by Ruth Harris
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.