Bibliography: Vivekananda, Gandhi, and
the RSS
Contributed by Frederick M. Smith, University of
Iowa
Several people have asked me off list to compile the sources reported
and to summarize the very preliminary findings from my question last week
regarding an apparent convergence between followers of Vivekananda, even
Gandhi, and the RSS. I regarded these three as strangely matched
bedfellows and wondered how to interpret it, if indeed my observations are
valid at all. What I discovered is that Vivekananda, and even Gandhi, have
been gradually appropriated into the culture of the RSS, and that this has
been building for many decades. Also, however, mediate forces have emerged
to both facilitate and transform this image. I was not aware, for example,
that the well-known monument to Vivekananda found at the southern tip of
India, at Kanyakumari, was constructed by the RSS in the late 1960s. (I
visited it many decades ago and was not at that time aware of the politics
involved in its construction.) For this and the activities of the
Vivekananda Kendra regarding yoga, see Gwilym Beckerlegge, “Eknath
Ranade, Gurus, and J?vanvrat?s: The Vivekananda Kendra’s Promotion of
the “Yoga Way of Life,”in Mark Singleton & Ellen Goldberg, Gurus
of Modern Yoga, pp. 317-350 (OUP 2013). In addition to the citation in my
original posting of the piece by Pralay Kanungo, seee his “Fusing the
Ideals of the Math with the Ideology of the Sangh? Vivekananda Kendra,
Ecumenical Hinduism, and Hindu Nationalism,” in Public Hinduisms, ed.
John Zavos, et al. pp. 119-140 (Sage, 2012). This excellent volume is
worth our attention.
I am also struck by the way new but mediate ideologies are influencing
the body politic and sectarian affiliations. An example is the influence
of Lingayat gurus in Karnataka who seem to draw from both sides, from
their own space in the middle, as well as from local political
arrangements. For this, see Aya Ikegame, “The governing guru: Hindu
mathas in liberalizing India,” in Jacob copeman and Aya Ikegame, The
Guru in South Asia: New Interdisciplinary Perspectives, pp. 46-63 (Routledge
2012). Her work is well worth following. I suspect that local
configurations and affiliations are present in many states in India that
most of us are unaware of.
John Cort reminded us of the posters and hoardings of a muscular macho
Vivekananda in Gujarat as recently as this year, used as props by the BJP.
Consistent with this, Adam Bowled noted, is a report in the Hindustan
Times “that the BJP government in Haryana has appointed Dinanath Batra
to guide a committee of educationists in Haryana. The accompanying photo
shows Dinanath Batra in an (his?) office with a statue of Vivekananda in
the foreground.” http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/rss-ideologue-dinanath-batra-to-guide-haryana-on-education/article1-1285430.aspx
Robert Zydenbos suggested we look at “an in-depth chapter on
Vivekananda” in Hans-Joachim Klimkeit's _Der politische Hinduismus_ (Harrassowitz,
1981), which, Robert says, “is still the standard work in German on the
subject.” Robert also suggests that Vivekananda’s appearance at the
Chicago Parliament of Religions in 1893 has been overplayed by Hindu
nationalists, at least from the European perspective. OK, go ahead, blame
America :-)
I agree with Pankaj Jain and everyone else that it’s not a good idea
for scholars to reduce Gandhi or Vivekananda to any political agenda. Jeff
Long emphasizes this point: “We need to be careful to distinguish
between these uses and the self-understandings of these figures in their
respective contexts.” Nevertheless, such noble aspirations have not
prevented these appropriations from becoming a regular feature of
political practice in India. I agree that the search for a new indigenous
hermeneutic and epistemology is a worthy endeavor, but the primary thrust
of the efforts I have encountered are preoccupied with rejectionist
discourse coupled with the use of highly selective evidence with which to
build their theories, compounded with insufficient deep knowledge of both
texts and the history of intellectual debate in India (for the latter, see
the vigorous and readable work of Larry McCrea).
Several people on and off-list brought to my attention Jyotimaya Sharma’s
recent book A Restatement of Religion: Swami Vivekananda and the Making of
Hindu Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2013). but James Madaio does not
believe that Sharma has adequately addressed how the right has “diachronically
appropriated figures like Vivekananda into their rhetoric and 'mediascapes',”
even as he demythologizes Vivekananda and neo-Vedantic inclusivism. Madaio
notes, perceptively: “It does not seem a coincidence that the (often
impassioned) issue of who Vivekananda was is anachronistically caught up
in the right's (selective) appropriation of him and, in turn, the left's
intellectual critique.”
TIm Dobe writes (off list):
Cassie Adcock's work on the narrative of Hindu Tolerance and on the
Arya Samaj approaches this kind of question from quite a different angle,
pointing out how critiques of the rise of homogenised, semiticized etc.
Hinduism often function as the foil for a pro-Congress
"secularism" and tolerance. Framed between these extremes, the
narratives we have often fail to attend other key dimensions of the
historical context, such as critiques of untouchability in connection with
shuddhi and the multiple and complex religious identities of figures who
converted in and out of a variety of "communal" movements.
https://religiousstudies.artsci.wustl.edu/cassie_adcock
And suggest his own article: "Daya-nanda Sarasvat¯ as Irascible
R.s.i: The Personal and Performed Authority of a Text,” in Journal of
Hindu Studies 2011.4: :79–100.
Among the more grisly accounts, Palianappan notes:
http://roundtableindia.co.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6040%3Avivekanandas-ideological-yatra&catid=119%3Afeature&Itemid=132
Jon Keune mentioned the common ground between Gandhi and Hindutva. For
this, see Arundhati Roy's introduction to the annotated edition of
Ambedkar's annihilation of caste:
http://www.amazon.com/Annihilation-Caste-Annotated-B-R-Ambedkar/dp/1781688311/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1415811796&sr=1-1&keywords=arundhati+roy+ambedkar
Also:
http://www.outlookindia.com/article/We-Need-AmbedkarNow-Urgently/289691
Amod Lele refers us to his master's thesis on the rise of
state-sponsored Hindutva with Singapore's Confucian experiments: https://bu.digication.com/amod_lele/International_development
and his article, "State Hindutva and Singapore Confucianism as
responses to the decline of the welfare state,” in Asian Studies Review
28 (2004): 267-82.
Other sources that list members noted were:
Joe Alter’s Gandhi’s Body and his many works on yoga and Indian
masculinity;
chapters 3 & 4 of Peter van der Veer’s Imperial Encounters, in
which he discusses Vivekananda’s rejection of muscular Christianity even
if muscular Hinduism developed later;
Arafaat Valiani’s work on Gandhi, masculinity, and performative
politics in Gujarat, Militant Publics in India: Physical Culture and
Violence in the Making of a Modern Polity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
Anup Kumar points out that in spite of the high profile of the hard
edge of Hindu nationalism, most Hindus still identify with a softer,
gentler Hinduism, and that “we are dealing with our own cognitive
dissonance in face of the renewed focus on Gandhi by the BJP.”
Similarly, Raymond Williams reminds us that in the early decades of Indian
immigration to the U.S., Vivekananda was extolled as the Indian spiritual
exemplar countering western materialism. How times have changed!!
Finally, and most recently, this from the NYTimes a few days ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/opinion/a-fighter-for-religious-tolerance.html?mabReward=RI%3A5&action=click&pgtype=Homepage®ion=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine
Revised: November 24, 2014
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