Swami Vivekananda, Hindu Dharma and ‘Social Ethics’ in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In nineteenth-century colonial India, Hindu Dharma was attacked by colonial machinery and Christian missionaries for lacking social ethics and morality, with an understanding that Christianity had an ‘inherent and timeless’ social ethic and was concerned with the social upliftment of the poor. This paradigm to criticise Hinduism was also extended to criticise those Hindu intellectuals, especially Swami Vivekananda, who were deliberating over the question of ethics and morality, intending to make Hindu Dharma an agent of social change. These developments in Hindu Dharma were criticised as an outcome of or reaction to Christian social ethics and thereby were declared inauthentic in both colonial and post-colonial periods. By historicising and contextualising the concept of Christian social ethics and morality, this paper debunks the propaganda that concern for the poor and the marginalised was an ‘inherent and timeless’ feature of Christianity.