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Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
From the Wolfson History Prize–winning author of The Man on Devil’s Island, the definitive biography of Vivekananda, the Indian monk who shaped the intellectual and spiritual history of both East and West.
Few thinkers have had so enduring an impact on both Eastern and Western life as Swami Vivekananda, the Indian monk who inspired the likes of Freud, Gandhi, and Tagore. Blending science, religion, and politics, Vivekananda introduced Westerners to yoga and the universalist school of Hinduism called Vedanta. His teachings fostered a more tolerant form of mainstream spirituality in Europe and North America and forever changed the Western relationship to meditation and spirituality.
Guru to the World traces Vivekananda’s transformation from son of a Calcutta-based attorney into saffron-robed ascetic. At the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, he fascinated audiences with teachings from Hinduism, Western esoteric spirituality, physics, and the sciences of the mind, in the process advocating a more inclusive conception of religion and expounding the evils of colonialism. Vivekananda won many disciples, most prominently the Irish activist Margaret Noble, who disseminated his ideas in the face of much disdain for the wisdom of a “subject race.” At home, he challenged the notion that religion was antithetical to nationalist goals, arguing that Hinduism was intimately connected with Indian identity.
Ruth Harris offers an arresting biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East-West interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global circulation of ideas.
Few thinkers have had so enduring an impact on both Eastern and Western life as Swami Vivekananda, the Indian monk who inspired the likes of Freud, Gandhi, and Tagore. Blending science, religion, and politics, Vivekananda introduced Westerners to yoga and the universalist school of Hinduism called Vedanta. His teachings fostered a more tolerant form of mainstream spirituality in Europe and North America and forever changed the Western relationship to meditation and spirituality.
Guru to the World traces Vivekananda’s transformation from son of a Calcutta-based attorney into saffron-robed ascetic. At the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, he fascinated audiences with teachings from Hinduism, Western esoteric spirituality, physics, and the sciences of the mind, in the process advocating a more inclusive conception of religion and expounding the evils of colonialism. Vivekananda won many disciples, most prominently the Irish activist Margaret Noble, who disseminated his ideas in the face of much disdain for the wisdom of a “subject race.” At home, he challenged the notion that religion was antithetical to nationalist goals, arguing that Hinduism was intimately connected with Indian identity.
Ruth Harris offers an arresting biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East-West interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global circulation of ideas.
560 pages, Hardcover
First published October 18, 2022
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161 people want to read
About the author
Ruth Harris
55 books3 followersDr. Ruth Harris is a Lecturer in History at Oxford University.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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January 16, 2023Harris, Ruth. Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Pr., 2022. 539 p.
In the fall of 2006, I was co-leading a field trip of students to the two beautiful Hindu temples in Lemont, Illinois, near I-55. That may have been one of the first times I encountered the legacy of Swami Vivekananda who is represented by a beautiful statue on the grounds of the temples.
He was a leader of a Hindu revitalization movement in India in the late 1800s named for his teacher Sri Ramakrishna, a mystic of the Advaita Vedanta branch of Hinduism that teaches the non-duality of the human self and ultimate reality. Along with about nineteen other speakers from India, he attended the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, part of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition celebrating Columbus’ so-called discovery of ‘the New World’ in 1492. On the opening day of the Parliament (September 11), he gave the final speech of the day on the topic of toleration between religions. His speech, which was brief and unscripted, became one of the founding statements of a new interreligious movement at the end of the century of global Christian missionaries who followed in the wake of European empires in Asia. The speech occurred in the oldest part of the buildings we know as the Art Institute of Chicago. Its thesis was that there are many paths up the one summit that points toward the highest sacred reality. Peoples of different religions may walk different paths, but we all seek a final goal that goes by different sacred names. Therefore, missions aimed at converting members of one religion into their own are mistaken in assuming that only one religion has found the privileged way to the Sacred. To acknowledge this fact is the beginning of religious toleration and a new chapter in the history of civilizations.
Ruth Harris, an award-winning historian at Oxford, has created three biographies in one: Ramakrishna (1836-1886), Vivekananda (1863-1902), and Margaret Noble or ‘Sister Nivedita’ (1867-1911), Vivekananda’s most devoted western disciple. She tells their stories with detailed attention to the intersections of global capitalism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and the emergence of international networks of idealist teachers and disciples before WWI, one of the first expressions of an interreligious ‘New Thought’ movement (what we know as ‘New Age’). It was highly unlikely in the late 1800s that a young man of the Kshatriya or ‘warrior caste’ from Kolkata/Calcutta would become a follower of Ramakrishna, a radical mystic of the Brahmin caste, especially a youth who was already a member of the Brahmo movement (that sought to accommodate Hinduism to the criticisms of imperialists and Christian missionaries). It was also highly unlikely that an Irish woman, Margaret Noble, would become Vivekananda’s most devoted disciple from the west, renamed ‘Nivedita,’ living in India as part of his monastic movement, writing one of the first biographies about him, and other books and articles celebrating Hinduism for readers beyond Asia.
