Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism

309 Pages·1999·44.641 MB·English

by  William Radice (editor)

SOAS Studies on South Asia
•
Swami Vivekananda and the
Modernization of Hinduism
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SOAS Studies on South Asia
Swami Vivekananda
ahd
the
Modernization of Hinduism
edited by
William Radice
Delhi
Oxford University Press
Calcutta Chennai Mumbai
1998
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Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford
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© William Radice and contributors, I 998
ISBN 0 19 564012 8
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CONTENTS
.
Contributors V.1.
Foreword
Vll
1. Swami Vivekananda's construction of Hinduism
./
Tapen Raychaudhuri 1
2. Reconstructing 1' .induism on a world platform: the
World's First Pa11iament of Religions, Chicago 1892
v'
Indira Chowdhwy-Sengupta 17
3. Sanskrit Pandits and the modernisation of Sanskrit
./
education in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries
Nita Kumar 36
4. A meeting of ends? Swami Vivekananda and
Brahmabandhab Upadhyay
Julius J. Lipner 61
s.
The modemi~ of tradition: Harishchandra ofBanaras and
the defence o Hindu dharma
Vasudha Dalmia 77
6. Hin<kl modernisers and the 'public' arena: indigenous
critiques of caste in colonial India
Susan Bayly 93
7. Vivekananda's Western message from the East
v
Dermot Killingley 138
8. Swami Vivekananda and sev.i: taking 'social service'
seriously
Gwilym BeckerJeue 158
9. Science and Sanskrit Vivelcananda's views on education
Vivienne Baumfield 194
10. Vivelcananda and cssentialism
Glyn Richards 213
11. Two sanitan dharma leaders and Swami Vivekananda:
a comparison
Kenneth W. Jones 224
12. Historicity, hagiography, and hierarchy in Gangetic India,
1918-1936
William R. Pinch 244
13. Swami Vivelcananda's ideal society and its impact on
Govind Chandra Dev
Hiltrud Rilstau 264
14. Swami Vivekananda and the challenge to fundamentalism
Nemai Sadhan Bose 281
v
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CONTRIBUTORS
Vivienne Baumfield Lecturer in Education, Department of
Education, University of Newcastle
Susan Bayly Fellow of Christ's College, University
ofC ambridge
Gwilym Beckerlegge Sta.ff Tutor, Department of Religious
Studies, The Open University
Nemai Sadhan Bose Guru Nanak Research Professor,
Asiatic Society, Calcutta
Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta Reader, Department of English,
Jadavpur University
Vasudha Dalmia Teacher of Hindi literature and Modem
Indian Studies, Universities of
Tiibingen and Heidelberg
Kenneth W. Jones University Distinguished Professor of
History, Department of History, Kansas
State University
Dermot Killingley Senior Lecturer, Department of
Religious Studies, University of
Newcastle upon Tyne
Nita Kumar Fellow, Centre for Studies in Social
Sciences, Calcutta
Julius J. lipner Lecturer, Divinity Faculty, University
of Cambridge
William R. Pinch Assistant Professor of History,
Wesleyan University
Willis.."11 i<adire Lecturer in Bengali, School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of
London
Tapan RaychaudhlUi Emeritus Professorial Fellow,
St Antony's College,
University of Oxford
Glyn Richards Fonner Head oft he Department of
Reliaious Studies, University of Stirling
Hiltrud Riistau Department of South Asian Studies,
Humboldt University, Berlin
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FOREWORD
William Radice
The papers in this volume were nearly all written for a Workshop
that was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University
of London on 26 and 27 November 1993. The Workshop stemmed
from the Annual Lecture of the Centre of South Asian Studies at
SOAS, which was given on 26 November by Professor Tapan
Raychaudhuri. His lecture fonns the opening chapter of the present
volume, and establishes its central drift. The Lecture and Workshop
were occasioned by the centenary of Swami Vivekananda's celebrated
address to the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago; they
were given added urgency and topicality by the demolition by Hindu
fundamentalists of the Bahri Masjid at Ayodhya on 6 December 1992.
