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This chapter begins with a short reappraisal of the life of Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa and his chief disciple Swami Vivekananda and describes the social and spiritual world of Ramakrishna. It argues that by putting action at least on the same footing as ascetic contemplation, Vivekananda seems to have not only departed from the negative work ethic of his Master but also implicitly suggested a fresh look at traditional (Hindu) value systems. It also investigates the place of Vivekananda within Hindu revivalist thought. This chapter examines afresh certain questions that remain crucial to our understanding of the interplay between strategies within Hindu revivalism and nationalist thought and discourse.

Swami Vivekananda sought to establish a new Hindu identity under a programme of national solidarity and uplift. He championed tolerant Hinduism, while emphasizing that other religions were subordinate. For Vivekananda, Hinduism was the essence of religion, and encompassed all sects. Buddhism and Jainism were religions in the meaning creeds or sects, unable to meet the requirements for a universal religion.

The impact of colonialism on the Indian mind may be confined to mere ‘surface deterioration’ and it may be ‘potentially what it was’. The relation between Mahatma Gandhi and the pre-modern societies and the critique of modernity, in the process making the necessary route assumed by Partha Chatterjee between nationalism and Gandhi contingent, is described. The Gandhian defence of the pre-modern as well as his critique of modernity, and Swami Vivekananda's limited fascination for modernity can become an important starting point to analyse this tension that would help in better understanding the dynamics of contemporary Indian society. In addition, the differences between Vivekananda and Gandhi are noted. It particularly covers Swami paradigm and Mahatma paradigm. The celebration of India's past and the evils in Indian society are discussed. In general, the two contrasting paradigms would throw better light on the understanding of the tension that underlies the nationalist programme.

Fears and anxieties as well as specific psycho-social strengths are rooted in the earliest ‘pre-verbal’ experiences and connections of life. It is this residual dark soil of infantile experience that erupts in psychopathology, that people mine in myth-making, and that underlies the strivings and disappointments of everyday life. This chapter explores the traces of infantile substratum in three different cultural/historical contexts: in two centuries-old religious cults that command the loyalty and devotion of millions of Indians; and in the life and work of one of the early prophets of a modern Indian identity. It discusses the cult and myths of Krishna, Shiva and Narcissus, and the childhood of Swami Vivekananda.

This chapter examines Swami Vivekananda's reading and interpretation of the Bhagavadgita. It suggests that Vivekananda considered karma yoga as the central teaching of the Bhagavadgita. It highlights that Vivekananda accused priests of misreading the text, defending privileged interests, and denying the people access to the Bhagavadgita which had led to the cultural degeneration of India. Vivekananda believed that nishkama karma or non-attachment is the core teaching of the Gita. It was inclusive in nature and could take the masses into its fold. From this philosophy he evolved two concepts, naranarayana and daridranarayana, which occupy a central place in his mission to revive the youth of India.

This chapter examines the various attempts, on the part of both Western and Indian authors, to deodorize, sanitize, or reform Tantra. The most famous of these is the eccentric Supreme Court judge and secret tàntrika (practitioner of Tantra), Sir John Woodroffe, who is regarded as the founding father of Tantric studies. His legacy of reform and sanitization of Tantra would be mirrored and echoed in various ways by a great many Indian authors, such as Swami Vivekenanda and the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. For both Woodroffe and Vivekananda, Tantra was something that was very much in need of censorship and reform—either (for the former) a moralizing sanitization, or else (for the latter) a form of suppression and denial. This chapter looks at sex, scandal, secrecy, and censorship in the works of Woodroffe and Vivekananda.

Bengali Hindu Swami Vivekananda sought to establish a new Hindu identity, which emphasized the individual’s right to unmediated access to the religious culture of India. His goal was to create a new basis for national unity and religious ethic that would encourage charitable work among the poor. Vivekananda endorsed a philosophical system called Advaita Vedanta, founded by the great teacher Sankara around 800 CE. This branch of Hinduism stresses the non-duality of reality and claims that the only thing that exists is Brahman, the Absolute. Everything, including self is identical with this Absolute, and it is only illusion caused by ignorance which makes us perceive them as individual entities separate from the Absolute.

In his travels Dharmapala encountered many universalizing projects-from Theosophy to Kakuzo Okakura’s pan-Asianism, from the World’s Parliament of Religions to the branding and projection of world religions, from Swami Vivekananda, Sister Nivedita, and Annie Besant to Lord Curzon’s affection for an Imperial British Buddhism. In Kolkata the Bengali elite (bhadralok) was drawn to Buddhism for its humanism as well as by their own civilizational pride in Buddhism as an Indian religion. As Dharmapala cultivated those connections, he fought to take Bodh Gaya away from the Hindu renouncer who controlled it, trying to install a Japanese Buddha image in the Bodh Gaya temple. That struggle brought both local and international actors into conflict and made the place a global Buddhist resource on the one side and an emergent instrument for forging the Indian nation on the other.

