensure that
their daughter-in-law—who was an
outsider to the family—would not be
able to gain control over any of their
ancestral property.
Dayanand Saraswati
(1824–1883) Nineteenth-century reformist
asceticand founder of the Arya Samaj, a
reformist Hindu organization. The late
nineteenth century was an era of
sweeping social, economic, and
religious change in northern India, and
the Arya Samaj was an authentically
Hindu response to these forces.
Dayanand’s mission for the Arya Samaj
was to reform and revitalize Hinduism
by purging it of the “false practices” that
had gradually crept in. Swami
Dayanand’s fundamental assumption
was that ultimate religious authority lay
only in the ancient scriptures called the
Vedas, and that any contemporary
religious practices not found in the
Vedas were mistaken, odious, and
deserved to be abandoned. This stance
allowed him to attack many of the
“social evils” plaguing nineteenth-
century Hinduism, such as child
marriages, sati (the rite in which a
widow would be burned on her
husband’s funeral pyre), “idolatrous”
image worship, untouchability, a ban
on widow remarriage, and the unequal
status of women. In claiming that such
practices were “corrupt,” Dayanand had
found not only a viable strategy for
reform, but a way to undercut the claims
of Christian missionaries, who pointed
to such evils as evidence that Hindu reli-
gion was inferior to Christianity.
Unlike its predecessor, the Brahmo
Samaj, which was heavily influenced by
Christianity, the Arya Samaj was a Hindu
response drawing from purely Hindu
sources. Dayanand belonged to the first
generation of Hindus aiming to reassert
the greatness of Hinduism as opposed
to the Christian missionary challenge,
and much of his writing is militantly
anti-Christian. One sign of his crusading
spirit is his support for the ceremony of
purification (shuddhi), through which
Hindus who had become members of
other religious communities were received
back into the Hindu community.
Although the Arya Samaj claimed that
they were simply getting back to the
Veda, the ultimate aim was not to
reclaim that long-gone era, but to
develop a form of Hindu religious life
more compatible with “modern” times.
Thus, even though Dayanand was “tra-
ditionalist” in his emphasis on the
Vedas, he was radical in insisting that
the Vedas should be accessible to all
people, including groups such as
women and the shudras, or the lowest
social group, both of whom had tradi-
tionally been forbidden to read or even
hear it. During his ministry Dayanand
spoke throughout India, attacking any
and all religions not rooted in the Vedas,
including contemporary Hinduism. His
eloquence, charisma, and commitment
brought him considerable success, but
also many enemies, and he was eventu-
ally assassinated by poisoning. For fur-
ther information see Dayanand
Saraswati, Autobiography of Swami
Dayanand Saraswati, K. C. Yadav (ed.),
1978; Ganga Prasad Upadhyaya (trans.),
Light of Truth, 1960; and Arvind Sharma,
“Swami Dayananda Sarasvati,” in
Robert D. Baird (ed.), Religion in Modern
India, 1998.Dayanand Saraswati