The cultural-ideological battle in the nineteenth century was two-fold. Firstly,
the encounter between Western and Indigenous cultural forms impressed upon
the intellectual with reforming zeal the need to revitalise the decadent elements
of their own traditional culture. There were precedents of such reforms in pre-
colonial India from time to time and hence, it can be safely said that nineteenth
century reform and its agenda were not merely stimulated by the impact of Western
education. However, the speedy intrusion of colonial cultural and ideological
hegemony left its imprints on many cultural experiments of the nineteenth century.
In the religious domain, the reformers tried to remove idolatry, polytheism and
priestly control of rituals and scriptural knowledge. Since literacy was limited
and confined to few, the reformers made use of mass-propaganda techniques
and oral transmission of their ideas through vernacular languages in order to
break the shackles of priestly oppression and exploitation by simplifying religious
rituals and attacking