Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

  Both these groups, the educated elites and the wealthy industrialists, would set their stamp on the Congress movement, which, for all its popular fervor, chose gradual capitalist growth over revolutionary temptation.

  28

  VIVEKANANDA

  Bring All Together

  1863–1902

  The day of the summer solstice usually passes unnoticed in India. In most parts of the country, it’s too damned hot, or wet, for celebration. Yet in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spent the morning leading some thirty-five thousand schoolchildren, servicemen, and bureaucrats, arrayed in rows on the ceremonial avenue running through the center of the capital, in a series of yoga exercises. He called this, the world’s largest yoga class, “the contribution from the soil of India for the good of human beings.”

  The world had, of course, been sampling this offering well before Modi became the first leader in recent memory to do a competent half-camel in public. In the United States alone, some fifteen million people practice yoga, but I’d wager few of them realize that the key text of modern yoga, Raja Yoga, one of the first works of Indian philosophy ever to reach a mass Western audience, was written in the United States in the 1890s and influenced by the American culture of the time. Raja Yoga’s thirty-three-year-old author, a restless, baby-faced monk from Calcutta, had set down his thoughts on yoga’s transformative power during breaks in a lengthy lecture tour of the United States.

  The monk, Vivekananda, had started the tour with the hope of teaching the West the essence of Hinduism, and counteracting persistent stereotypes of India as a barbarous spiritual vacuum. Late at night, escaping the flashy red robe and saffron turban that increased his mystique at the lectern, he dutifully recorded high points of his press reviews for his princely patrons back in India, to reassure them their money had been well spent. “An orator by Divine right,” said one of the passages he copied out—a review that seems muted in retrospect. By the tour’s end, Vivekananda had become, in the words of the political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “the most famous brand ambassador for Indian spirituality, culture, yoga, and ideals that our country has ever known.”

  When he returned to India in 1897, Vivekananda was given a hero’s welcome for having finally engendered respect for Hinduism in the skeptical West and, in certain circles, even a clamor for it. Though he lived for only five more years, dying just before the freedom struggle got under way, his image—arms defiantly folded, soft features hardened by a Napoleonic gaze—could be found in the homes of Indian revolutionaries, Congress leaders, religious men, intellectuals, and regional social reformers. Embodying a potent Hinduism that had nothing to apologize for, he gained a pan-Indian appeal that rivaled that of Mohandas Gandhi (38). Today, he is one of Hindu nationalism’s leading spiritual lights.

  Modi is not alone in considering Vivekananda “a personal inspiration.” Many contemporary Hindu elites in India and abroad celebrate him for his insistence that Hinduism is superior to all other religions, and uniquely peaceful and tolerant, “because it never conquered, because it never shed blood.” They’ve especially taken to heart his notion that religion is India’s “only common ground, and upon that we shall have to build.”

  Yet when one considers the historical Vivekananda alongside the archetype, the Hindu propagandist enjoying a vibrant afterlife seems like an incarnation that has misplaced one of its dimensions. India’s first global guru was a complex and inconsistent man, habitually inflecting his message to suit different audiences and making declarations he’d later contradict. Still, there’s a silver thread running through his thought: the imperative to test old grounds of belief and seek out new ones, while grappling with the age-old problem of how to make a moral life a practical one. In this respect, too, Vivekananda resembled Gandhi, who was six years younger. Both men, far from spouting timeless Indian verities, were struggling to convert their own uncertainties into new ways to believe, and be.

  Vivekananda’s intention was never just to celebrate Hinduism, either in the West or at home. He hoped to motivate his fellow Indians to rework it. “No religion on earth preaches the dignity of humanity in such a lofty strain as Hinduism, and no religion on earth treads upon the necks of the poor and low in such a fashion as Hinduism,” he once wrote. He also argued that Hinduism as practiced was illegitimate because of the dehumanizing effects of the caste system.

