Soft Power | Swami Vivekananda: A veritable youth icon

Swami Vivekananda’s birthday, on January 12, was declared in 1984 as the National Youth Day by the Government of India. If we were to poll today’s youth, few are likely to see the leonine monk as a youth icon. Though he died before reaching the age of forty, Vivekananda, with his larger than life impact and aura, has the gravitas of an older, weightier personality. How then did the powers that be select him as the icon of youth? Apparently, one of the members of the committee opined that Vivekananda is the only great Indian not a single one of whose pictures shows him as old. This is not entirely untrue even if it sounds facetious: as a people, we tend to revere only the geriatric.

Actually, in hundred years, our ideas of youth and old age have changed radically. Vivekananda’s master, Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) died at fifty, but his last photos show him aged and haggard. But even before he was ravaged by cancer, Ramakrishna was already addressed as ‘the old man’ by Vivekananda, who considered his Guru as belonging to another generation, another age even, not just physically but psychologically. In those days, when girls were married off before puberty and became mothers in their teens, being thirty was middle-aged, and forty, old.

Indeed, when we consider Vivekananda’s great works and words, he rarely sounds like a young man. As the foremost disciple and successor of Sri Ramakrishna, he was an outstanding spiritual leader, institution-builder, philosopher, scholar, orator, teacher, poet, and one of most important makers of modern India. In the last nine years of his life, the Swami, who died before he was forty, set into motion a massive movement to reconstruct Hinduism and transform India.

He accomplished this by reforming Hinduism in India and changing its image in the West. His reshaping of the century-long project of Hindu social and cultural regeneration directly linked him to the birth of a new India. Indeed, the Hinduism that Vivekananda expounded at the Parliament of Religions and, later, all over America and India, parts of Britain and Europe, was a new version of an ancient tradition, retooled to spiritualise individuals and transform society.

The makeover of Vivekananda from an unknown monk to India’s first international hero is the stuff legends are made of. As BG Gokhale puts it, “In 1892 he was a little known sannyasi when Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the ‘Father of Indian Unrest,’ met him on a Poona-bound train. Five years later he was hailed all over the country as a ‘conquering hero’. He ‘thundered from Cape Comorin on the southern tip of India to the Himalayas’ delivering his message of nationalism which ‘came as a tonic to the depressed and demoralised Hindu mind.’

His message to the Parliament also hugely significant for the future of the inter-faith dialogue: “I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honour of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.” This was clearly a restatement of what he learned from Sri Ramakrishna, his guru. Ramakrishna’s powerful assertion of pluralism: joto mat toto poth – as one’s opinion so one’s path, might itself be considered a timely and colloquial restatemene ancient Vedic dictum, ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti – reality is one, the wise speak of it variously. Vivekananda interpreted this declaration of pluralism and egalitarianism in the language of modernity that he imbibed as a young English-educated Calcutta man.

Vivekananda’s meeting with Ramakrishna, several years earlier, shows both the impetuosity and innocence of the very young. Though Mahendranath Gupta, Ramakrishna’s chronicler frames it as a classic face-off between mundane if modern rationality and superiorly endowed spiritual power, it was actually an encounter between innocence and experience. Vivekananda asked, “Have you seen God?” Without a moment’s hesitation, Ramakrishna replied, “Yes, I have seen God. I see Him as I see you here, only more clearly. God can be seen. One can talk to him. But who cares for God? People shed torrents of tears for their wives, children, wealth, and property, but who weeps for the vision of God?”

But Vivekananda’s great achievements would not have been possible without youthful enthusiasm, energy, daring-do, and entrepreneurship. His founding of the Ramakrishna Mission in 1897 was, in a sense, the ultimate Hindu start-up. The received view of Hinduism, promoted not only by missionaries and modernisers, but also held by a large section of the educated middle-classes of India, was as a pagan, superstitious, idolatrous, and hierarchical practice of rituals and customs. Vivekananda transformed it into a rational, universal philosophy, freed from dogma and authority.  He did this by making Vedanta the spine of new Hinduism, bhakti its heart, and the yogas its sinews.  For the West, what he brought was indeed original and promising.  

One of Vivekananda’s radical theses was that India had declined because of its neglect of women and depressed classes.  “We are horrible sinners,” he said, “and our degradation is due to our calling women, ‘despicable worms,’ ‘gateways to hell,’ and so forth….” In his letter to Alasinga Perumal, he is even more categorical: “So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them!”

The emergence of the national culture in India would not have been possible without an inspiring and youthful exemplar like Vivekananda. The national consensus, whether secular or religious, evolved out of plural and non-exclusive Hindu strand of which Vivekananda was a key agent. Today, if Hinduism is also a global religion this is also, in large measure, owing to Vivekananda’s success in reinterpreting and propagating it as ‘practical Vedanta’.

The author is a poet and professor at JNU, New Delhi.