The social and religious reform movement which had been of great promise before the Mutiny and for some years afterwards, when Keshab Chundra Sen gave the Brahmo Somaj a fine uplift, slackened.  Like the Brahmo Somaj in Bengal, the Prirthana Somaj in Bombay no longer made so many or such fervent recruits.  New societies sprang up in defence of the old faiths, some even glorifying all their primitive customs and superstitions, and most of them, whilst professing to recognise the need for cleansing them of their grosser accretions, displaying a marked reaction against the West in their avowed determination to seek reform only in a return to the purer doctrines of early Hinduism.  The most important of all these movements was the Arya Somaj in the Punjab, whose watchwords were “Back to the Vedas” and “Arya for the Aryans.”  The latter has sometimes barely disguised a more than merely platonic desire to see the British disappear out of the Aryan land of India.  But the Vedas at any rate yielded to the searchers sufficient fruitful authority for promoting female education on sound moral lines and for discouraging idolatry and relaxing the cruel bondage of caste.  That it has been and still is in many respects a powerful influence for good is now generally admitted by those even whom its political tendencies have alarmed.  New sects arose within Hinduism.[1] An ardent apostle of the Hindu revival in Bengal, Swami Vivekananda, was the most impressive and picturesque figure at the Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 and made converts in America and in Europe, amongst them in England the gifted poetess best known under her Hindu name as Sister Nivedita.  How strong was the hold regained by the purely reactionary forces in Hinduism was suddenly shown in the furious campaign against Lord Lansdowne’s Age of Consent Bill in 1891 which brought Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a Chitawan Brahman of Poona, for the first time into public life as the champion of extreme Hindu orthodoxy.  That measure was intended to mitigate the evils of infant marriage by raising the age for the woman’s consent to its consummation from ten to twelve, and the death quite recently of a young Hindu girl of eleven in Calcutta due to the violence inflicted upon her by a husband nearly twenty years older than she was, had enlisted very widespread support for Government amongst enlightened Hindus and especially amongst the Western-educated.  Tilak did not defeat the Bill, but his unscrupulous attacks, not only upon the British rulers of India but upon his own more liberal co-religionists, including men of such ability and character as Telang and Ranade, dealt a sinister blow at the social reform movement, which practically died out of the Congress when he and his friends began to establish their ascendancy over it.