Incarnations: India in 50 Lives - Rammohan Roy: Humanity in General

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Prof. Sunil Khilnani profiles Rammohan Roy, the Bengali scholar and reformer who became a worldwide intellectual celebrity and campaigned against Sati, the suicide of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres.

Rammohan Roy was part of an international set of radicals and reformers attacking established religion and ruling despots in the early 19th century, including the East India Company. He urged Indians to judge their society and behaviour by universal values at the very moment these values were emerging in the Enlightenment West. "And ever since Roy," Sunil Khilnani says, "Indians have been part of the global argument about the nature of justice, rights and freedom"

He is best known for his advocacy for women and his opposition to Sati, the Hindu rite in which widows died on their husbands' funeral pyres. His campaign converged with the birth of an international concern with human rights.

With contributions from Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and from the late Prof. Christopher Bayly, Sunil Khilnani's examination of Rammohan Roy's life takes him from the Sati ghats of Calcutta to a quiet cemetery on the outskirts of Bristol, Roy's last resting place.

Producer: Jeremy Grange
Executive Producer: Martin Smith
Original Music composed by Talvin Singh.

Published on Tuesday, 9th June 2015.

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