- Lived:
- 12 February 1824, Tankara in Kathiawar (Gujarat) → a runaway's quarter-century of wandering across northern India, then a campaigning decade through Bombay, the Punjab and the princely courts of Rajputana; died at Ajmer, 30 October 1883
- Field:
- religious and social reform — founder of the Arya Samaj, the "Society of the Noble," and the fiercest of the nineteenth century's Hindu reformers
- The Big Idea:
- Everything he thought rotten in the Hinduism around him — idol worship, caste by birth, child marriage, priestcraft — was a later corruption; the Vedas alone are revelation, and the way forward for India was all the way back: "Back to the Vedas."
- In their words:
- "The Vedas are the scripture of true knowledge. It is the paramount duty of every Ārya to read them, teach them, recite them and hear them read." (the third of the ten Arya Samaj principles, in his own drafting, Lahore, 1877)
- If you remember one thing:
- A fourteen-year-old keeping vigil watched a mouse eat the offerings off a Shiva idol and asked a question nobody could answer — and spent the next forty-five years building, out of that one unanswered question, a movement that attacked caste, child marriage and priestcraft in the name of India's oldest books.