Harris’ archival research documents that some American and European elites who were disillusioned with Christianity in the late nineteenth century were already attracted to “eastern religions.” In this sense, the modern interreligious movement dating from 1893 and what we call New Age spirituality have always been intertwined. In fact, those who were attracted to Vivekananda’s speeches and writings were already aware of the criticisms of some traditional Christian doctrines by modern science, historical criticism in biblical studies, liberal theology, and nineteenth century feminists. These western disciples of Vivekananda were already seeking to escape the patriarchy of Victorian families and moral perfectionism of Protestant congregations. In Vivekananda’s “Hindu universalism” they found a religion more ancient than western monotheisms, one that represented divinity in both female and male images and was rich with forms of yoga and meditation to take the place of petitionary prayer. The young Swami taught there was no actual conflict between Hinduism and modern evolutionary biology and criticized Christian missionaries for mis-representing Hinduism and India as passive and fatalistic.
Some of Vivekananda’s western followers were also attracted to the faith-healing of Christian Science, psychics who could communicate beyond the grave with their deceased family members, and other forms of occult wisdom. The gap that the eclipse of conventional Christianity left in the souls of these western elites became filled with forms of spirituality that seemed exotic, supernatural, and cult-like to their more conventional peers. One trajectory in this new biography is the globalization of religions and spirituality that may help us understand some of our contemporaries who identify as “spiritual but not religious.”
But Harris is also well read in the history of imperialism in Asia. Vivekananda’s movement sought to unite all the castes and creeds of India in a movement of moral and spiritual resistance against their overlords. By recovering the unifying dimensions of Hindu wisdom and linking it with an ethic of service to the impoverished masses, the Swami showed how forms of mysticism could become transformative for society. He employed Hinduism to critique western greed and materialism that resulted in famine, disease, and poverty for millions of subjects of Britain’s empire. He called attention to the hypocrisy of Christian missionaries who reported to their western supporters that Indians sacrificed their infants to crocodiles and forced widows to emulate themselves in funeral pyres while ignoring the mass casualties of western wars of aggression, child labor, and the poverty of industrial cities.
Swami Vivekananda became a reverse missionary of “Hindu universalism” to the west while working to unite a new generation of Indians in the cause of nationalism against the British. At home one of his aims was to educate male leadership who would be morally and spiritually prepared to resist their British overlords. Ironically, as he lectured and debated in America and Europe, many of his most supportive followers and financial supporters were women like Margaret Noble. The Swami had taken a vow of chastity to be free of the responsibilities of marriage and family in service of his moral-mystical movement. Western audiences found him to be attractive with a commanding voice and (from their perspective) exotic worldview and practices. He modeled a different expression of masculinity since his cause was spiritual, self-sacrificial, and universalistic rather than chauvinistic. Noble in seeking to become his most devoted disciple, transformed herself into an ally of Hinduism who was quick to document the injustices of the British imperium and speak as an apologist on behalf of India. Sometimes she traveled under a pseudonym to avoid the surveillance of the colonial authorities. After Vivekananda’s untimely death, when she traveled to Boston to accompany a close friend in the final months of her life, she was portrayed by journalists as the leader of cult that hastened her friend’s demise and manipulated her will.
Guru to the World can be read as a cautionary tale in our age of both economic globalization and neo-nationalisms. How we represent the most sacred religious and cultural beliefs and practices of other peoples can either contribute to mutual edification or reinforce prejudice. When some abandon their own religious traditions, what they put in its place requires great discernment to avoid being naïve or becoming jaded. Seeking to become an ally of people of another religion, culture, or race requires self-criticism to avoid running from one extreme (ethnocentrism) to another (essentializing others). In Margaret Noble’s case, her anti-imperialism against the British in India became linked with anti-Semitism in the last years of her life as she gave credence to conspiracy theories about Jewish financiers. This stands in contrast to Vivekananda’s admiration for Jews as an ancient people (like Hindus) who overcame centuries of persecution to renew their tradition in a changing modern world.
Robert Cathey
Emeritus Professor of Theology
McCormick Theological Seminary
In the fall of 2006, I was co-leading a field trip of students to the two beautiful Hindu temples in Lemont, Illinois, near I-55. That may have been one of the first times I encountered the legacy of Swami Vivekananda who is represented by a beautiful statue on the grounds of the temples.
He was a leader of a Hindu revitalization movement in India in the late 1800s named for his teacher Sri Ramakrishna, a mystic of the Advaita Vedanta branch of Hinduism that teaches the non-duality of the human self and ultimate reality. Along with about nineteen other speakers from India, he attended the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, part of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition celebrating Columbus’ so-called discovery of ‘the New World’ in 1492. On the opening day of the Parliament (September 11), he gave the final speech of the day on the topic of toleration between religions. His speech, which was brief and unscripted, became one of the founding statements of a new interreligious movement at the end of the century of global Christian missionaries who followed in the wake of European empires in Asia. The speech occurred in the oldest part of the buildings we know as the Art Institute of Chicago. Its thesis was that there are many paths up the one summit that points toward the highest sacred reality. Peoples of different religions may walk different paths, but we all seek a final goal that goes by different sacred names. Therefore, missions aimed at converting members of one religion into their own are mistaken in assuming that only one religion has found the privileged way to the Sacred. To acknowledge this fact is the beginning of religious toleration and a new chapter in the history of civilizations.
