Abstract
Swami Vivekananda’s 1893 speech at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago and his subsequent popularity in the USA and the West generally, as the spokesperson of ‘accurate Hinduism’, as Vivekananda would see it, resulted also in the formation of a group of followers from Indian and Western backgrounds. In various corners of the world, such devotees and disciples connected to Vivekananda and his teachings. Among them, Margaret Elizabeth Noble (1867–911), better known as Sister Nivedita, soon came to be a close associate of her guru, Vivekananda, whom she first met in 1895. Nivedita, a Scots-Irish social worker and teacher, dedicated her life to Hinduism, travelled to Calcutta in 1898 and worked for a Hinduised India with vigorous religious complexities. In contemporary India, Vivekananda, now the official youth icon of India, and his disciple Nivedita, are portrayed as the best examples of devoutness and guru–shishya relation. But there are more complexities to this prominent figure than her ‘conversion’ to Hinduism suggests.
In this timely book, Sen explores as a historian the life and teachings of Sister Nivedita and her transformation into a Hindu sanyasin. Apart from examining her life and teachings, the book contains many articles, letters and speeches of Nivedita, throwing light on the political and ideological assumptions that motivated Nivedita to develop her love for Hinduism and India. The book’s contemporary relevance is focused on seeking to understand what model of Hinduism was defended by Nivedita and what lacunas one may find in her defence of Hinduism. This is pertinent, not just because the Indian subcontinent is undergoing politicisation of religious sentiments but also because Hinduism is at risk of being crystallised as one ‘formal religion’, in the true sense of the word, from its much-celebrated identity of hybridity or plurality of teachings and outlooks.
The book is divided into four major sections with an introduction. These four sections deal with the writings and speeches of Nivedita at various places. The introduction rigorously examines the development of Nivedita’s character as a Hindu sanyasin in the context of colonialism and the politics of Hindu religious rejuvenation in nineteenth century India. Sen shows that Nivedita embraced ascetic life due to three distressing love failures. This becomes clearer from her lecture, titled ‘How and Why I adopted the Hindu Religion’ in the fourth section. She writes that having been brought up as a devout Christian, she developed some scepticism about Christian teachings over the years. Accidently, she read about the life of Gautama Buddha and was influenced by his teachings. While being a teacher at her own kindergarten, and already sympathetic to Buddhism, Nivedita was introduced to Vivekananda in 1895 by a friend during a function. In 1896, she attended Vivekananda’s lectures and accepted Vedanta philosophy, which started her new journey as a Hindu, which eventually took her to India in 1898.
Interestingly, Nivedita was attracted to Hinduism and India by the ‘beautifulness’ of Indian village life (p. 159). She writes about a country where homes are simple, where domestic happiness is mostly to be found, and where women unselfishly, unobtrusively and ungrudgingly serve their dear ones from early morning to late at night (p. 159). This shows that Nivedita, without a family and coming from an industrialised, urbanised society, saw Indian village culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as appealing. Without understanding processes of social formation, she credited Hinduism for being the source of Indian villages’ agrarian economy, in the process romanticising Hinduism. Though the book does not explicitly argue that she is mistaken to consider Indian villages as pleasant, Sen shows throughout the introduction that Nivedita was driven by her deep-rooted devotion to Hinduism. This same devotion then influenced her at various junctures in her approach towards India.
The first section, ‘Thoughts on Education’, is a collection of Nivedita’s arguments about education. Her ideas on education are of considerable significance today, as she strongly supported women’s education and argued that India’s future depends also on educating women. However, Nivedita did not like to promote missionary education, which she saw as denationalising and not rooted in native culture. In short, for Nivedita, good education must have a nation-building quality and it should help India unite her people for the cause of a nation. One can see why this kind of reasoning is attractive for current Hindutva ideologists.
The second section, ‘Indian Art and Aesthetics’, presents and discusses Nivedita’s thoughts on Indian art and aesthetics. She hoped that Indian art, distinct from European art, could be a medium for national unity and modernisation. She did not support Western claims that Indian art can be located within Greek art. Evidently, Nivedita was led in this by Vivekananda, which meant that she would be interested to locate Indian art with absolutely no history of external influence. Hence, we see Nivedita arguing that Indian art had to appeal to the Indian heart, which also explains her criticism of Raja Ravi Varma, a South Indian artist, who based his reliance on European masters (p. 29).
The third section, ‘Hindu Mythology, Religion and Philosophy’, presents Nivedita’s identification with Hindu religion and her approach towards it as an all-encompassing ideology. She finds it noteworthy that Hinduism is more concerned about worshipping women as mother goddess or Kali, instead of the European approach of seeing God as a father figure. The feminine character of Hinduism is delightful in her view and conducive for India’s empowerment. Nivedita argues that Hinduism must be seen as a tree and not a machine (p. 141). While she approached Hinduism as a complex continuity, Sen shows that at certain points, she was seriously confused about how to deal with the crystallisation of Hinduism (pp. 33–4, 44–5), as Vivekananda taught that only one method or path of Hinduism can be projected as authentic, namely his portrayal of Vedanta philosophy as the real doctrine of Hinduism. Here, too, Nivedita differed from her teacher.
Section 4, ‘Contemporary India and her Problems’, throws light on the socio-political issues of British India in the larger context of nationalist struggles. While nationalism was developing in India, the country was witnessing growing Hindu–Muslim tensions. Her political connections led her to experience state surveillance; she even came to be watched as a pro-terrorist figure. While it appears again that Nivedita is confused in her attitude towards the Indian political struggles of her time, she was convinced that her racial standing as a white woman would save her from the gallows. Doubtlessly, Nivedita was dedicated to the cause of India, but she was unsure, as her writings confirm, about how to assess India’s political prospects. This confusion is further strengthened by her desire for religious Hindu-focused emancipation of India, on the one hand, and recognition of the vast plurality of religious and cultural communities that she encountered, on the other hand.
In short, these four sections reveal why Sister Nivedita is a celebrated symbol of Hinduism’s triumph in the West, and now in a Hindu nationalist India. She is partly projected as a dedicated disciple of Vivekananda, though there were resentments between Nivedita and her guru. Though she was unable to break her ideological bondage with Vivekananda, she also wanted to establish her identity as separate from him. Sister Nivedita, the book shows, is a representative of a particular time of revival in Indian spirituality and political nationalism, engaged above all in ardent search for Indian sentiments. She represents, in the end, the development of Hinduism from its pan-Indian range to a universally acceptable religion which anyone could embrace. Through Nivedita’s presence, Hinduism has broken the chain of being merely an oriental belief system.
Nivedita’s engagements with Hinduism that this book analyses, especially her being a foreigner, enabled and continues to strengthen the assertions of supporters of Hinduism, since the nineteenth century, that Hinduism has universal relevance and validity. Hindu nationalists saw in her an unexpected defender of their faith, as she worked during a period in which the internal contradictions of Hinduism were subject to rigorous criticism. Today, when many non-Indians across the globe embrace various forms of Hinduism, Nivedita stands tall as an established legacy for defenders of the Hindu faith, strengthening their arguments for a place at the global table of world religions, thereby closing the circle with her guru’s speech in 1893.