  His solution was not to turn away from the faith, as the Buddha (1) and Mahavira (2) had done, and as Ambedkar (41) would later do. Instead, he sought the more worldly ends of the philosophy embodied in the Vedanta, the Upanishad scriptures that came after the Vedas, which had been made central to Hinduism by Adi Shankara (8). Providing spiritual solace wasn’t the main point of the faith to Vivekananda. Rather, in what amounted to a novel and radical argument, he insisted that Hinduism’s moral force rested on its capacity to meet society’s practical needs.

  * * *

  Vivekananda’s short life had a whirlwind intellectual and spiritual itinerary. Among other things, it encompassed Freemasonry, Buddhist meditation, immersion in Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, readings of Western science and rationalist philosophy, encounters with Western occultism and esotericism, and engagement with the organizational energies of American social crusaders.

  Born Narendranath Dutta in 1863, he grew up in Calcutta, then the capital of the Raj, where so many currents of European and Indian thought intersected. His father, a successful anglicized lawyer with liberal views, encouraged his three sons to argue and think for themselves. His mother was a practicing Hindu. One of his brothers repudiated the faith to become a Marxist revolutionary, but for Narendra, Hinduism, rationalism, and social radicalism were ideals that could be reconciled. As a teenager he joined a branch of the Brahmo Samaj, accepting its view of Hinduism as a universalistic religion whose essence was to be found in the Vedanta. He took to heart both the Brahmo Samaj’s critique of idol worship and its focus on social reform, inspired by the Christian Unitarianism of Rammohun Roy (22).

  At college in Calcutta, he seemed to embody a joke that was appearing in Indian periodicals of the time, about young Bengali intellectuals dallying between “Kali and Kant.” Reading European philosophy, he and his friends delighted in trying to solder together unlikely philosophical combinations. One of his companions later recalled an effort to hybridize “the pure monism of the Vedanta, the dialectics of the Absolute idea of Hegel and the Gospel of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity of the French Revolution.”

  As dauntless as Narendra seemed in college, the deaths in quick succession of his Brahmo mentor and his father sent him into a spiritual crisis. Following a breakdown, he left behind a family squabbling over his father’s property and began spending time on the banks of the nearby Ganga with Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a hermit in the ecstatic tradition. Ramakrishna was a mystic devotee of the goddess Kali and a practitioner of Tantra and yoga, who had also for a time followed Sufi Islam. His tradition of Hindu worship accepted different paths to God and focused on personal transcendental experiences.

  Though Ramakrishna died in 1886, a few years after they met, Vivekananda later described his encounter with the mystic as a spiritual turning point that wiped his soul of earlier influences. On the evidence of his own writings, that’s not entirely true; his later reconstruction of Hinduism seems to owe at least as much to his previous intellectual encounters, including those with European ideas, as to Ramakrishna. Yet his religious questing did change in one distinct way. Repudiating the Brahmo Samaj as a “booby religion” and taking on the name Vivekananda (meaning “joyous with knowledge”), he began to seek grounds for his religious understandings less in texts and more in personal experiences.

  * * *

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hinduism was being reconstructed in a variety of forms, both in the West and in India. Theosophy blended Hinduism with esotericism and occultism, to create an arcane philosophy for an elite race (see 29, Annie Besant). In t
he hands of V. D. Savarkar, Hinduism was converted into Hindutva, a nationalist ideology that defines Hinduism in terms of blood and territory, and which considers members of religions not “born” in India, such as Islam and Christianity, as inherently inferior within Bharat Mata, or Mother India. Preceding Savarkar into the mix, in the late 1880s, was Vivekananda.

  For several years, Vivekananda wandered India as a mendicant, carrying little more than a couple of changes of clothes, a rolled-up deerskin, a water pot, and the occasional book. (His interests ranged from French music to chemistry to history, and he could recite pages from The Pickwick Papers as readily as sutras from Panini’s Ashtadhyayi [3].) One of his goals during his walkabout was to probe the nature of Hinduism. As he wandered, he found the faith to be connected in dark ways to the reality he was witnessing in the Indian countryside.

