Arya Samaj and Swami Dayanand Saraswati

Dayanand's Life: From Mool Shankar to Maharshi

Notice the last row: Dayanand died two years before the Indian National Congress was founded (1885), so he belongs to the age of reform, not of politics. Notice also that a Gujarati speaker wrote his main book in Hindi, because he wanted one script and language that Indians from Punjab to Bihar could read.

"Back to the Vedas": What He Taught and What He Rejected

Dayanand's test for any belief was a single question: is it in the Vedas? The four Samhitas (Rig, Yajur, Sama and Atharva) were, for him, free from error. Whatever grew around them later, such as the Puranas, idol worship, pilgrimage rituals and the claim that Brahmins are superior by birth, was man-made and could be thrown out. That is why the Arya Samaj is called revivalist: it reforms society by returning to a remembered Vedic past. The Brahmo Samaj, by contrast, relied on reason and borrowed freely from the West.

The ten principles of the Samaj, settled at Lahore in 1877, put God, the Vedas and service to the whole world at the centre. One more feature shaped its history. The later chapters of Satyarth Prakash criticise other faiths as well as other Hindu sects, and Arya Samajists took on missionaries and maulvis in public debates (shastrarth). That energy won the Samaj followers in Punjab and the United Provinces, and it also sharpened community identities.

Textbooks credit him with an early call of "India for Indians" in 1876, and the Satyarth Prakash argues that even the best foreign government cannot match a country's own. Historians add a caution: the word swaraj in its modern political sense does not appear in his writing.

Two Classrooms: DAV, Gurukul and the Split

After Dayanand's death, his Punjab followers chose a school as his memorial. The Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) school opened at Lahore on 1 June 1886 with Lala Hansraj as headmaster, and it grew into the DAV College. Its idea was a bargain: teach English and the sciences, so that students could earn a living in the colonial economy, and Sanskrit and Vedic studies, so that they stayed rooted in their own tradition. British policy had set English and Indian learning against each other (see education in British India); the DAV tried to join them.

Not everyone liked the bargain. A second group, led by Munshi Ram, felt that English schooling would turn Arya children into clerks with no Vedic character. Textbooks date the open split in the Punjab Samaj to 1893. It had two causes: Anglicised versus Sanskrit-based education, and vegetarianism (the "Mahatma" party insisted on it; the "Cultured" or College party did not). Munshi Ram then put his own idea into practice. In 1902 he founded Gurukul Kangri on the Ganga bank near Haridwar, a residential school where pupils lived with their teachers and the Vedic tradition stood at the centre of the course.

Shuddhi, Sangathan and Swami Shraddhanand

Shuddhi means "purification". In the Arya Samaj it came to mean a ceremony that took back into the Hindu fold people who had converted to Islam or Christianity, and also admitted so-called untouchables. Dayanand accepted the idea that a person could return, and his followers turned it into an organised campaign in the early twentieth century. It won the Samaj admirers and enemies in equal number.

The man most linked with shuddhi was Swami Shraddhanand. Born Munshi Ram at Talwan, Jalandhar, in 1856, he was a lawyer before he became the Samaj's leading educator. His public life shows both faces of the movement:

• 1917: he takes sannyasa and the name Shraddhanand.
• April 1919: in the Rowlatt agitation he speaks from the Jama Masjid in Delhi, a Hindu sannyasi addressing a Muslim congregation on unity. The President recalled this at Kurukshetra.
• December 1919: he chairs the reception committee of the Congress session at Amritsar, held after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, where Motilal Nehru presided.
• 1923: he heads the Bharatiya Hindu Shuddhi Sabha and leads the shuddhi of the Malkana Rajputs of western Uttar Pradesh.
• Throughout: he campaigns against untouchability, arguing that it contradicts the Vedic tradition.
• 23 December 1926: he is shot dead in Delhi by Abdul Rashid, and the centenary year of that martyrdom is what the nation marks in 2026.

The Arya Samaj in the National Movement

The Samaj never fought the British as an organisation, but its schools and members shaped Punjab's nationalism.

• Lala Lajpat Rai (1865–1928), "Punjab Kesari", was an Arya Samajist and a DAV pillar. He was part of the Lal-Bal-Pal trio, was deported to Mandalay in 1907, and was the first president of the AITUC in 1920. He died on 17 November 1928, weeks after police lathi blows at an anti-Simon Commission march in Lahore.
• Shyamji Krishna Varma, inspired by Dayanand, opened India House in London in 1905 as a base for Indian students and revolutionaries.
• Bhai Parmanand, an Arya Samaj missionary, became a Ghadar leader, was sentenced to death in the Lahore Conspiracy Case (1915) and was held in the Cellular Jail. His full story is in our article on Bhai Parmanand at 150.
• Bhagat Singh studied at a DAV school in Lahore before joining the National College, where Bhai Parmanand taught history.

The 1907 agitation in Punjab, against a colonisation law and rising canal charges, was part of the same wave as the Swadeshi movement; see our article on the Swadeshi movement and the Partition of Bengal.

The Arya Samaj Beside Its Cousins

CDS loves the match-the-columns question on these five bodies. Learn the table, not the paragraphs.

How UPSC Has Asked It: Past Papers Solved

UPSC asks what he believed, when, and who else belongs in the same bracket. Six solved questions follow.

Practice MCQs (with answers)

1. The Arya Samaj was founded in Bombay in
   1. 1857
   2. 1866
   3. 1875
   4. 1885
2. The Ten Principles of the Arya Samaj were settled in 1877 at
   1. Lahore
   2. Amritsar
   3. Calcutta
   4. Allahabad
3. Dayanand's Satyarth Prakash was first published in
   1. Sanskrit
   2. Gujarati
   3. English
   4. Hindi
4. Gurukul Kangri, near Haridwar, was founded in 1902 by
   1. Lala Hansraj
   2. Munshi Ram (Swami Shraddhanand)
   3. Lala Lajpat Rai
   4. Swami Vivekananda
5. Which pairing of founder and organisation is correct?
   1. Atmaram Pandurang - Prarthana Samaj
   2. Dayanand Saraswati - Brahmo Samaj
   3. Vivekananda - Theosophical Society
   4. Keshab Chandra Sen - Arya Samaj
6. The 1923 shuddhi campaign among the Malkana Rajputs was led by
   1. Lala Lajpat Rai
   2. Bhai Parmanand
   3. Shyamji Krishna Varma
   4. Swami Shraddhanand
7. In the split in the Punjab Arya Samaj, the "College party" was led by Lala Hansraj and
   1. Shyamji Krishna Varma
   2. Munshi Ram
   3. Lala Lajpat Rai
   4. Annie Besant
8. Which of the following did Dayanand NOT support?
   1. The Vedas as the source of knowledge
   2. Worship of idols as a path to devotion
   3. Caste decided by merit
   4. Hindi as a common language

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