Ruth Harris, an award-winning historian at Oxford, has created three biographies in one: Ramakrishna (1836-1886), Vivekananda (1863-1902), and Margaret Noble or ‘Sister Nivedita’ (1867-1911), Vivekananda’s most devoted western disciple. She tells their stories with detailed attention to the intersections of global capitalism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and the emergence of international networks of idealist teachers and disciples before WWI, one of the first expressions of an interreligious ‘New Thought’ movement (what we know as ‘New Age’). It was highly unlikely in the late 1800s that a young man of the Kshatriya or ‘warrior caste’ from Kolkata/Calcutta would become a follower of Ramakrishna, a radical mystic of the Brahmin caste, especially a youth who was already a member of the Brahmo movement (that sought to accommodate Hinduism to the criticisms of imperialists and Christian missionaries). It was also highly unlikely that an Irish woman, Margaret Noble, would become Vivekananda’s most devoted disciple from the west, renamed ‘Nivedita,’ living in India as part of his monastic movement, writing one of the first biographies about him, and other books and articles celebrating Hinduism for readers beyond Asia.
Harris’ archival research documents that some American and European elites who were disillusioned with Christianity in the late nineteenth century were already attracted to “eastern religions.” In this sense, the modern interreligious movement dating from 1893 and what we call New Age spirituality have always been intertwined. In fact, those who were attracted to Vivekananda’s speeches and writings were already aware of the criticisms of some traditional Christian doctrines by modern science, historical criticism in biblical studies, liberal theology, and nineteenth century feminists. These western disciples of Vivekananda were already seeking to escape the patriarchy of Victorian families and moral perfectionism of Protestant congregations. In Vivekananda’s “Hindu universalism” they found a religion more ancient than western monotheisms, one that represented divinity in both female and male images and was rich with forms of yoga and meditation to take the place of petitionary prayer. The young Swami taught there was no actual conflict between Hinduism and modern evolutionary biology and criticized Christian missionaries for mis-representing Hinduism and India as passive and fatalistic.
Some of Vivekananda’s western followers were also attracted to the faith-healing of Christian Science, psychics who could communicate beyond the grave with their deceased family members, and other forms of occult wisdom. The gap that the eclipse of conventional Christianity left in the souls of these western elites became filled with forms of spirituality that seemed exotic, supernatural, and cult-like to their more conventional peers. One trajectory in this new biography is the globalization of religions and spirituality that may help us understand some of our contemporaries who identify as “spiritual but not religious.”
But Harris is also well read in the history of imperialism in Asia. Vivekananda’s movement sought to unite all the castes and creeds of India in a movement of moral and spiritual resistance against their overlords. By recovering the unifying dimensions of Hindu wisdom and linking it with an ethic of service to the impoverished masses, the Swami showed how forms of mysticism could become transformative for society. He employed Hinduism to critique western greed and materialism that resulted in famine, disease, and poverty for millions of subjects of Britain’s empire. He called attention to the hypocrisy of Christian missionaries who reported to their western supporters that Indians sacrificed their infants to crocodiles and forced widows to emulate themselves in funeral pyres while ignoring the mass casualties of western wars of aggression, child labor, and the poverty of industrial cities.
Swami Vivekananda became a reverse missionary of “Hindu universalism” to the west while working to unite a new generation of Indians in the cause of nationalism against the British. At home one of his aims was to educate male leadership who would be morally and spiritually prepared to resist their British overlords. Ironically, as he lectured and debated in America and Europe, many of his most supportive followers and financial supporters were women like Margaret Noble. The Swami had taken a vow of chastity to be free of the responsibilities of marriage and family in service of his moral-mystical movement. Western audiences found him to be attractive with a commanding voice and (from their perspective) exotic worldview and practices. He modeled a different expression of masculinity since his cause was spiritual, self-sacrificial, and universalistic rather than chauvinistic. Noble in seeking to become his most devoted disciple, transformed herself into an ally of Hinduism who was quick to document the injustices of the British imperium and speak as an apologist on behalf of India. Sometimes she traveled under a pseudonym to avoid the surveillance of the colonial authorities. After Vivekananda’s untimely death, when she traveled to Boston to accompany a close friend in the final months of her life, she was portrayed by journalists as the leader of cult that hastened her friend’s demise and manipulated her will.
Guru to the World can be read as a cautionary tale in our age of both economic globalization and neo-nationalisms. How we represent the most sacred religious and cultural beliefs and practices of other peoples can either contribute to mutual edification or reinforce prejudice. When some abandon their own religious traditions, what they put in its place requires great discernment to avoid being naïve or becoming jaded. Seeking to become an ally of people of another religion, culture, or race requires self-criticism to avoid running from one extreme (ethnocentrism) to another (essentializing others). In Margaret Noble’s case, her anti-imperialism against the British in India became linked with anti-Semitism in the last years of her life as she gave credence to conspiracy theories about Jewish financiers. This stands in contrast to Vivekananda’s admiration for Jews as an ancient people (like Hindus) who overcame centuries of persecution to renew their tradition in a changing modern world.
