He Argued It From the Shastras

He won it by out-arguing them in Sanskrit.

The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856 was not carried by an appeal to English liberal sentiment.

Nor was it carried by the government's enthusiasm. It was carried because Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar went into the shastras. The Hindu legal and scriptural texts.

And he showed, on their own terms, that they did not forbid a widow from remarrying.

The orthodox opposition then had to argue against their own texts, in front of an audience that could check.

Where he started

Vidyasagar was born on the 26th of September, 1820, at Birsingha, into a poor Bengali Brahmin family.

There is a detail about his childhood that everybody in Bengal knows.