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What Vivekananda valued

Pratap Bhanu Mehta : Mon Jan 16 2012, 02:45 hrsIndian Express 16th January 2012

There is a touch of irony in the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of Vivekananda.

Vivekananda constantly reminded Indians that out of hopelessly intricate mythology must

come concrete moral forms; and out of bewildering Yogism must come that most scientific

and practical psychology. Yet Vivekananda, like so many figures of Indian intellectual

history, has now been made more into a myth than moral form, more part of an ideology of

yogism, than a practical spirit. Exploring why this has happened, may give us more insights

into our predicament, than the celebrating the cardboard cut-outs that most of our

anniversaries have become.

Anniversaries are important. If they do nothing but dent the massive historicalamnesia we have about how we became what we are, they will have served their

purpose. Vivekananda does have a pride of place in the massive transformation of

Indian self-consciousness. He was, to use, Audens phrase, a whole climate of

opinion, an object of admiration for figures as diverse as Gandhi, Tagore and Bose.

There is the sheer force of his personality and the power of his words. There is also

something deeply elegiac about the intellectual journey he crafted. There is of course

the Vivekananda, the by-no-means-unthinking disciple of Ramkrishna

Paramahansa. But there is the wandering monk, studying the Ashtadhyayi in Jaipur,

Vedas in Porbandar, Latin theology in Goa, conversing with William James at

Harvard. There is the extraordinary juxtaposition: Jamshedji Tata and Vivekananda

on a ship talking about the establishment of an institute of science. Jamshedji

writing to him to be its brand ambassador, as it were. India has progressed in many

ways. But not in intellectual ambition. Almost all our great figures appear to us

monumentalised, precisely because we are incapable of comprehending the rich and

diverse intellectual soil that nourished them.

Vivekananda was central to many of the intellectual undercurrents that made

modern India possible. He was the progenitor of projects central to modern Indianidentity. The claim that without removing hunger and ignorance of the masses, no

national regeneration would be possible now seems commonplace, even if

unconscionably unfulfilled. But he shifted the central question of Indias future to the

removal of poverty and ignorance with unprecedented rhetorical power and force.

Ignoring poverty and education was the highest form of treason.

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He made possible a radical criticism of tradition, without making tradition

despicable. Few describe the savagery of Indian society with as much bluntness as he

does. The greatest indictment of priestly power was it made the poor forget their own

humanity. No social structure is religiously sanctioned; societies are products of the

operations of power and necessity. This then paved the way for the centrality of a very modern political vocabulary centred on freedom, individuality and equal

opportunity. The great abomination of poverty was that it crushed individuals. His

advice to the Congress party, let them (the masses) have full meals, they will work

out their salvation.

The third achievement was to recast the modern Indian project as the creation of an

alternative universality. The legitimacy of the Indian enterprise would forever be

measured by the fact that it was tethered to values: a theological openness, toleration

in the highest sense of the term and pluralism. He directed India towards a liberality

by reminding us that it was gods job to protect us, not ours to protect our gods. The

distinction of Indian nationalism was precisely that it never saw the nation as the

highest embodiment of value. With the condescension of hindsight it is too easy to

dismiss this project as either disembodied idealism, or worse still, an assertion of

Indian superiority. But embedded in it was the radical idea that India means nothing

if it is not going to be a source of alternative values. There is a recognition of

pluralism, but not one that sacrifices truth. We want to lead mankind to a place

where there is neither the Vedas, nor the Bible, nor the Koran, yet this has to be done

by harmonising the Vedas, the Bible, the Koran. Whatever one may think of thisproject, the idea that each tradition could reach to some place outside itself, by

working through all traditions, was a sign of intellectual ambition that is now all but

lost.

Again, in hindsight, Vivekananda has been read as progenitor masculinity in politics;

and he has certainly been appropriated that way. His claim that for our motherland,

a conjunction of the two great systems, Hinduism and Islam Vedanta Brain and

Islam Body is the only hope has been tirelessly misinterpreted. This quotation is

prefaced by two striking claims Practical Advaitism, which looks upon and behaves

to all mankind as ones own soul, was never developed amongst the Hindus. And if

any religion approached equality in any appreciable manner it was Islam and Islam

alone. The reference to Islamic body is not to an ideal of power; it is to the central

idea of equality.

Vivekananda was an unabashed defender of equality of opportunity: If there is

inequality in nature, there still must be equal chances for all. He prophesises the

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empowerment of the backward castes, and his castigation of untouchability was

second to none. Yet, like Gandhi, he could not convert an anti-untouchability

programme into a genuine anti-caste programme; indeed the abstraction with which

he can sometimes talk of caste led him to underestimate just what a scourge it was.

In a strange way, his political thought is incomprehensible without unpacking two

categories: abhaya (fearlessness) and aparigraha (renunciation). Indeed what is

common to the non-Marxist understanding of equality in the Indian tradition is

precisely that equality might not be possible without individuals practising some

form of renunciation. For the root source of inequality is excessive attachment and a

will to dominate. And the only means to address inequality therefore, is to shape

ourselves in a certain way. But this tradition could not quite bridge the gap from

equality as an ethical ideal to a political and economic one.

The other point of distance between us and the tradition that Vivekanandarepresented is this. While the social question was central for them, they did not

reduce all thought to the social question. There was still something of genuinely

divine reality to be accessed, a higher form of knowledge to be comprehended. While

we all pay due homage to that aspiration, we can barely understand what that might

mean. For all its limitations, Vivekananda underlying sensibility was open, self-

confident and governed by the belief that humanity needs wider circles of

identification to transcend narrow identities. But this is not a message we are yet

ready to comprehend.

The writer is president of Centre for Policy Research, Delhi