It was Professor Nemai Sadhan Bose who felt passionately that it was
crucially necessary, at this alarming moment in India's development, to
give scholarly attention to Vivekananda's social and religious ideals, to
rescue them from the distortions that were being worked on them by
fundamentalists keen to co-opt Vivekananda to their cause. Meeting me
in Calcutta early in 1993, he urged me to organise the workshop.
Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri shared Professor Bose's concern, and
his lecture refined further the sym.pathetic yet objective appraisal of
Vivekananda he had earlier given in his seminal book Europe Recon
sidered: perreptions of the West in nineteenth-century Bengal (Delhi:
OUP 1988). The firm view of both these scholars, based on their
comprehensive knowledge of the Swami's writings in both Bengali and
•
English, as well as the facts of his life, was in 1993 and still is now that
any attempt to project the Swami as a Hindu revivalist, fundamentalist
or communalist grossly contradicts the evidence.
Yet a volume such as this, bringing together scholars from different
fields and backgrounds, approaching the Swami from many different
angles, shows that the historical estimation of his life, works and influ
ence can never be finally wrapped up. His life was so short, his writ
ings often so hurried and improvised and provisional, that interpreters
will always find loose ends or contradictions to support their particular
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FOREWORD
standpoint. Differences of view will be found in the present volume: to
try to reconcile them all would diminish the richness and fascination of
Vivekananda's legacy. It would also force into a rigid. intellectual
mould the thoughts of a man who-despite his formidable learning and
intellect- was not a systematic thinker, and never claimed to be one. In
everything he did and wrote, the Swami was driven by his feelings: by
his passionate devotion to his &UN Ramakrishna, by his ardent pursuit
of the spiritual realisation that be had witnessed in his master, by his
heartfelt awareness of human suffering and poverty that he acquired
th.rough his experience as a wandering sannyisi, by his earnest convic
tion- implanted in him unexpectedly by his sudden success at
Chicago-that India and the West needed each other. He tried (not
always succeeding perhaps) to apply the discipline of his intellect to
those feelings; but the feelings always, for him, had primacy:
It is through the heart that the Lord is seen, and not through the intellect. The
intellect is only the street-cleaner, cleansing the path for us, a secondary
worker, the policeman; but the policeman is not a positive necessity for the
workings of society. He is only to stop disturbances, to check wrong-doing and
that is all the work required of the intellect. When you read intellectual books,
you think when you have mastered them, 'Bless the Lord that I am out of them'
because the intellect is blind and cannot move of itself, it bas neither hands nor
feel It is feeling that works, that moves with speed infmitely superior to that of
electricity or anything else. Do you feel?- that is the question . ..1
So what would the Swami have made of the Workshop in 1993 and a
volume such as this? He would probably been wryly amused at such
academic scrutiny of his life and works and writings, but we can, I
think, rest assured that he would not have disapproved of academic
endeavour per se. He himself devoured academic books, valued his
meetings with scholars in Europe and America. and regarded scholar
ship-like science-as a valid sidhani in itself: almost a form ofj filna
yoga. It is essential, however, never to lose sight of the Swami's pri
mary motivation: it was, after all, what made him what he was and is
therefore at the root of why we met to discuss him in 1993 and are
publishing the Workshop papers now. A salutary reminder of that
motivation was given at the end of the Workshop by Swami Dayatman
anda of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre at Bourne End. His moving
words impresSed us by the inner experience they reflected- just as
Vivekananda himself impressed those who heard him.
I 'Practical Vedanta' Part I, CW ll, p.306.
