Herald of New Modern Age

Rammohun Roy's year of birth is a highly controversial issue. According to some historians he was born on May 22, 1772. But there are others who hold the view that Rammohun was born in 1774. Unfortunately, there is no incontrovertible evidence in support of either of the two dates though a comparative assessment of the available data seems to weigh in favour of the later date as Rammohun's year of birth.

He was born at a time when the East and West had come together for good, when the British Rule was being consolidated in India, and when scientific, political, an economic movements were going in the west. He wanted that his country also, which had for some time been in spiritual, moral and political decadeness, should become once more a great nation.

In the midst of the darkness that prevailed all over the country the man to see the vision of a new India was Raja Rammohun Roy. The Raja has been regarded as the 'Herald of a New Age' in India. The chief characteristic of Rammohun's life was an assimilation of the very best of the Western and Eastern cultures as he understood them. Rammohun Roy's many-sided and multifarious activities in the field of social and religious reform, in the sphere of cultural and intellectual advancement, and in the arena of political and constitutional evolution, mark him out as the most outstanding personality modern India has produced.

Raja Rammohun Roy stands out like a great snowclad mountain peak in the far distance, rising out of the lower mists, high up in the firmament of heaven. He was always for in advance of his own times, and his greatest thoughts have not yet found their full accomplishment in the history of India and the modern world. Raja Rammohun Roy was one of those saints and seers, who, in the words of Rabindranath Tagore, had carried on much farther India's great attempt to evolve a human adjustment of peoples and races, who broke through barriers of social and religious exclusiveness and brought together India's different communities on the genuine basis of spiritual reality.