THE MONK AHEAD OF HIS TIMES
A new biography sheds light on Swami Vivekananda’s life in India and the US, and the nonsectarian cosmopolitanism that made him an icon
RRuth Harris’s fine treatment of Swami Vivekananda situates a much-admired national icon in a wider national and transnational context. His address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago is a well-known milestone in any Indian perspective on how Hindu thought was introduced to the West. Making ‘Advaita Vedanta’ accessible to a wider cross-section of society in India, and then marrying it to an idea of dedicated service with a central role for an established order of monks are innovations that stand out. Superficially, it is easy to posit linkages between the current wave of Hindu nationalism and the Swami’s thought. To Harris, this is “both reductive and dangerously misleading”, and the book narrates a story that is far more complex. The Swami’s assertion of Indian values was built upon an appreciation of the diversity of India’s mystical and religious thought and had an openness to, and knowledge of, different intellectual strands then current in the West. His appeal was genuinely nonsectarian in an Indian context; and in a wider universal stage, he was a historical personality who “helped create an important amalgam”.
This biography is in three parts: Vivekananda’s early life in the intellectual ferment of Calcutta in the 1870-80s; second, his travel to Chicago and four-year stay in the US; and third, his thought and activities after returning to India till his premature death in 1902 at the young age of 39. Vivekananda’s guru Ramakrishna Paramahansa and his disciple and admirer Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita) bookend the middle section on Vivekananda’s US stay and his interface with different religious and sectarian currents then dominant there.
Vivekananda encountered Ramakrishna as a young 18-yearold and as a legatee of an established subculture of reform and rationalism that had enveloped Calcutta’s upper classes for some decades. But educated young men like Vivekananda found themselves “swimming against a powerful tide of British exclusion and privilege”. Against Ramakrishna, Vivekananda’s “book learning, ‘rationalism’ and independentmindedness proved no defence: he was quickly enchanted by the combination of love, spiritual power and native intelligence that Ramakrishna demonstrated”.
By the time Ramakrishna died, Vivekananda was the most prominent of his disciples. He travelled widely in India, showing himself open to its different religious experiences—Jain, Islamic, Buddhist, etc. In the process, he remained “eminently Bengali while also becoming more consciously Indian”.
On his return from the US, Vivekananda returned to celebrity status in India. Harris’s treatment, however, also tells us how intellectually engaged he was with the West during this time. Several women played a significant role in deepening his interaction with religious thought in the US. Margaret Noble, who followed him to India, was among the most committed: she provides Harris with the prism to view this phase of Vivekananda’s life and until his death. The book also details how Sister Nivedita’s story continued after him, including an unexpected drift towards antisemitism.
A guru like Ramakrishna and a British woman as a principal disciple suggests, to Harris, Vivekananda’s ambitions “to encompass ideas and experiences beyond his own ken”. The book is a meaty treatise on Vivekananda’s intellectual evolution and the meaning of his life in a much larger frame than in which it is normally located and understood in India. ■
VIVEKANANDA TRAVELLED WIDELY IN INDIA, BUT REMAINED
“EMINENTLY BENGALI WHILE ALSO BECOMING MORE CONSCIOUSLY INDIAN”