VIVEKANANDA

Born Narendranath Datta, Vivekananda (1863-1902) was a Bengali intellectual educated in English schools in Calcutta. Although an agnostic, he joined the reformist Brahmo Samaj, and was introduced to the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna. He soon attached himself as a disciple to Ramakrishna. When the saint died in 1886, Swami Vivekananda took sannyasa (spiritual withdrawal) and with some disciples spent six years on pilgrimage in India. In 1893 he attended the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, soon gaining an American following. He increased his Western flock of disciples in London, where he spent much time. Back in India in 1897, he made a triumphal tour of Colombo (Sri Lanka), Madras, and Calcutta. In the same year he organized the Ramakrishna Mission, which was to be highly successful in promulgating Vivekananda's version of the saint's teachings. A second trip to the United States and England brought more fame and success. He died at Belur, Bengal, at the math or ashram he had founded there in 1898. His teachings were a streamlined, modernized Vedanta that rejected past superstitions and reactionary tendencies and added a layer of Western social reform. However, some of his ideas show a morbidity unacceptable to positive-thinking foreigners. He was a fervent devotee of Kali, and saw life in terms of her negative aspects. "There are some who scoff at the existence of Kali," he said. "Who can say that God does not manifest Himself as Evil as well as Good? But only the Hindu dares to worship him in the evil." He also said, "I worship the terrible! It is a mistake to hold that with all men pleasure is the motive. Quite as many are born to seek after pain. Let us worship the Terror for Its own sake...How few have dared to worship Death, or Kali! Let us worship Death!" Like others of the neoHindu revival, he saw Hinduism and India as the world Savior, and that, as a disciple reported, "the East must come to the West, not as sycophant, not as servant, but as Guru and teacher."

One of the Swami's early and most important converts was the Irishwoman Margaret E. Noble, who followed him from London to India in 1898. He called her Nivedita (the Dedicated One), the name by which she has been known since. Nivedita became his biographer, the collector of his sayings, and the editor of his writings. Her own works are a reflection of Vivekananda's ideas. The Ramakrishna Mission is a paragon of unselfish devotion and hard work on behalf of the Indian poor, transcending caste and racial barriers. The group maintains a number of centers outside India, including one in New York. Orthodox Hindus find the Mission's version of Hinduism inauthentic and too Westernized, even as it thrives.