The life and letters of Raja Rammohun Roy - WordPress.com

OF SOPHIA DOBSON COLT ETXXVauthor, whose name isquite familiar to our readers, hastaken up the most important topic of the day in India andtreated it in so exhaustive and convincing a manner as ismost likely to influence public opinion in England. Thepamphlet exhibits an amount of research which is trulyremarkable." This pamphlet, the narrative portion of whichwas subsequently embodied by Miss Collet in her BrahmoYear-Book for 1879, remains the clearest and fullest historyof that exceedingly interesting episode in the reform movementof modern India viz., emancipation from the tyrannyof caste and priesthood in matters of matrimony. Itrecords how, step by step, the present law regulating reformmarriages came to be enacted.Now we pass on to a more elaborate and sustained efforton the part of Miss Collet to present the work and activitiesof the Brahmo Samaj to the public. This was her compilationof the "Brahmo Year-Book,'' which came out year afteryear for seven years from 1876 to 1882. Considering thefact that the compiler was not herself a member of the community,nor had she any direct personal acquaintance withthe churches the minutest details of the work and organisationof which she undertook to chronicle from a distance of manythousand miles, the work must be pronounced a marvellousmonument of labour and the power of keeping accurate information.The seven volumes of Miss Collet's BrahmoYear-Book are together a store-house of information about theBrahmo Samaj during a most important epoch in its history.They include the period of the zenith of Babu Keshub ChandraSen's ascendancy in the Brahmo Samaj, immediately precedingthe Cooch Behar marriage and the troubled times thatfollowed until the practical conclusion of the disastrousagitation- When Miss Collet commenced the work, she hadno idea of the coming catastrophe. Her object in undertakingthe compilation has been told in the preface to the4