Dayananda Saraswati (Arya Samaj)

Mūla Śaṅkara, born into a Śaiva Brāhmaṇa family at Tankara in Gujarat, left home as a young man in a long search for truth, eventually studying Sanskrit grammar and the Vedas under the blind teacher Virajananda at Mathura. Taking the name Dayananda Saraswati, he launched a reform movement urging a 'return to the Vedas' as the sole infallible authority, and rejecting what he saw as later corruptions — image-worship, the dominance of the Purāṇas, hereditary caste, child-marriage, and the bar on widow remarriage. In 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay, which became a major force in North Indian religious and social reform and education. His chief work is the 'Satyārth Prakāś' ('Light of Truth'). He died at Ajmer in 1883, reportedly by poisoning. His distinctive 'Vedas alone' position is one reformist reading among many and should be presented as his movement's stance, not the neutral whole of Hinduism. His life is well documented.