Robert Cathey
Emeritus Professor of Theology
McCormick Theological Seminary
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September 21, 2023Gwyneth Paltrow would have us believe she discovered yoga, but really, it’s been around in the West since the 1890s, popularised by the pudgy monk Vivekananda and his bevy of fawning followers. That said, it isn’t easy to place Vivekananda. The world’s most famous celibate, Mahatma Gandhi, cited his influence, but so did the priapic writer Henry Miller. Today, India’s Hindu nationalist ruler fashions himself as Vivekananda redivivus – Ruth Harris’ title sends up Narendra Modi’s own self-description as guru to the world – whereas his left-liberal critics remember him as a radical. Each of these appropriations is misguided. Vivekananda was the kind of chap that Modi’s cow-protecting acolytes would want to lynch. ‘Give me beef’, he is reported to have said in Chicago at the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893. No liberal, let alone leftist, he was a Hindu supremacist who wanted to save his faith from the clutches of Christianity.
He was also a man of his time, and Harris does a superb job of returning him to the 19th century. A historian of the Dreyfus affair, she’s on firm ground in the world of fin de-siècle ferment. This was still a time when science and séances, religion and rationality could peacefully coexist.
Born Narendranath Datta in 1863, Vivekananda grew up in a family of unreconstructed Brahmos who moved in Calcutta’s reformist circles, scorning idolatry and untouchability. Still, they gave him a Calvinist education, all damnation and hellfire, that he found inauthentic. Aged 18, a chance encounter with an ascetic, Ramakrishna, changed his life. Ramakrishna’s homespun philosophy, welding the easy enchantment of esotericism with an anti-intellectual habit of mind, spoke to Vivekananda, helping him see through the desultory attractions of capitalist life.
Ramakrishna liked to shock the Hindus with degrading acts unbefitting a Brahmin such as touching excrement with his tongue and urinating from a banyan tree. If this sounds puerile, it was intentionally so. He fetishised the innocence of childhood, living naked and resisting adult sexuality. The point was to lose oneself in worship, to find empowerment in submission.
Vivekananda was struck by Ramakrishna’s devotion to Kali, the exuberant goddess despised by Brahmos, commonly depicted with a lolling tongue and a garland of skulls. On the rebound from the formless, abstract God of Brahmoism, Kali must have made a refreshing change. For the first time, he felt he could take pride in the Indian philosophical tradition. Ramakrishna preached the gospel of Vedanta, stressing the underlying unity of all being. Man and God are one. Dualisms – mind and body; good and evil; man and woman – are illusory. There were days when he woke up as a pious Muslim, or a mad child. There were times when he apparently bled like a woman on her period.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Pratinav Anil’s Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77 is forthcoming from Hurst.
He was also a man of his time, and Harris does a superb job of returning him to the 19th century. A historian of the Dreyfus affair, she’s on firm ground in the world of fin de-siècle ferment. This was still a time when science and séances, religion and rationality could peacefully coexist.
Born Narendranath Datta in 1863, Vivekananda grew up in a family of unreconstructed Brahmos who moved in Calcutta’s reformist circles, scorning idolatry and untouchability. Still, they gave him a Calvinist education, all damnation and hellfire, that he found inauthentic. Aged 18, a chance encounter with an ascetic, Ramakrishna, changed his life. Ramakrishna’s homespun philosophy, welding the easy enchantment of esotericism with an anti-intellectual habit of mind, spoke to Vivekananda, helping him see through the desultory attractions of capitalist life.
Ramakrishna liked to shock the Hindus with degrading acts unbefitting a Brahmin such as touching excrement with his tongue and urinating from a banyan tree. If this sounds puerile, it was intentionally so. He fetishised the innocence of childhood, living naked and resisting adult sexuality. The point was to lose oneself in worship, to find empowerment in submission.
Vivekananda was struck by Ramakrishna’s devotion to Kali, the exuberant goddess despised by Brahmos, commonly depicted with a lolling tongue and a garland of skulls. On the rebound from the formless, abstract God of Brahmoism, Kali must have made a refreshing change. For the first time, he felt he could take pride in the Indian philosophical tradition. Ramakrishna preached the gospel of Vedanta, stressing the underlying unity of all being. Man and God are one. Dualisms – mind and body; good and evil; man and woman – are illusory. There were days when he woke up as a pious Muslim, or a mad child. There were times when he apparently bled like a woman on her period.
Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.
Pratinav Anil’s Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77 is forthcoming from Hurst.
May 14, 2023
The West must rediscover Swamiji through this splendid biography
130 years ago, on 11th September 1893, a thirty-year-old in ochre robes from a subjugated nation electrified a gathering at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago with his message of universal acceptance (not mere tolerance). Quoting from the Bhagavad Gita (“Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me”), he thus ‘contrasted the capacious universality of Hinduism with the emphasis on sectarian exclusivity in the Gospel of John (John 14:6), which states that “no one comes to the Father except through me”.’
Swami Vivekananda, the young monk from British-occupied India, had thus neatly subverted the Parliament’s goal of demonstrating ‘that there is no teacher to be compared with Christ, and no Saviour except Christ’, to quote the chair of its organizing committee, Reverend John Henry Barrows of Yale’s Divinity School. The biographer Ruth Harris admits that the main lay organizer, Charles Bonney also ‘did not believe that all “religions were of equal merit”,’ but held that ‘all men received a “universal influx from God” into their souls’ -- which provided enough leeway for speakers from Japan, India and Sri Lanka to make the case forcefully for other faiths.
