Universal self, equality and hierarchy in Swami Vivekananda

Abstract

In the context of analysing the relation between the master and the disciple, Ramakrishna Pramahamsa and Swami Vivekananda, the article brings together different unconnected writings for a systematic and cumulative argumentation on this important relation. This is undertaken with reference to Ramakrishna’s strict adherence to equality amongst all religions and his disciple’s claim for the superiority of Hinduism in general and Advaita Vedanta in particular. Having set the background, it further embarks on explaining the possible reasons for deviations by the pupil from the master by brining into the centre-stage the whole sale claims of the entire nineteenth-century scholarship as derivative by Indologists like Hacker. The failure to recognise these important dimensions imbricated in this relation is traced firstly to the general failure in reading the nature and logic of modernity, particularly, the invariance between its attitude towards both its own pre-modern and those non-Western societies like India which it sought to colonise. Second, to treating modern Indian thinkers as authors in the modern sense of the term when they are not strictly so.