  Ordinary people everywhere were sunk in poverty and ignorance, while Hindu rulers went off on shooting excursions, he would later say. Hindu traditions sanctified priests for denying untouchables their humanity. Seeing the oppression caused in part by Hindu religious practices, Vivekananda felt he was “being driven mad with mental agonies.” It became clear to him that the social order, built around what he called the “mental disease” of “don’t-touchism,” both mutilated souls and kept people divided. If Hinduism were to have any moral credibility, or any hope of collective strength, it would have to address social inequality and degradation.

  His anger led to questions. For some time, Vivekananda had been infuriated by the way Christian missionaries were able to capitalize on caste discrimination and untouchability by moving in to convert the lower castes in significant numbers. Were caste hierarchies essential to Hinduism? What was essential? To his guru, Ramakrishna, Vedanta was the highest expression of eternal religion, or Sanatan Dharma, which was unchanging and ahistorical. Yet in its interpretations, Vivekananda began to perceive the shifting, historical hand of religious authority. For instance, Shankara’s interpretation of the Vedanta permitted only Brahmins to study the Vedas and Upanishads. (That interpretation would exclude Vivekananda himself, because he was a Kayasth, a scribal caste the British classified as Shudra.) He decided that Shankara’s idea was based on nonauthoritative scriptures, and so rejected it. On similar grounds, he found he could also refuse to accept other practices he abhorred: for instance, the practice of marrying girls before they had reached the age of puberty, or Vedic rituals such as the Ashvamedha, which instructed a queen hoping to secure her king’s sovereignty to simulate copulation with a dead horse. Vivekananda’s rereading of the Vedas would strike down the bad interpretations and inessential rituals that separated the seeker from deeper eternal truths.

  Shankara had interpreted the Vedantist philosophy as showing us the illusory character of the sensory world, and the need to pierce that illusion to achieve oneness with Brahman. Vivekananda took that idea of oneness, but insisted on the reality of the perceived world: one in which the path to oneness was through action. His reconstruction of Vedantist philosophy proclaimed Hinduism as a uniquely practical religion, open to all and directed toward the uplift of society.

  His teachings moved Hinduism away from texts as primary repositories of authority and truths and toward personal experience. Gurus or teachers were not essential. Anyone could get nearer to spiritual truth through exercises and service to the poor and needy, activism that would also restore cultural confidence and pride in Hindu traditions. In fact, he argued, the root cause of all of India’s historical wretchedness, including its inability to evade colonization, was that the purest truths of Hinduism had been mangled by obscurantist priests.

  Vivekananda claimed that his socially transformative understanding of the place of Hinduism in Indian society was visited upon him whole, in 1892, in the form of a revelation at Kanyakumari, or Cape Comorin, at the southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula. But his letters suggest a project built in stages, embedded in human time. “We must travel, we must go to foreign parts,” he wrote that year to a Brahmin priest who became one of his spiritual guides. “We must see how the engine of society works in other countries.” By the next year, he was writing to the priest from the United States, where he had begun to enact his idea of activism with new urgency.

  * * *

  In August 1893, freezing in the New England summer and reeling at the prices of American goods—“a cigar costs eight annas of our money,” he complained in a letter—the thirty-year-old Vivekananda visited a Massachusetts reformatory for women. He was amazed to see hundreds of inmates being treated gently by jailors, who were intentionally kept unaware of each prisoner’s specific crime and were diligently preparing the women for reintegration into society. Such dignified treatment of people of low status was unimaginable back home. “Oh, how my heart ached to think of what we think of the poor, the low in India,” he wrote to a friend there. “They have no chance, no escape, no way to climb up … They have forgotten that they too are men. And the result is slavery.”