But Vivekananda’s stirring message of universal love and India’s millennia-long history of welcoming adherents of every persecuted religion (including Jews and Parsis) soon made him the star of the World’s Parliament. He confronted the very concept of ‘original sin’ that is central to Christian theology, telling his rapt audience that “the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss….[to call humans sinners] is a standing libel on human nature”. He explained that the Vedas were a ‘revelation that had no “beginning or end”…an “accumulated treasury of spiritual laws”…that would be added to and rearranged forever’ by men and women (rishis) who ‘would continue to discover them in new ages’. And he showed that the Vedic idea of creation without beginning or end was consistent with the conclusion of physics through thermodynamics.
Ruth Harris is a professor of European History at the University of Oxford, and she came to Sri Ramakrishna and Swamiji via reading Romain Rolland, the French litterateur who won the Nobel Prize for literature two years after Tagore. Hers is one of the finest biographies ever written by a Westerner about the spiritual founders of Renascent Hinduism. Unlike professors of Divinity (who belong to a tradition of scholarship aimed at privileging Christianity), Harris does not seek to judge Vivekananda but to understand him.
Her research into Sri Ramakrishna’s spiritual journey and message is meticulous. She bases this on an objective reading of Swami Saradananda’s Lilaprasanga (Divine Play) and later Mahendranath Gupta’s Kathamrita (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna). She sensitively deals with his immersion in the Vaishnava bhakti tradition of Sri Chaitanya, the tantric roots of Kali worship, and the bliss of Advaitic realization. And she delves briefly into how Sri Ramakrishna “entered into Islam” (primarily its Sufi version) to ‘experience its mystical possibilities with the same gusto’, and the spiritual bliss he experienced at the culmination of his three days meditating on Christ. She beautifully evokes Sri Ramakrishna’s childlike yet ascetic personality, and his remarkable ability to convey deep spiritual messages with simple parables, aphorisms and song.
In the mid-19th century, Bengali elites had responded to the challenge of the new imperial power mainly via the Brahmo Samaj, which incorporated many elements of Christian rationality (and some Islamic influences) onto a reading of the Upanishads shorn of idols and rituals. The young Narendranath Datta too became a Brahmo during his college years, as did many educated Indians in that period. But his spiritual quest somehow remained unfulfilled, until he almost accidentally visited the mystic of Dakshineswar, Sri Ramakrishna, whose spiritual ecstasies had been mentioned by his college professor, Rev. William Hastie, while trying to explain Wordsworth and Shelley.
The rationalist in Narendranath was skeptical of the mystic of Dakshineswar after the first visit, although he felt an ephemeral mystical attraction that drew him back. By then Sri Ramakrishna was highly evolved spiritually, having spent a quarter-century as the priest of the Kali temple established by a Shudra widow, Rani Rashmoni, breaking down barriers of caste, gender and other fetters as he attained astonishing heights of spiritual realization through myriad paths. To Narendra’s question “have you seen god?”, Sri Ramakrishna readily answered that he had, and quickly gave the young man a glimpse of the vast spiritual possibilities of what he meant.
And thus began the association between seeming opposites – the rationalist, widely-read Vivekananda and his spiritual master, the near-illiterate but spiritually-evolved Sri Ramakrishna with his experiential comprehension of the capacious forms of Hindu worship. Harris likens the relationship to that between Christ and his great disciple Paul, particularly the follower’s role in interpreting the seemingly eccentric teaching of the master to a wider audience in the western world. Chicago was the window through which Vivekananda took his master’s word to the west.
The brilliant young man, with his easy command of eastern and western religions became a sensation across America during the four years he spent there, especially among intellectuals like the philosopher and psychologist William James and Harvard’s classics scholar John Henry Wright. The latter said Vivekananda was “more learned than all our learned professors put together”. Most of all, however, he was helped by a group of wealthy women disciples – spiritual seekers Josephine McLeod, Mary Hale and her sisters, and Sarah Bull – who embraced his message and broadcast it widely during his lifetime.
Margaret Noble, who belonged to an Irish-nationalist family despite being Protestant, was to become the most important of Swamiji’s western disciples. She formally became a brahmacharini called Nivedita, experiencing the bliss of spiritual elevation at Amarnath in Swamiji’s company--while personally also feeling almost betrayed by his immersion in his own spirituality there.
The one slightly dissonant note is Harris’s interpretation of Nivedita’s Indian-nationalist turn after Swamiji’s samadhi (death) as being an expression of her personal independence. In reality, Swamiji is known to have written a poem for her in his last days, which enjoined upon her the responsibility of creating an Indian nationality. Nivedita distanced herself from the Ramakrishna Mission not because she sought autonomy from it, but precisely to protect it from the political fallout of her increasing support for the revolutionaries led by Sri Aurobindo, on whom she had a profound influence, just as she played a major role in enabling the scientist Jagadish Bose to gain acceptance (despite the innately racist resistance to his ideas) in the west. Nivedita remained close to (and deeply influenced by) Sarada Devi all her life, and is still deeply revered by the Ramakrishna Mission.
