Vivekananda
Authors: McGetchin Douglas 
Published: June 2013

Narendranath Datta, later known as Swami Vivekananda (b. 1863–d. 1902), was a Hindu missionary who traveled extensively in the United States and Europe, propagating a message of pride in Indian heritage. He is perhaps best known for his dynamic presence and speeches at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, associated with the World Fair there that year. Naren (the future Vivekananda) was from an educated middle-class Bengali family in Calcutta. His father was a lawyer who supported the British. Naren attended Presidency College in Calcutta and studied Western topics, including philosophy, and joined the moderate reformed Hindu Brahmo Samaj (Brahma Society). Naren was skeptical when he met Gadadhar Chattopadhyay (b. 1836–d. 1886), who took the name Ramakrishna Paramahansa, from a poor, rural Brahmin family in the village of Kamarpukur in the Hoogly district of West Bengal. As a priest at the temple of Dakshineswar, Ramakrishna pursued a mystical, ecstatic form of Hinduism, achieving what he and observers believed were trance-like beatific divine visions, “seeing God.” Naren first met Ramakrishna in 1881 and took some time to accept him as his guru. After facing doubts and personal crises such as the death of his father in 1884, Naren intensified his contact with Ramakrishna, obtaining ordination as a monk before the latter’s death in 1886. Ramakrishna’s followers took formal vows and Naren spent the years 1888 to 1893 traveling around India as a wandering monk. His wandering then expanded internationally when he traveled in 1893 to the United States to attend the World Parliament of Religions. His speeches there and his charismatic presence made many friends for his movement. A handsome man with a deep voice and charming accent, he became a speaker in great demand as he traveled widely in the United States and Europe from 1893 to 1896 and again from 1899 to 1900, making contacts and friends with influential people in the West such as the Oxford Indologist Max Müller. He inspired westerners, most notably the Irish woman Margaret Noble, who took the name Nivedita (“the dedicated”) and moved to Calcutta where she ran a school for Hindu girls and wrote several books about the attraction of Hinduism and Vivekananda. He established a religious legacy that continues to thrive. These organizations include the Ramakrishna Math and Mission he founded in Calcutta in 1897 as well as Vedanta Societies in New York and San Francisco. Vivekananda’s interpretation of “Hinduism” is a modernized or Westernized variety that some refer to as “Neo-Hinduism.” The vast majority of literature on Vivekananda is published by devotees, or swamis, within the religious order Vivekananda founded, the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, named after Vivekananda’s guru. While this literature naturally seeks to put Vivekananda in the best possible light, much of it is very detailed, extensive, and quite scholarly, with a deep knowledge of the many primary sources associated with Vivekananda. There is a challenge reading semi- or pseudo-scholarly works that are clearly biased yet do contain useful information. These accounts are clustered in their own separate sections.