The establishment of British rule brought India in direct contact with Christianity and English education which led to fresh awakening. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emergence of great rational minds and an enormous urge for freedom characterized the Indian scene. The era, which, in historical terms, commenced with Raja Rammohan Roy of Bengal, heralded a major attitudinal change among the people of India. The unequal society that had been built in India over the ages needed to be changed in favour of equality and giving people a greater say in religious, political, and economic systems. The contribution of three leaders is indeed of great historical value: Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941); Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902); and Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). Each one grew to become a formidable figure in his sphere of human activity: Gurudev Tagore in literature, Swami Vivekananda in religion, and Mahatma Gandhi in politics.

This chapter examines how reading contemporary Indian philosophers' writings as modern texts or considering them as modern authors fails to capture some important ideas contained in them. There are two different sets of interpretations on contemporary Indian philosopher Swami Vivekananda. The first consists of those like Tapan Raychaudhuri, who sees no traces of Hindu revivalism in Vivekananda. Raychaudhuri, together with Nemai Sadhan Bose, tries to project universalism, ultimate truth, rather than Hindu religion, as central to Vivekananda. The second set comprises those like Javeed Alam, who sees certain thoughts and categorizations of communalism in Vivekananda. This chapter argues that democracy in India can be sustained not only through a liberal epistemology based on empirical claims about reality, but also through Buddhist epistemology. To develop this argument, the chapter considers a crucial structural feature of democracy: criticism. It elaborates the three modes of criticism: criticism as rejection, self-criticism, and internal criticism.

This chapter studies the dominant response of Ireland and India to effeminization and racialization. Like the idea of Christian manliness, these responses were infused with muted religious overtones that drew on the tenets of Catholicism and Hinduism. The chapter also reviews the writings of Patrick Pearse and Swami Vivekananda to illustrate the social construction of this kind of gendered nationalism in each context. Although the two philosophers presented remarks on the intersection of hegemonic masculinity in relation to nation as a part of anticolonial resistance, their ideas unfolded against a broader nationalist context, in which certain traits of hegemonic masculinity were already shaping the cultural milieu.

The previous chapters have shown that the idea of “spiritual” or non-material personhood informed the entirety of Bhaktisiddhānta's thought, religious vision and understanding of agency. For him, personhood (beginning with the personhood of the supreme absolute) implied a moral and spiritual dimension that structured human existence, giving it a fundamental sense of presence, responsibility and meaning across time and space. This concluding chapter places Bhaktisiddhānta's life and work within a taxonomy of modern Hinduism and compares the significance of his work to the contributions of major figures such as Swami Vivekananda. The issue of reform versus revivalism is also addressed herein. Finally, Bhaktisiddhānta's work is linked to the development of ISKCON, a worldwide movement that today encompasses thousands of American and European practitioners, a number of whom have become respected representatives of Caitanya bhakti in India itself.

Chapter 6 examines the effect of historical dynamics upon the development of modern yoga practice, in the United States and Europe as well as India. Indian yogis were intimately familiar not only with Western physical culture but also Western metaphysical traditions. For this reason, one finds a diffusion of Western harmonial language into the writings on Indian yogis, where such terms are used to express an entirely different school of metaphysical concepts. This is mirrored by the ways in which Sanskrit terms are being used in Euro-American sources to represent genealogically Western harmonial concepts. The chapter concludes by examining the multiple waves of synthesis affected by later teachers of this hybrid yoga, such as Indra Devi, who found themselves at pains to differentiate between the yogic teachings they brought from India and the naturalized content of the broader harmonial fitness movement.

This chapter analyses the Hindu nationalist tradition of political thought, focusing on its assessment of international relations and India’s role in the world. It explores the work of a series of Hindu nationalist ideologues, including – among others – Swami Vivekananda, V. D. Savarkar, and Deendayal Upadhyaya. It argues that although their thought is couched in very different terms to those generally used in Western international relations, they provide accounts of the nature of international relations in the modern age, the place of India and its national destiny, as they perceive it, and the manner in which both economic development and national security ought to be pursued by a state infused with what they argue is a proper Hindu ethos.

As historians of religion in America have turned their attention to the role of markets and money in religious history, their focus has rarely moved beyond American Christianity. Taking the business turn in the study of Asian religions in America means taking a global view of networks and circulation. Using the examples of Swami Vivekananda and Sathya Sai Baba, this chapter argues that these Asian CEO gurus collapse the distinction between business and religion. Through global flows of money and media, Asian religions in America offer an example of why the dichotomy between religion and business needs to be deconstructed.

This essay identifies the similarities and differences between Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda. It explains how the two men vastly differed in their family background and the educational and social milieu in which they grew up. Vivekananda was a religious leader and the proclaimed heir of the great saint of Bengal, Sri Ramakrishna, while Gandhi plunged into the political arena at the age of twenty-four, and for the next fifty years, led struggles against racialism and imperialism. Vivekananda rejected politics, while Gandhi believed that religion could not be separated from politics. Despite these differences, they both responded to Western influences with judicious discrimination, accepting what was life-giving and rejecting what was deleterious.

Indian intellectuals influenced by postmoderism such as Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva, put local folk beliefs on a par with science. Hindu nationalists, especially members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, following the lead of the historical figure Swami Vivekananda and the contemporary Subhash Kak, have developed what they call “Vedic Science”, including Vedic astrology and Vedic creationism. Although India welcomes new technology, it has for the most part rejected the values of modern science, thus embracing a stance of what might be called reactionary modernism.