01A mouse on Shivaratri
He was born Mool Shankar to a Brahmin family at Tankara in Kathiawar. At fourteen, keeping the Shivaratri night vigil with his father, he saw a mouse climb onto the Shivalinga and eat the offerings, and began to ask where the God of the Vedas was to be found. The death of a sister and an uncle sharpened the question. In 1846 he left home to avoid marriage and wandered for some fifteen years as a sannyasi. In 1860 he reached Swami Virajananda at Mathura, who made him throw away his books of later grammar and learn from Panini and the Vedas themselves.
02The Arya Samaj
He held the Vedas alone to be the word of God and argued against image worship, caste by birth, child marriage and the bar on women and all castes reading the Veda. He debated the pandits of Kashi in 1869. He founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay on 10 April 1875, and the Satyarth Prakash appeared that year; the Lahore Samaj of 1877 fixed its ten principles. The Samaj spread fast across Punjab and the United Provinces, ran shuddhi to bring converts home, and its DAV schools opened from 1886. He died at Ajmer on Diwali night, 30 October 1883.
