Representing Swami Vivekananda

Abstract

This chapter raises two significant issues with regard to one of modern India’s most charismatic and influential prodigies, Swami Vivekananda. The first has to do with how Vivekananda has been represented in the secondary literature on him. The second which, in a sense, arises out of the first, has to do with what constitutes a “fact” in a spiritual biography. I believe that confronting both these issues is necessary in order to have a clearer comprehension of the impact of Vivekananda on his world, both in the East and the West. Despite such attempts to “historicise” and debunk Vivekananda, his enormous power and dynamism have continued to inspire generations of Indians and Westerners. Apart from the Ramakrishna Math and Mission that he founded, several other organizations and institutions have been set up in his name, supposedly to promote the causes that he stood for. I would suggest that a revaluation of Vivekananda’s life and influence cannot be undertaken without engaging with how he is represented. This in turn requires a twofold awareness of the sources of his life and work on the one hand, with an understanding of the limitations that they impose, and of the values and biases of the scholars who worked on them, on the other hand. In the process, “historical” facts are sometimes at variance with “spiritual” facts. Vivekananda’s greatest achievements include the reconstruction of Hinduism, the change of its image in the West, the starting of a movement of social and cultural regeneration, all of which were directly linked to the birth of Indian nationalism, which was taking place at that time. The key to all these contributions was Vivekananda’s modernization of Hinduism. Indeed, the Hinduism that he spoke of and expounded at the Parliament of Religions and, later, all over America was a new version, mostly of his own invention, of an ancient tradition. Instead of a pagan, superstitious, idolatrous, and barbarous set of rituals, customs, and practices, which is how Hinduism had been by-and-large perceived, not just by missionaries, but by a section of the educated middle-classes of India, Vivekananda turned it into a rational, universal philosophy, freed from dogma and authority. He thus re-interpreted Hinduism not only to the West but to India. He managed the seemingly impossible by expressing a contradictory message: when he faced the West, he was a teacher and practitioner of Indian spirituality; when he faced his fellow countrymen and women, he was a social reformer.