Vivekananda’s work Raja Yoga was his lasting legacy in the west, morphing later into Hatha Yoga (often stripped of its spiritual essence). But there was strong resistance among a determined group of Christian missionaries even during his lifetime, who sought to demonize Hinduism as a heathen and occult faith. Swamiji opposed magic and any elements of the occult, considering them inauthentic (including the work of Madame Blavatsky and the theosophists).
During his lifetime, and for the decade after it that Nivedita lived and worked in India and the west, Swamiji’s legacy was alive and thriving. But the Christian missionaries eventually got their way (once Josephine and Nivedita died in 1911), and they were able to ensure that the Swami’s name vanished into obscurity after 1915. In 1976, I was astonished that the 20-volume World Book encyclopaedia (America’s version of Britannica) didn’t contain Vivekananda’s name. In 1990, the World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought devoted just 3 of its 65 chapters to Hinduism—by Tagore, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan. Ruth Harris’ marvellous book needs to be read widely by Indians, but more importantly needs to spread widely worldwide, so that this remarkable savant becomes better known again as the true representative of Hinduism renascent.
130 years ago, on 11th September 1893, a thirty-year-old in ochre robes from a subjugated nation electrified a gathering at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago with his message of universal acceptance (not mere tolerance). Quoting from the Bhagavad Gita (“Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me”), he thus ‘contrasted the capacious universality of Hinduism with the emphasis on sectarian exclusivity in the Gospel of John (John 14:6), which states that “no one comes to the Father except through me”.’
Swami Vivekananda, the young monk from British-occupied India, had thus neatly subverted the Parliament’s goal of demonstrating ‘that there is no teacher to be compared with Christ, and no Saviour except Christ’, to quote the chair of its organizing committee, Reverend John Henry Barrows of Yale’s Divinity School. The biographer Ruth Harris admits that the main lay organizer, Charles Bonney also ‘did not believe that all “religions were of equal merit”,’ but held that ‘all men received a “universal influx from God” into their souls’ -- which provided enough leeway for speakers from Japan, India and Sri Lanka to make the case forcefully for other faiths.
But Vivekananda’s stirring message of universal love and India’s millennia-long history of welcoming adherents of every persecuted religion (including Jews and Parsis) soon made him the star of the World’s Parliament. He confronted the very concept of ‘original sin’ that is central to Christian theology, telling his rapt audience that “the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss….[to call humans sinners] is a standing libel on human nature”. He explained that the Vedas were a ‘revelation that had no “beginning or end”…an “accumulated treasury of spiritual laws”…that would be added to and rearranged forever’ by men and women (rishis) who ‘would continue to discover them in new ages’. And he showed that the Vedic idea of creation without beginning or end was consistent with the conclusion of physics through thermodynamics.
Ruth Harris is a professor of European History at the University of Oxford, and she came to Sri Ramakrishna and Swamiji via reading Romain Rolland, the French litterateur who won the Nobel Prize for literature two years after Tagore. Hers is one of the finest biographies ever written by a Westerner about the spiritual founders of Renascent Hinduism. Unlike professors of Divinity (who belong to a tradition of scholarship aimed at privileging Christianity), Harris does not seek to judge Vivekananda but to understand him.
Her research into Sri Ramakrishna’s spiritual journey and message is meticulous. She bases this on an objective reading of Swami Saradananda’s Lilaprasanga (Divine Play) and later Mahendranath Gupta’s Kathamrita (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna). She sensitively deals with his immersion in the Vaishnava bhakti tradition of Sri Chaitanya, the tantric roots of Kali worship, and the bliss of Advaitic realization. And she delves briefly into how Sri Ramakrishna “entered into Islam” (primarily its Sufi version) to ‘experience its mystical possibilities with the same gusto’, and the spiritual bliss he experienced at the culmination of his three days meditating on Christ. She beautifully evokes Sri Ramakrishna’s childlike yet ascetic personality, and his remarkable ability to convey deep spiritual messages with simple parables, aphorisms and song.
In the mid-19th century, Bengali elites had responded to the challenge of the new imperial power mainly via the Brahmo Samaj, which incorporated many elements of Christian rationality (and some Islamic influences) onto a reading of the Upanishads shorn of idols and rituals. The young Narendranath Datta too became a Brahmo during his college years, as did many educated Indians in that period. But his spiritual quest somehow remained unfulfilled, until he almost accidentally visited the mystic of Dakshineswar, Sri Ramakrishna, whose spiritual ecstasies had been mentioned by his college professor, Rev. William Hastie, while trying to explain Wordsworth and Shelley.
The rationalist in Narendranath was skeptical of the mystic of Dakshineswar after the first visit, although he felt an ephemeral mystical attraction that drew him back. By then Sri Ramakrishna was highly evolved spiritually, having spent a quarter-century as the priest of the Kali temple established by a Shudra widow, Rani Rashmoni, breaking down barriers of caste, gender and other fetters as he attained astonishing heights of spiritual realization through myriad paths. To Narendra’s question “have you seen god?”, Sri Ramakrishna readily answered that he had, and quickly gave the young man a glimpse of the vast spiritual possibilities of what he meant.
And thus began the association between seeming opposites – the rationalist, widely-read Vivekananda and his spiritual master, the near-illiterate but spiritually-evolved Sri Ramakrishna with his experiential comprehension of the capacious forms of Hindu worship. Harris likens the relationship to that between Christ and his great disciple Paul, particularly the follower’s role in interpreting the seemingly eccentric teaching of the master to a wider audience in the western world. Chicago was the window through which Vivekananda took his master’s word to the west.
