Swami Dayananda Saraswati

The Story

Born Mool Shankar in Tankara, Gujarat, he was a boy of fierce questioning — a childhood encounter with a rat nibbling at the family's idol on Shivaratri shook his faith in idol worship forever. He left home as a young man and wandered Bhārat for years as an ascetic, searching for truth, until he found it in the Vedas.

His teaching, 'Back to the Vedas', was both conservative and revolutionary: he rejected idol worship, polytheism, and priestcraft as later corruptions, and he denounced caste by birth, child marriage, and the oppression of women. He wrote the Satyarth Prakash, 'the light of truth', and in 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay.

The Arya Samaj spread across north Bhārat, building schools (the DAV colleges), opening the shuddhi movement that brought converts back to the Hindu fold, and producing leaders like Lala Lajpat Rai and Swami Shraddhananda. Dayananda was poisoned by a cook in the pay of a Maharaja he had criticised, and he died in 1883 — his movement, grown immense, carrying on his reform.