He Watched His Brother’s Widow Burn

He had watched a woman in his own family burn.

Ram Mohan Roy's sister-in-law died by sati, burned on her husband's pyre, and he was there. Everything he spent the rest of his life doing runs back to that.

The equipment he brought to it

Rammohan was born in 1772 at Radhanagar in Bengal, into a Brahmin family.

And he was given an education that almost nobody in India then possessed.

Persian and Arabic at Patna. Sanskrit at Benares. Greek and Latin later, at Calcutta. English, obviously, and Bengali.

Sit with that list. He could read the Quran in Arabic. The Upanishads in Sanskrit. The New Testament in Greek. And the parliamentary debates of Westminster in English.

He did read all of them. And he argued with all of them.