The brilliant young man, with his easy command of eastern and western religions became a sensation across America during the four years he spent there, especially among intellectuals like the philosopher and psychologist William James and Harvard’s classics scholar John Henry Wright. The latter said Vivekananda was “more learned than all our learned professors put together”. Most of all, however, he was helped by a group of wealthy women disciples – spiritual seekers Josephine McLeod, Mary Hale and her sisters, and Sarah Bull – who embraced his message and broadcast it widely during his lifetime.
Margaret Noble, who belonged to an Irish-nationalist family despite being Protestant, was to become the most important of Swamiji’s western disciples. She formally became a brahmacharini called Nivedita, experiencing the bliss of spiritual elevation at Amarnath in Swamiji’s company--while personally also feeling almost betrayed by his immersion in his own spirituality there.
The one slightly dissonant note is Harris’s interpretation of Nivedita’s Indian-nationalist turn after Swamiji’s samadhi (death) as being an expression of her personal independence. In reality, Swamiji is known to have written a poem for her in his last days, which enjoined upon her the responsibility of creating an Indian nationality. Nivedita distanced herself from the Ramakrishna Mission not because she sought autonomy from it, but precisely to protect it from the political fallout of her increasing support for the revolutionaries led by Sri Aurobindo, on whom she had a profound influence, just as she played a major role in enabling the scientist Jagadish Bose to gain acceptance (despite the innately racist resistance to his ideas) in the west. Nivedita remained close to (and deeply influenced by) Sarada Devi all her life, and is still deeply revered by the Ramakrishna Mission.
Vivekananda’s work Raja Yoga was his lasting legacy in the west, morphing later into Hatha Yoga (often stripped of its spiritual essence). But there was strong resistance among a determined group of Christian missionaries even during his lifetime, who sought to demonize Hinduism as a heathen and occult faith. Swamiji opposed magic and any elements of the occult, considering them inauthentic (including the work of Madame Blavatsky and the theosophists).
During his lifetime, and for the decade after it that Nivedita lived and worked in India and the west, Swamiji’s legacy was alive and thriving. But the Christian missionaries eventually got their way (once Josephine and Nivedita died in 1911), and they were able to ensure that the Swami’s name vanished into obscurity after 1915. In 1976, I was astonished that the 20-volume World Book encyclopaedia (America’s version of Britannica) didn’t contain Vivekananda’s name. In 1990, the World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought devoted just 3 of its 65 chapters to Hinduism—by Tagore, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan. Ruth Harris’ marvellous book needs to be read widely by Indians, but more importantly needs to spread widely worldwide, so that this remarkable savant becomes better known again as the true representative of Hinduism renascent.
July 18, 2024
Read Harris’s book Guru to the world on Swami Vivekananda. I admit I started with trepidations as I thought it would be yet another ‘cultural appropriation exercise’ project. I was so wrong.
Harris wrote a wonderful account of Swami’s ji inner life, his closest acolytes and major challenges. We often hear from devotees and monks of the order on their views and thoughts on Swamiji. Often these records ( not all of course) border on blind idolatry but no such thing is to be found with Harris’s accounts. She is not a practicing Hindu but a professor in European Literatures at Oxford, so her analysis was invaluable to gain an understanding of the historical nuances of Swamiji’s arduous and momentous journey.
It is simply a miracle that a man would come to the US for a conference, with a little pocket money, and raise a storm of global proportions, make the deepest possible connections with a culture that is alien to the Indic world. What was of greatest impact to me from the book were the immense travails of Swamiji. His depression, his struggle with consumption, flatulence, disease, rejected friendships, personal attacks on his self and teachings, and that impossible level of bone killing exhaustion he felt at the end zig zagging across the US and EU. What is remarkable was he seemed to be breathing ‘for’ his Guru, Ramakrishna , living under his aura, yet did not go around evangelizing about his Guru. He transformed into a ‘westerner’, did not worry about meat eating, and importantly adapted his ‘vigyanic ‘ message to explain the gist of the practical philosophy to others. He was irritated with quacks, false prophets and scoffed at theosophical proponents.
It is Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita)’s connections with Swami Vivekananda that one finds truly remarkable. What new do we learn from Harris? She takes a deep dive into their correspondences. Although they seem to drift apart during Swamiji’s final return to India, where he would eventually pass away in 1902, it was this wonderful love of this lady that many called a ‘quack’ that endures in our minds. Swamiji’s love for his Guru was directly transmitted to her. A lady from a different background, and different world. Her absorption of the message is itself tantamount to proving that human connections take complete precedence over cultural barriers. It seems then that , vedantic messages, like with Ramana Maharishi teachings, transcend all man made borders and belong to l’etre humain in his grandiosity. Their connections prove that the global soul is one and only one !
Her last two years were harrowing and painful too, money problems, rejection by many but her love for her Guru, India, education was just divine and insightful! Long live Ireland Long live India !!!