  Yet he wasn’t about to share with his new audience the painful light that America had shed on Hinduism’s injustices. His commission, funded by maharajas, was to present a gilded version of the religion for Western consumption. The following month, he arrived, uninvited, at the enormous Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, an attempt to create a global dialogue of faiths. Lecturing for days to adulatory audiences, Vivekananda became one of the parliament’s stars.

  His agent was now handling details of lectures in other cities, Henry and William James were hanging on his utterances, and rich, ardent American women were inviting him home for tea. It was a bit of a mind-wrench after the meditative barefoot years, and he would later joke that by the end of the tour, he’d succumbed to the biggest of all the temptations America threw in his path: the allure of new forms of organization.

  He was fascinated by American social openness, the comparative freedom of women, the ability of people to act collectively in their own interests—labor unions were then gathering steam—and the way state institutions served the practical needs of the people. The secret of Westerners’ success, he concluded, was “the power of organization and combination.” It was a secret that he immediately saw he needed to transmit to his countrymen.

  “I give them spirituality, and they give me money,” he wrote with a wink to the Dewan of Junagadh, a minister of one of his princely patrons, in 1894. Funds he raised on tour, and inspiration taken from American religious and civic associations, enabled him to set up the Vedanta Society, first in New York and then in London, to promote his version of Hinduism. These would be India’s first spiritual missions in the West. After his return to India in 1897, American money would help him realize a key aspect of his revelation at Kanyakumari.

  In that same 1894 letter, he laid out what was, in effect, a charter for his life: a band of religious monks, devoted to social service, would travel India from village to village, educating all tiers of society, including the lowest, “by means of maps, cameras, globes, and other such accessories”—spreading the light of science as well as the gospel of religion. Drawing on ideas of social service that he had learned from his late Brahmo mentor, Vivekananda turned them into the organization he would name the Ramakrishna Mission, after his mystic guru. The mission had no precedent among Indian religious institutions, and continues to function across India today as a dispenser of education and social welfare.

  * * *

  Other American habits impressed Vivekananda, including the country’s appetite for beef—which he recommended to fellow Indians as a way of strengthening their physique. He also imbibed American bodybuilding culture, placing exercise techniques at the heart of the practice of true Hinduism. Yoga, breathing, and meditation were compatible with everyday life, accessible to upper and lower castes, rich and poor, and to Westerners, too. If practiced sincerely, the exercises would leave a devotee psychologically remodeled. By imparting confidence, discipline, and strength, yoga also became a means of changi
ng society and training people to carry out social reform. This is perhaps not the end goal of the yoga-with-cats classes lately offered in Manhattan, or the “Stay Woke” yoga music pop-up in Chicago, where postures are held as a DJ spins, but you never know. Elizabeth De Michelis, who has studied the history of modern yoga, emphasizes that Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga was itself a novel mix, bringing together loose ideas of yoga, terminology drawn from the Yoga Sutra (a text by Patanjali dating from around 400 CE), Indian tradition, and occultist and esoteric beliefs he had encountered in America. “It’s not,” De Michelis allows, “very logically tied together.”

  As Vivekananda successfully promoted health and strength at the turn of the century, his own health was secretly failing: stomach ailments, heart trouble, loss of vision. He died stoically, in 1902, at the age of almost forty, three years before the Partition of Bengal.

  Unlike Gandhi, Vivekananda lived before the era of mass politics; he always insisted that he was uninterested in politics anyway. But Pratap Bhanu Mehta wonders how or if, had he lived another ten or fifteen years, he would have engaged with the political imagination that came to grip India. Instead, India’s political imagination has engaged with him, often assimilating him to nationalist purposes. He’s now considered the originator of an aggressive culture of masculinity in Hinduism.

  “Bring all together,” Vivekananda once urged. India’s different cultures were just emanations of a single principle, and social unity would lead to the achievement of collective purposes. As a hope for change, it’s not without merit. But Vivekananda has been turned instead into a warrior-philosopher of a new Hindu pridefulness, invoked today by a political ideology that aims to impose conformity across India’s religiously diverse communities.