Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda

From the Wolfson History Prize–winning author of The Man on Devil’s Island,  the definitive biography of Vivekananda, the Indian monk who shaped the  intellectual and spiritual history of both East and West.

Few  thinkers have had so enduring an impact on both Eastern and Western  life as Swami Vivekananda, the Indian monk who inspired the likes of  Freud, Gandhi, and Tagore. Blending science, religion, and politics,  Vivekananda introduced Westerners to yoga and the universalist school of  Hinduism called Vedanta. His teachings fostered a more tolerant form of  mainstream spirituality in Europe and North America and forever changed  the Western relationship to meditation and spirituality.

Guru to the World  traces Vivekananda’s transformation from son of a Calcutta-based  attorney into saffron-robed ascetic. At the 1893 World Parliament of  Religions in Chicago, he fascinated audiences with teachings from  Hinduism, Western esoteric spirituality, physics, and the sciences of  the mind, in the process advocating a more inclusive conception of  religion and expounding the evils of colonialism. Vivekananda won many  disciples, most prominently the Irish activist Margaret Noble, who  disseminated his ideas in the face of much disdain for the wisdom of a  “subject race.” At home, he challenged the notion that religion was  antithetical to nationalist goals, arguing that Hinduism was intimately  connected with Indian identity.

Ruth Harris offers an arresting  biography, showing how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global  anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist  politics a century after his death. The iconic monk emerges as a  counterargument to Orientalist critiques, which interpret East-West  interactions as primarily instances of Western borrowing. As Vivekananda  demonstrates, we must not underestimate Eastern agency in the global  circulation of ideas.