Debendranath Tagore

Debendranath Tagore inherited one of the largest fortunes in Bengal, found a page of the Upanishads blowing along a riverbank, and spent the rest of his life on the religion it started. He was the son of Dwarkanath Tagore, the merchant prince whose debts he insisted on paying in full after his death rather than repudiating them, which cost him most of the estate and made his reputation. In 1843 he formally took up Ram Mohan Roy's Brahmo Sabha, reconstituted it as the Brahmo Samaj, wrote its covenant and gave it an organisation, a liturgy and a body of members - Roy had left an argument and Debendranath made it a church. He was called Maharshi, the great sage. His theology kept the Upanishads while dropping the infallibility of the Vedas, which was a real break, and he split with the younger Keshub Chandra Sen over how far to go in abandoning caste and Hindu ceremony. In 1863 he bought land at Bolpur and founded an ashram there for meditation, which his son Rabindranath later turned into the school and university at Santiniketan. He spent long periods alone in the Himalayas. He had fourteen children, of whom Rabindranath was the youngest and Jyotirindranath and Satyendranath - the first Indian in the Indian Civil Service - were also significant. His autobiography, written in Bengali and translated by his sons, is one of the earliest in the language and is candid about doubt. He sent envoys to Benares to examine the Vedas and concluded on the evidence that they could not be treated as infallible, which he then had to defend against his own membership. The Bolpur ashram deed required that no image be worshipped there and no religion disparaged.

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