Ram Mohan Roy

Born in 1772, Roy grew up in a Bengal where ritual and hierarchy were rarely questioned. He learned Sanskrit, Persian, and English, then turned all three against practices he saw as corrupt. In 1828 he founded the Brahmo Sabha, a reform society that would become the Brahmo Samaj, challenging caste and ritual with a stripped-down theism. He campaigned against sati and child marriage, wrote the first complete grammar of Bengali, and pushed for modern education. The Mughal emperor Akbar II gave him the title Raja. He died in England in 1833, far from the renaissance he'd started.