Harris wrote a wonderful account of Swami’s ji inner life, his closest acolytes and major challenges. We often hear from devotees and monks of the order on their views and thoughts on Swamiji. Often these records ( not all of course) border on blind idolatry but no such thing is to be found with Harris’s accounts. She is not a practicing Hindu but a professor in European Literatures at Oxford, so her analysis was invaluable to gain an understanding of the historical nuances of Swamiji’s arduous and momentous journey.
It is simply a miracle that a man would come to the US for a conference, with a little pocket money, and raise a storm of global proportions, make the deepest possible connections with a culture that is alien to the Indic world. What was of greatest impact to me from the book were the immense travails of Swamiji. His depression, his struggle with consumption, flatulence, disease, rejected friendships, personal attacks on his self and teachings, and that impossible level of bone killing exhaustion he felt at the end zig zagging across the US and EU. What is remarkable was he seemed to be breathing ‘for’ his Guru, Ramakrishna , living under his aura, yet did not go around evangelizing about his Guru. He transformed into a ‘westerner’, did not worry about meat eating, and importantly adapted his ‘vigyanic ‘ message to explain the gist of the practical philosophy to others. He was irritated with quacks, false prophets and scoffed at theosophical proponents.
It is Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita)’s connections with Swami Vivekananda that one finds truly remarkable. What new do we learn from Harris? She takes a deep dive into their correspondences. Although they seem to drift apart during Swamiji’s final return to India, where he would eventually pass away in 1902, it was this wonderful love of this lady that many called a ‘quack’ that endures in our minds. Swamiji’s love for his Guru was directly transmitted to her. A lady from a different background, and different world. Her absorption of the message is itself tantamount to proving that human connections take complete precedence over cultural barriers. It seems then that , vedantic messages, like with Ramana Maharishi teachings, transcend all man made borders and belong to l’etre humain in his grandiosity. Their connections prove that the global soul is one and only one !
Her last two years were harrowing and painful too, money problems, rejection by many but her love for her Guru, India, education was just divine and insightful! Long live Ireland Long live India !!!
December 12, 2022
“In a day, when you don't come across any problems - you can be sure that you are traveling in the wrong path”
Ushering perspective the above-stated quote briefly sums up the outlook of swami Vivekananda over life and this has been the guiding factor behind the pervasion of his ideals throughout the world. Delving further, the 560 pages long book at hand comes in the form of an autobiography of swami Vivekananda and the preface of the book sheds light on the guiding reasons behind the book being written. The introduction of the book begins by emphasizing the triumphant return of swami Vivekananda from the west and how he reasserted the truer precepts of Hinduism at the Chicago Religion Congress of 1893. As the chapters go further, each of the chapters steadily unfolds the vital facets of the life of Swami Vivekananda and proceeds further in a steady fashion thereby retaining the required pace of the overall plot of the book.
The writing style of the book has been kept simple, and easy to understand for the readers and brings forth a truer and poignant understanding of Swami Vivekananda to the world.
Ushering perspective the above-stated quote briefly sums up the outlook of swami Vivekananda over life and this has been the guiding factor behind the pervasion of his ideals throughout the world. Delving further, the 560 pages long book at hand comes in the form of an autobiography of swami Vivekananda and the preface of the book sheds light on the guiding reasons behind the book being written. The introduction of the book begins by emphasizing the triumphant return of swami Vivekananda from the west and how he reasserted the truer precepts of Hinduism at the Chicago Religion Congress of 1893. As the chapters go further, each of the chapters steadily unfolds the vital facets of the life of Swami Vivekananda and proceeds further in a steady fashion thereby retaining the required pace of the overall plot of the book.
The writing style of the book has been kept simple, and easy to understand for the readers and brings forth a truer and poignant understanding of Swami Vivekananda to the world.
September 29, 2024
I always had a desire to understand Swami Vivekananda and I am glad that I start reading Ruth Harris’s Guru to the World. Additionally i was also curious to understand what goes inside such great personalities. Ruth does a commendable job in bringing both sides of Swami and the book is also about his guru and so much more about his favourite disciple Sister Nivedita. It isn’t a read to begin with but as the book progresses Ruth creates a world with her thoughts which was engaging for me.
Definitely I will come back to the book again ♥️
Definitely I will come back to the book again ♥️
March 6, 2023
'[s]piritual people are not fanatical or severe. They are not long-faced and thin.'
Rather, he insisted, 'They are fat, like me.'
Rather, he insisted, 'They are fat, like me.'
December 28, 2023
It's a fascinating adventure into the exceptional life of Swami Vivekananda. The book fantastically unfolds his teachings and the profound effect he had on worldwide spirituality. You'll get to recognize the person behind the wisdom, his dynamic personality, and how he added Vedanta to the West. What I loved the most is how the writer skillfully explores his regular teachings and their relevance in state-of-the-art world.
The thorough description of Vivekananda's address before the Parliament of the World's Religions was one of my favorite things.—it gave me chills! The book is not only a biography; it is an insightful tribute to a visionary chief. Highly recommend it if you're into spiritual journeys and discovering the timeless wisdom of Vivekananda.
The thorough description of Vivekananda's address before the Parliament of the World's Religions was one of my favorite things.—it gave me chills! The book is not only a biography; it is an insightful tribute to a visionary chief. Highly recommend it if you're into spiritual journeys and discovering the timeless wisdom of Vivekananda.
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