Liberal Religion and the ‘Woman Question’ between East and West: Perspectives from a Nineteenth‐Century Bengali Women's Journal

British and American Unitarians and members of the Brahmo Samaj of India belonged to liberal religious groups that played leading roles in movements to improve women’s education and social position in Britain, the United States and colonial India.1 Their engagements with the ‘woman question’ were informed by a shared conviction that human progress could be achieved through combining a rational or intuitive, rather than an authoritarian or dogmatic, approach to faith with a radical agenda of social reform. Unitarianism and Brahmoism did not develop in isolation from each other, but rather in the context of a long history of cross-cultural interchange and co-operation. This article, focused on analysis of articles published in the first Bengali women’s journal, Bamabodhini Patrika, presents new evidence about the nature of the intercultural liberal religious milieu within which debates on the ‘woman question’ were shaped in the nineteenth-century world. In the process, it offers a fresh perspective on the role of religious movements in the global development of modern feminism. From their consolidation in the 1820s as distinctive liberal religious groupings, Unitarians and Brahmos identified each other as kindred spirits. Unitarians in Britain and America formed national organisations in 1825, which brought together heterodox Protestant congregations who questioned the Trinitarian belief in Christ’s divinity and rejected the Calvinist doctrine of original sin. United by a belief that ‘true religion’ was marked by good deeds rather than adherence to orthodox Christian dogma, they formed close-knit transatlantic networks promoting the abolition of slavery, social reform and women’s rights.2 These Unitarian networks inter-meshed with transoceanic webs of connection with the Brahmo Samaj (Society of Worshippers of the Supreme Being), founded in Calcutta in 1828 by Rammohun Roy to promote monotheistic religion and social reform among Hindus.3 Rammohun Roy engaged in extensive correspondence and exchange of tracts on religion and social reform with leading British and American Unitarians, and he cemented and extended these personal connections during an extended visit to Britain prior to his death in Bristol in