Who had given the slogan ‘Back to Vedas’?

Colonial-era Hindu reform movements responded to Vedic-era religious practice in different ways: some blended Vedic ideas with Western rationalism (a syncretic reform), while others called for a return to what they held as the pure, original authority of the Vedas, treating later ritualistic and caste accretions as corruptions.

Swami Dayanand Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj in 1875 on exactly this second platform, giving the doctrine ‘Back to the Vedas’ — he held the Vedas as the sole infallible scripture and campaigned against idol worship, rigid caste hierarchy, and ritualism as deviations from them; he set out these ideas in his text Satyarth Prakash.

• Mahatma Gandhi led the mass non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements against British rule decades later, with no doctrine built around sole Vedic scriptural authority.

• Guru Nanak Dev founded Sikhism in the 15th–16th century as a distinct tradition, well before the era of this 19th-century reform-movement slogan.

• Bhimrao Ambedkar campaigned against caste oppression and ultimately renounced Hinduism for Buddhism — the opposite trajectory from a call to return to Vedic authority.