ABSTRACT
In his unfinished autobiography, Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905), the leader of the reformist body called the Brahmo Samaj (founded 1828), recalls that in the early 1850s, some of his close religious associates and friends tried to determine the nature of god by a show of hands. If, for instance, someone proposed that god represented Bliss and Beatitude, this was then put to vote among the members gathered. The pious and essentially conservative man that he was, Debendranath found this quite blasphemous. Earlier too, he had regretfully noted that while he was interested in investigating the relationship between god and man, his associates seemed more keen on examining the ways in which man related to the physical world. On each of these occasions, he singled out in particular one associate by the name of Akshay Kumar Dutta (1820–1886). Dutta was an ardent deist and a scholar of natural theology. It was in fact Dutta who convinced Debendranath to take up the question of whether or not the Vedas could be treated as the final scriptural authority for Hinduism. As a result, by 1848–1849, the Brahmo Samaj under Debendranath’s leadership took the radical step of renouncing faith in the Vedas as an infallible work of nonhuman (apaurusheya) revelation.