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FOREWORD
A more serious question is: what would he have thought of the title
of the Workshop and volume? It was devised partly so that the
Workshop would embrace not only VivekaMOO& himself but his con
temporaries and the religious, social and cultural context from which he
emerged and which continued to evolve in his wake. Thus the volume
includes-as well as the papers specifically on Vivekananda- two
papers on nineteenth century Benaras (Nita Kumar and Vasudha
Dalmia); two detailed studies of contemporary critiques of caste- in
India as a whole (Susan Bayly) and in the Ramananda order of Vaish
nava monks (Vijay Pinch); and comparisons between Vivekananda and
other significant leaders and thinkers: Brahmabandhab Upadhyay
(Julius Lipner), two sanltan dharma propagandists in the Punjab
(Kenneth Jones) and Govind Chandra Dev in East Benaal (Hiltrud
Riistau). But what would the Swami have made of the term
'modernisation' as applied to Hinduism? In one sense be would prob
ably have rejected it as meaningless, since he believed the basic prin
ciples of Vedanta to be eternally true, and valid not only for Hinduism
but all faiths. But in other respects I do not think he would have shared
the caution that many historians and thinkers today have about applying
a moral value to the term. This caution characterises, for example,
Vasudba Dalmia's definition ('an operation which entails a process of
alteration and improvement of what is basically an older and already
existing institution or system in order to accord better with
contemporary conditions') or Gwilym Beckerlegge's view of modern
isation as the changes worked by industrialisation, mass literacy, rapid
transport and communications etc. For Vivekananda, modernisation
meant reform: reform not only in its social dimension-in the nine
teenth-century Bengali tradition of social, religious and educational
reform (so that Vivekananda declared himself to be a follower of
Vidyasagar as well as Ramakrishna) - but in a mental sense too. His
central project- uniting his work in India and in the West- was to try
to work out what in the religious traditions not only of India but of all
countries and civilisations was valid and acceptable to modem scien
tific and historical understanding. What should be preserved from the
accumulated lumber and clutter of the world's religions, and what
should be discarded? Was it possible not to throw the baby out with the
bathwater? This project-and these questions-are even more pressing
now than they were in 1893:
The worship of the goddess of Reason dwing the French Revolution was not
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FOREWORD
the fint mmifestation of that phenomenon in lbe hilllDry of humanity, it wa a
re-eoa•~went of what bad happened in ancient times, but in modem times it baa
usumed greater proportions. The physical sciences are beUer equipped now
than formerly, and religions have become leu and less equipped. The founda
tions have been all undermined, and modern man, whatever be may say in
public, knows in tbe privacy of his heart that be can no more 'believe'.
Believing certain things becau1e an organized body of priests tells him to
believe, believing becauJe it ii written in certain boob, believing because bis
people like him to believe, the modem man knows to be impossible for him.
There are, of course, a DIUDber of people wbo seem to acquiesce in lbe 10-
called popular faith, but we also know for certain that they do not think. Their
idea ofb elief may be better tramllled u 'not-thinl<ing-careleuneu'. This fight
lnakina
cannot last much longer without to pie<les all lbe buildings ofr eligion.
au&
The question is: is there a way
The present volume does not in any way supply an answer to that
question, any more than Swami Vivekananda had a final a.nswer. But
for as long as the search for an answer goes on, Vivekananda will be
remembered, and will, no doubt, be discussed and dissected at many
more seminars and in many more books such as this.
It remains for me to thank not only the contributors to the volume
for revising their papers for publication but also the past and present
Chairmen of the Centre of South Asian Studies, Professor Peter Robb
and Dr. Giles Tillotson, for their guidance and support (it was Professor
Robb who valuably suggested that the workshop should be widened
beyond Vivekananda himself), and above all the Executive Officers of
the Centre, Miss Janet Marks and her successor Mrs. Barbara Lazoi.
The last named has shown by her care that accurate copy-editing and
typesetting (even with modem computer aids) can also be a form of
sidhani.
SOAS, October 1996
2 ·Reason and Religion', CW I, p.367.
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