In Vivekananda, The Philosopher of Freedom, Govind Krishnan V. argues that the best antidote to the Sangh Parivar’s appropriation of Vivekananda is for more people to read his work. Pointing out that Vivekananda was not a Hindu supremacist nor a “facile glorifier of Hinduism”, as the Sangh portrays him to be, the writer argues that Vivekananda’s thought stands in direct opposition to all the fundamentalist tenets of Hindutva. As a liberal and an individualist, Vivekananda pushed for universal religious tolerance. An excerpt.
Vivekananda did not consider that those who follow Hinduism had to believe in the literal truth of its sacred myths. In fact, he would say again and again, to take mythology literally is to get stuck in a crude stage of spiritual growth. Mythology had an important place in religion, but it had to be understood as allegory, as literary and symbolic illustrations of the abstract principles of spirituality. There was no contradiction in worshipping the gods of Hinduism’s lore as forms of divinity, while recognising the non-historical and mythological character of their depiction in scriptures.
Youth dressed as Swami Vivekananda take part in ‘Bharat Jago Daud’, organised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to mark his 150th birth anniversary in Bhopal. | Photo Credit: A.M. Faruqui
Vivekananda’s thought on all themes important to Hindutva nationalism — Hindu identity, the nature of Hinduism, the place of minorities in India — stand in stark opposition to the thought of the RSS’s icons like Savarkar, Golwalkar, and Hedgewar. As a result, the RSS does not project Vivekananda as an ideological forerunner to the Savarkar–Golwalkar brand of hardline Hindutva. It is difficult to put Vivekananda, the central theme of whose thought was universal religious tolerance, in the same box with Hindutva ideologues who were openly and deeply hostile to Islam and Christianity. The RSS and other Sangh outfits do not generally discuss Vivekananda’s work, choosing only to make use of the symbolic value of invoking his name and image for their events, activities, and organisations. On the occasions that writers associated with the RSS have ventured to write on Vivekananda, they proceed by ignoring or underemphasizing the universal and non-denominational aspects of his work. Instead, a nationalistic, culturally conservative, and Hinduized Vivekananda is presented. This is achieved through cherry picking writings and utterances that appear to bear idiomatic similarities to certain aspects of Hindutva when they are lifted out of their original contexts. This is followed by attributing to Vivekananda on this basis, beliefs and ideological positions he never held.
For example, RSS ideologue P. Parameswaran in his writings on Vivekananda, presents Vivekananda as a figure who was predominantly concerned with the preservation of ‘Indian values’. Parameswaran bemoans how Indian youngsters have fallen away from these values in their lifestyle. The younger generation, especially the Indian diaspora in the U.S., is turning away from ‘Indian cultural values’ and leading a degenerate lifestyle (marked, among other things, by sexual liberty), forgetting their cultural heritage. Parameswaran claims that Vivekananda was proud of Hindutva. According to Parameswaran, Vivekananda believed that a thousand years of slavery had made the Hindu community lose its pride and had caused it to become divided. The task that Vivekananda saw before him was to organize and mobilize the disunited Hindus.
From the RSS’s account, Vivekananda emerges as an advocate of Hindu exceptionalism. It is claimed Vivekananda preached that Indians were an extraordinary nation. India had been considered a holy land, a ‘punyabhoomi’, from ancient times. Vivekananda’s patriotism was rooted in and was a continuation of this older ethno-religious tradition, cast in new nationalist terms. According to this narrative, Vivekananda firmly believed that India and Hindus had a special destiny in the world, a destiny that stemmed from the knowledge contained in the Vedas and the Upanishads.
Missing the point
In the Sangh’s version, Vivekananda was not only a cultural conservative whose primary concern was the perpetuation of Indian cultural values; he was also a champion of the universal relevance and inherent superiority of those values. He was an evangelist for Hindu spirituality, whose patriotism was based on ‘extraordinary pride in Indian culture.’ Particularly, he laid emphasis on the Upanishads, the final portions of the Vedas. In Parameswaran’s rendering of Vivekananda’s thought, Vivekananda criticised the West and its consumer culture.
Vivekananda in Chicago, September 1893. On the left, the note by him reads: ‘One infinite pure and holy — beyond thought beyond qualities I bow down to thee.’ | Photo Credit: Wiki Commons
While it is true that Vivekananda wanted to spread the message of the Upanishads throughout the world and believed that Advaita Vedanta gave philosophical answers to intellectual challenges that religion faced from modern scepticism, the RSS narrative about Vivekananda does not come close to even being a caricature.
Vivekananda was neither an iconoclast, nor an anarchist. He valued what spiritual tradition, scriptures, and the accumulated wisdom of humanity had to offer the individual. He considered the Upanishads (the philosophical part of the Vedas) to contain the grandest truths of existence ever discovered by man and the Buddha to have preached the highest morality ever conceived. But all these were valuable only if man received them freely and accepted these truths after examining them with her own discriminative faculty. No one should be coerced to accept them or live according to anything other than the dictates of her own conscience.
Vivekananda: The Philosopher of Freedom; Govind Krishnan V., Aleph, ₹999.
Excerpted with permission from Aleph.
