Swami Dayanand Saraswati

• Context (TH): PM Modi was virtually addressing an event organized to mark the 200^th birth anniversary of Swami Dayanand Saraswati.

Early Life

• Dayanand Saraswati was born on February 12, 1824 in Tankara, Gujarat as Mool Shankar to Karshanji Lalji Tiwari and Yashodabai.
• He was attracted to the spiritual realm after the death of his sister when he was 14 years old.
• At age 22, Moolshakar left home in search of true knowledge, spiritual purity and moksha (liberation).
• He wandered for fifteen years (1845-60) in search of a guru. In 1860, he found his blind guru and mentor Swami Virjanand Saraswati at Mathura.
• Virjanand Saraswati gave him the name Dayanand and as gurudakshina extracted a promise from Dayanand that he would devote his life to the revival of Hinduism.

Preachings

• To him Veda was the rock-bed of Hindu culture and infallible, being the inspired one of God. He gave the clarion call “Go Back to Vedas”.
• His slogan called for a revival of Vedic knowledge and the purity of Vedic religion, not a return to Vedic times.
• He strongly criticized the Hindu belief in maya (illusion) as the overarching theme of all physical existence.
• He profusely quoted the Vedas and other religious texts to insist that salvation was not the only motto of a Hindu or Arya, as was believed.
• To lead a fruitful worldly life, working for a noble cause was important, and he preached that salvation was possible through social service.
• He opposed Islam and Christianity and advocated for Suddhi movement to reconvert the other sects to the Hindu order.
• He advocated that God, the soul, and matter (prakriti) were separate and eternal entities.
• He was against idol worship, caste system, ritualism, fatalism, infanticide, sale of grooms, child marriages, etc. He also stood for the liberation of women and upliftment of the depressed class.
• He advocated the ideal age for a girl to be between 16 and 24, and for men between 25 and 40.
• He was the first leader in the field of theology who welcomed the advances of sciences and technology.
• He believed in the theory of karma and reincarnation.
• He subscribed to the Vedic notion of chaturvarna system in which a person was identified as a Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, or Shudra according to the occupation he followed.

Contributions

• Maharshi’s first major authorship was Panchmahayajya Vidhi in 1874 AD.
• He wrote three books namely:
  1. “Satyartha Prakash”,
  2. “Veda Bhashya Bhumika” and
  3. “Veda Bhashya”.
• He founded Arya Samaj in Mumbai in 1875 to promote social service. Later the headquarters of the Samaj were established at Lahore.
• The Paropkarini Sabha located in Ajmer was founded by the Swami himself to publish and preach his works and Vedic texts in 1882.
• He is credited to have first used the term swaraj (self-rule)- “India for Indians” in 1876, which was later picked up by the likes of Lokmanya Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi.

Death and Legacy

• Dayanand Saraswati died under suspicious circumstances in 1883, after his public criticism of the Maharaja of Jodhpur.
• Today, Dayanand Saraswati’s legacy carries on through the Arya Samaj centres found across India as well as the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic schools and colleges.
  • The first DAV School was established at Lahore with Mahatma Hansarj as the headmaster.
• Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, India’s second President, called Dayanand Saraswati “a maker of modern India”.