Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda

by Ruth Harris

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674287341
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/27/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	560
File size:	112 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Ruth Harris is the author of Lourdes and The Man on Devil’s Island, which won the Wolfson Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. She is Senior Research Fellow at All Soul’s College, University of Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and Professor of European History at the University of Oxford.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Note on Transliteration Introduction Part One: India 1. Earliest Days 2. Ramakrishna 3. Ramakrishna and Vivekananda 4. Vivekananda and His Travels Part Two: The West 5. The World’s Parliament of Religions 6. Women East and West 7. Magic, Science, Transcendence 8. Green Acre, William James, and Raja Yoga 9. Female Devotees and the Labors of the Guru 10. The Pains and Pleasures of Love in America 11. The Pains and Pleasures of Love in Great Britain Part Three: India and the World 12. Vivekananda Returns 13. The Clinch 14. Education, “Divine Play,” and the Nation 15. Femininity, the National Idea, and Politics 16. Malign Influences and Harrowing Deaths Conclusion Chronology Dramatis Personae Notes Acknowledgments Illustration credits Index

Editorial Reviews

07/18/2022

Historian Harris (The Man on Devil’s Island) delivers a granular biography of 19th-century Indian monk Vivekananda, née Narendranath Datta, who helped introduce yoga and the Vedanta school of Hinduism to the English-speaking world. Seeking to “restore an understanding of Vivekananda’s complexity,” Harris rigorously details her subject’s social, economic, and political milieu and contradicts modern-day misinterpretations that place his teachings at the center of a resurgent Hindu nationalism linked to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tracing Vivekananda’s development from his youthful disillusionment as the educated son of a high-ranking but impoverished civil servant to his spiritual reawakening under the guidance of the religious guru Ramakrishna and his travels across India and the world, Harris spotlights how Vivekananda “synthesize ideas of service, Karma yoga, and anticolonial assertion.” After catapulting to international fame from giving a series of speeches extolling religious tolerance and India’s spiritual traditions at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, he went on speaking tours, published the first English-language manual on yoga, and helped win Western converts to the side of Indian independence. Throughout, Harris tackles controversies—including the anti-Semitism of one of Vivekananda’s most devoted and influential followers—but her insights frequently get lost in a thicket of tangents. Still, readers willing to slog through the minutiae will gain a clearer picture of the swami and his movement. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Vivekananda was many things to many people: the first global religious celebrity, an apostle of Indian nationalism, a man whose message was heard, and heard differently, in salons as well as slums. It’s not just any biographer who can do justice to such a complex life. He’s fortunate to have found a perfect interpreter in Ruth Harris.

Benjamin Moser

This will be the standard biography of [Vivekananda] for years to come…Admirable.

Spirituality & Practice - Jon M. Sweeney

In Ruth Harris’s vivid portrait of India’s Vivekananda, we discover a compelling story of interconnected lives—the guru, his disciple, the international followers, his own teacher—that sheds new light on religion, race, gender, colonialism, and nationalism. This impressive book introduces us to some important but half-forgotten cultural currents in the life of India, Europe, and America at the end of the nineteenth century. To understand contemporary India, we need to pay more attention to these currents, and Harris is a sure-footed guide.

Rowan Williams

Guru to the World is a triumph of research and ambition, drawing connections between a dazzling array of philosophies, figures, languages, geographies and religions.

Literary Review - Abhimanyu Arni

Vivekananda’s life was an embarrassment of epiphanies and contradictions, and Harris exhaustively uncovers all of them.

History Today - Pratinav Anil

This is a deeply researched and compellingly argued biography of Swami Vivekananda, one of the first Indian religious thinkers to become known in the west, and one of the makers of modern India.

BBC History Magazine - Rana Mitter

In Guru to the World, Ruth Harris gives us riveting accounts of both the Indian and the international sides of Swami Vivekananda, one of the most provocative personalities of the nineteenth century. The connections between tradition and modernity forged by him over a century ago continue to influence culture, politics, and religion worldwide. A brilliant read.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

An inspired blend of religion, politics, and biography, Guru to the World takes a novel approach to the history of empire and cross-cultural encounters that foregrounds the workings of love, friendship, and faith. In the lives of Vivekananda and his associates, Ruth Harris delivers insight into topics ranging from yoga to anticolonial nationalism that should interest any readers curious to understand the workings of what might be called globalized culture.

Maya Jasanoff

09/01/2022

A century ago, Westerners would readily recognize the name of Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), the man who helped introduce Hinduism to the United States, England, and Europe and influenced Gandhi and Freud. Wolfson Prize—winning historian Harris (Oxford Univ.; The Man on Devil's Island) has written perhaps the definitive book on the Indian monk and philosopher that seeks to present his complexity as a person and in his teachings. Harris shows him first as a disciple of Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, and then as master, in his own right, of an important disciple, Margaret Noble (known as Sister Nivedita). She also writes that Vivekananda taught inclusive religious universalism even as he advocated Hindu nationalism as a means to fight colonialism and paternalistic thinking. Arranged chronologically in three parts ("India"; "The West"; "India and the World"), this work is scholarly in nature, with more than 70 pages of endnotes; readers might find it to be very detailed and dense. VERDICT Useful and perhaps even fascinating for readers interested in Hinduism or in scholarly literature on Vivekananda.—John Jaeger

Library Journal