Non-Brahmin Approach to Advaita Vedanta in Colonial Western India

Abstract

The scholarship on Vedanta in Colonial India is mostly focused on the Bengal presidency, particularly on the figure of Vivekananda and his Guru Ramakrishna. (Allen 2023) This paper tries to shift the focus away to the discourses on Vedanta in Bombay presidency. The Marathi public sphere was characterised by fervent debates on caste and the questions of equal access to religion in terms of access to religious texts, places of worship, and ritual status.  Sarwate (2021) in his thesis notes that the Satyashodhak movement, which completely rejected Brahminical/Vedic Religion earlier, returned to the “Hindu” fold in its second phase. Later non-Brahmin thinkers like Ghole, Keluskar, and Khedkar produced some of the early discussions on Vedanta in the vernacular Marathi public sphere. In this context, this paper asks questions such as — How did Non-brahmin thinkers’ approach to Vedanta differ from traditional Sanskrit scholars writing about Vedanta in vernacular Marathi? The paper will analyze texts such as — “Dharmajidnyasu Kumudini” (1912), and “A Handbook on Vedanta Philosophy of Religion” (1911) by situating them in the context of the early 20th-century Marathi Public Sphere. The paper argues, tentatively, that non-Brahmin scholars approached Vedantic thought as an alternative form of ‘religion’ in itself that accommodated their ethical concerns.  Although the theological core changed due to the recently found accessibility to the Vedic literature through Western Indological works, their search for an alternative ‘religion’ was in continuation with the Satyashodhak movement’s goals.