Ruth Harris' 'Guru to the World' reconstructs the Vivekananda saga

Pankaj Srivastava

Vivekananda educated the West not only about the idea of religious tolerance, but also universal acceptance of brotherhood, invoking the ideal of Indian wisdom, that is, a realisation of the true self (atman). This ideal can be attained by creatively channelising one’s spiritual resources through the practice of yoga. He also taught Indians what he learned from the West: the importance of material well-being, scientific temper, bodily strength and autonomy that can be achieved by practical Vedanta (karma yoga) and selfless service to the poor. He defused the strict binaries of the East and the West, emotion and reason, subjective and objective, mind and body, tradition and modernity. His advocacy and practice of nationalism led to internationalism.

Vivekananda had an endless quest for learning. That is why his personality constantly evolved. Ruth Harris, in her book, ‘Guru to the World: Life and Legacy of Vivekananda’, meticulously narrates the story of the making of the global personality of Swami Vivekananda from a local boy, Narendranath Dutta, of Calcutta. She studied different aspects of his life and travels, exemplifying his relationships with different types of people, including his guru Ramakrishna, princes, intellectuals and his disciples, friends and facilitators.

The key intent of Harris’ work is to provide an integrated and interpretative history of Vivekananda’s global project of Hindu universalism as an alternative to masculinised western modernism, in which feminine experiences received sufficient space and women from the East and the West played a significant role. To address the paradox of self and non-self, Vivekananda reinterpreted and articulated the Advaita metaphysics by emphasising subjective experiences. For him, the subject is not a rational agent of Cartesian cogito but rather an experiencing self who has immense potential to experience different levels of reality as the Upanishads maintain.

The book has three sections: ‘India’, ‘The West’ and ‘India and the World’. Harris analyses the dialectic of Vivekananda’s subjectivity. She elucidates how a young Narendranath was initially influenced by Brahmoism, a reform movement that rejected idol worship, the idea of the divine incarnation and the cult of guru. But, after encountering Ramakrishna, he felt awe and fear towards the guru. Ramakrishna demonstrated an ecastatic love for Goddess Kali, spiritual strength and native intelligence. After some initial issues, Vivekananda became Ramakrishna’s favourite disciple. The writer attempts to unravel Ramakrishna’s relationship with Kali, his wife and with Vivekananda. Strangely, Ramakrishna worshipped his wife, treating her as an object of his sadhana.

Vivekananda appreciated this feminine aspect of Indian spirituality in response to the masculinity/ferocity of western modernity. Interestingly, Vivekananda had a more affectionate relationship and bonding with women associates (Margaret Noble, Christine Greenstidel, Sara Bull, Josephine MacLeod) in comparison to men, who had opposed his innovative and critical stand on religious orthodoxy, puritanism, ritualism and vegetarianism.

Harris is critical of Vivekananda’s views on the issues of caste and widow remarriage. Though he criticised the hegemonic/hierarchical structure of the caste system, at the same time, he justified caste as an organic structure in the backdrop of the Vedic conception of varna. For instance, when some people linked his caste (Kayastha) status to a lower varna (Shudra), he argued proudly that he belonged to the Kshatriya varna. The author informs how Pandita Ramabai endorsed widow remarriage and challenged Vivekananda’s stand that a widow should be in service of humanity like a nun.

The book is a little bulky, but well-researched, incorporating 90 pages of endnotes with chronology. Harris’ work reconstructs the tale of Vivekananda, accounting well his letters, historical documents and experiences/reports of various devotees of the Ramakrishna Mission across the globe. Notably, at times, the author consciously refers to hagiographic accounts of followers/devotees of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda but critically analyses and cross-examines them too. She gives thought-provoking insights concerning issues related to the anti-colonial movement, feminisation of religion, science and spirituality, caste and many more. The author’s work holds a timely significance as it gives us a chance to encounter Vivekananda’s values and visions when competing political ideologies are fervent to appropriate him in their own framework.