Identifier: aryasamajaccount00lajpuoft Title: The Arya samaj; an account of its origin, doctrines, and activities, with a biographical sketch of the founder Year: 1915 (1910s) Authors: Lajpat Rai, Lala, 1865-1928 Subjects: Dayananda Sarasvati, Swami, 1824-1883 Arya-Samaj Publisher: London Longmans, Green Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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Text Appearing Before Image: ssolvinghere and reforming there before their very eyes.While we are deeply grateful to the Western scholarsfor the time and labour they have bestowed onVedic research, which is likely to be of the greatestpossible value to the rising generation of Indianswho are devoting themselves to the study and inter-pretation of the Vedas, we cannot help remarkingthat their hasty conclusions as to the religion of theVedas did great and unnecessary harm by creatinga mass of prejudice against Vedic religion on thepart of the earlier generations of educated Hindus.The Missionary propagandists in their zeal for con-version, in their anxiety to show the superiority ofthe Christian Bible, condemned the Vedas in themost positive language at their command. For thispurpose they even transgressed the rules of fair andhonest controversy by quoting the conclusions ofEuropean scholars on Vedic religion and Vedicculture without giving the accompanying qualifi-cations, and without giving the reader any idea of

Text Appearing After Image: PAXDIT GURUDATTA VIDYARTHI, M.A.Who died at the aye of 25. TRANSLATION OF THE VEDAS 95 the unsatisfactory character of the translations onwhich those conclusions were based, though wellknown to and acknowledged by themselves. It isnot wonderful, therefore, that, misled by thesegarbled quotations, many an educated Indianrejected the Vedas, and accepted Christian thought,though not Christian religion, especially in Bengaland Bombay. Swami Dayananda made it his mission to stemthe flow of this anti-Vedic and anti-Hindu currentby showing that the conclusions of European scho^rswere faulty, and often affected by their consciousor unconscious Christian bias. In any case, in thelanguage of the European scholars themselves,their translations are only provisional. SwamiDayananda did not know any of the Europeanlanguages, not even English. His criticism of MaxMuller, etc., in his commentaries on the Rig-Veda,is therefore based on information supplied to himby friends who were acquainted with Eng

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