ARYA-SAMAJ. - Properly “community, society of the Aryans”; one of the numerous religious-social movements of modern India, founded in 1865 by Dayanand Saraswati, a Brahmin of Kathiawar (1824–1883), which soon spread throughout northern India (Punjab and the United Provinces). Opposed to European culture and all its influences, and particularly hostile to the tenets of Christianity and Islam, Dayanand advocated a return of the Hindus to their primitive purity by restoring them to the Vedic sources, in whose deities he saw symbolically personified the forces of nature.
His is therefore a monotheistic doctrine according to which God, the most perfect being—whose worship, together with uprightness of life, is the indispensable means to the emancipation of souls from their wandering through successive existences and to celestial beatitude—is the creator, ruler, and destroyer of the world; the existence of which is therefore a perpetual arising, perishing, and renewing. All possible knowledge of the past, present, and even of what future ages may conceive—not only for India—must be considered already included in the Veda, which is thus to be regarded as the book of divine wisdom. Every other religion that does not accept its word must therefore be rejected, whether it be not only Christianity or Islam, but also Buddhism and Hinduism, the latter of which Dayanand explicitly repudiates for its idolatry. Dayanand also rejects the remission of sins; he opposes the caste system and child marriage; he defends the necessity of greater education for the lower classes and the equalization of women’s rights with those of men.
Noteworthy is the propaganda that the A.-S. carries on among the Christians and Muslims of India, even since, upon Dayanand’s death in 1883, it has divided into three distinct groups with gradually diverging tendencies. Of these, one, strictly conservative, adheres closely to the dictates of the Veda; another does not disdain to accept European customs and permits the eating of meat; the third, animated by nationalist spirit, energetically opposes every foreign influence and would “revive the golden age of ancient India.”
In 1921 the A.-S., whose adherents were steadily increasing, counted—also as a result of its nationalist spirit and active propaganda—in Bengal alone 468,000 members.