During the early years of
East India Company rule, Ram Mohan Roy acted as a political agitator while employed by the company. In 1792, the British
Baptist shoemaker
William Carey published his influential missionary tract,
An Enquiry of the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of Heathens. In 1793, William Carey landed in India to settle. His objective was to translate, publish and distribute the Bible in Indian languages and propagate Christianity to the Indian people. He realised the "mobile" (i.e. service classes)
Brahmins and
Pandits were most able to help him in this endeavour, and he began gathering them. He learnt the Buddhist and Jain religious works to better argue the case for Christianity in a cultural context. In 1795, Carey made contact with a Sanskrit scholar, the Tantric Saihardana Vidyavagish, who later introduced him to Ram Mohan Roy, who wished to learn English. While there are rumors that between 1796 and 1797, the trio of Carey, Vidyavagish, and Roy created a religious work known as the "Maha Nirvana Tantra" (or "Book of the Great Liberation"). Scholars like John Duncan Derrett are skeptical of this claim calling it "highly improbable" and Hugh Urban argues that "It is probable that we will never know the true author and date of the Maha Nirvana Tantra". Carey's involvement is not recorded in his very detailed records and he reports only learning to read
Sanskrit in 1796 and only completed a grammar in 1797, the same year he translated part of The Bible (from Joshua to Job), a massive task. For the next two decades Maha Nirvana Tantra was regularly augmented. Its judicial sections were used in the law courts of the English Settlement in Bengal as Hindu Law for adjudicating upon property disputes of the zamindars. However, a few British magistrates and collectors began to suspect and its usage (as well as the reliance on
pandits as sources of Hindu Law) was quickly deprecated. Vidyavagish had a brief falling out with Carey and separated from the group, but maintained ties to Ram Mohan Roy. In 1797, Raja Ram Mohan reached Calcutta and became a
bania (moneylender), mainly to lend to the Englishmen of the Company living beyond their means. Ram Mohan also continued his vocation as
pandit in the English courts and started to make a living for himself. He began learning Greek and Latin. In 1799, Carey was joined by missionary
Joshua Marshman and the printer William Ward at the Danish settlement of
Serampore. From 1803 until 1815, Ram Mohan served the East India Company's "Writing Service", commencing as private clerk (
Munshi) to Thomas Woodroffe, Registrar of the Appellate Court at Murshidabad (whose distant nephew,
John Woodroffe—also a magistrate—and later lived off the Maha Nirvana Tantra under the pseudonym
Arthur Avalon). Roy resigned from Woodroffe's service and later secured employment with John Digby, a Company collector, and Ram Mohan spent many years at Rangpur and elsewhere with Digby, where he renewed his contacts with Hariharananda.
William Carey had by this time settled at Serampore and the old trio renewed their profitable association.
William Carey was also aligned now with the English Company, then head-quartered at Fort William, and his religious and political ambitions were increasingly intertwined. While in Murshidabad, in 1804 Raja Ram Mohan Roy wrote
Tuhfat-ul-Muwahhidin (A Gift to Monotheists) in Persian with an introduction in Arabic. Bengali had not yet become the language of intellectual discourse. The importance of
Tuhfat-ul-muwahhidin lies only in its being the first known theological statement of one who achieved later fame and notoriety as a
Vedantin. On its own, it is unremarkable, perhaps of interest only to a social historian because of its amateurish eclecticism.
Tuhfat was, after all, available as early as 1884 in the English translation of Maulavi Obaidullah EI Obaid, published by the Adi Brahmo Samaj. Raja Ram Mohan Roy did not know the Upanishad at this stage in his intellectual development. In 1814, he started
Atmiya Sabha (i.e. Society of Friends) a philosophical discussion circle in
Kolkata (then Calcutta) to propagate the monotheistic ideals of the vedanta and to campaign against idolatry, caste rigidities, meaningless rituals and other social ills. The East India Company was draining money from India at a rate of three million pounds a year by 1838. Ram Mohan Roy was one of the first to try to estimate how much money was being taken out of India and to where it was disappearing. He estimated that around one-half of all total revenue collected in India was sent out to England, leaving India, with a considerably larger population, to use the remaining money to maintain social well-being. Ram Mohan Roy saw this and believed that the unrestricted settlement of Europeans in India governing under free trade would help ease the economic drain crisis. During the next two decades, Ram Mohan along with William Carey, launched his attack against the bastions of Hinduism of Bengal, namely his own
Kulin Brahmin priestly clan (then in control of the many temples of Bengal) and their priestly excesses. He wrote
Gaudiya Vyakaran which was the first complete Bangla grammar written book. It was published in 1826. In 1828, he launched Brahmo Sabha with
Debendranath Tagore. By 1828, he had become a well known figure in India. In 1830, he had gone to England as an envoy of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar Shah II, who invested him with the title of Raja to the court of King William IV. ==Middle "Brahmo" period (1820–1830)==