RELIGION FOr A SECULAr AGE To my parents Religion for a Secular Age Max Müller, and Vedānta

THOMAs J. GrEEN First published 2016 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

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ISBN: 978-1-472-46292-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-60490-9 (ebk) Contents

Preface vii Abbreviations ix Conventions of Transliteration and Translation xi

Introduction 1

1 Foundations 15

2 The Science of Religion and Religion as Science 49

3 Vedānta in Defence of Religion 79

4 Vedānta and the Religious Foundation of 113

5 , Vedānta and the Essence of 141

Conclusion 171

Bibliography 175 Index 185 This page intentionally left blank Preface

Explorations of what happens to ‘religion’ in the face of modernity have long been fixtures of historical and sociological scholarship, but only more recently has the net begun to be cast more widely to take in the transnational dimensions of this problem. If we acknowledge that secularisation may be better understood on a canvas broader than that offered by national histories, then we might expect at least some of the forms of religion that emerge in response to secularisation to have a transnational character. My aim in this book is to offer an account of just such a form of religion, namely, the ‘Vedānta’ of the title. By paying close attention to the texts produced by Müller and Vivekananda on both religion generally and Vedānta more specifically, as well as the context in which these texts were produced, I provide a new interpretation of late nineteenth-century Vedānta as a transnational religious form at once determined by and resistant to secularisation. This book is a revised version of my thesis which was written with the support of a studentship from King’s College, Cambridge – an institution which also provided me with a sociable and stimulating collegiate environment during my doctoral studies. I received additional funding from the Spalding Trust to enable me to complete the thesis. I was able to spend a summer improving my German thanks to the Kurt Hahn Trust and the Cambridge European Trust. From the first time I stepped through his office door as a callow undergraduate, Julius Lipner has had a profound influence on my academic development. I can scarcely imagine that I would have started or finished this project without his encouragement and inspiration, not to mention his exceptional dedication, patience and attention to detail as a reader and critic of my writing at all stages of its development. My thesis examiners, Chris Bayly and , both made thoughtful comments pushing me to reconsider or reinforce my argument in ways I would not otherwise have perceived. Douglas Hedley read early drafts of two chapters and offered suggestions for further reading and constructive criticism without which this work as a whole would have been much the poorer. I received instruction in Bengali from Sima Chakrabarti and later from Julius Lipner, both of whom were patient with my faltering efforts to negotiate the vagaries of the inherent vowel. I am also thankful to Eivind Kahrs and Vincenzo Vergiani for their instruction in , but perhaps even more so for welcoming me into a friendly and supportive Indological community. I benefited greatly from Tim Jenkins’s reading group in the social sciences during my graduate studies and am particularly thankful to him for introducing me viii Religion for a Secular Age to an eclectic range of texts and ideas which I hope has kept me from narrowing my focus too far. I also learned much from the graduate seminar on Global Intellectual History led by Chris Bayly and Shruti . Discussing nineteenth-century and with Mishka Sinha, often late into the night, provided me with inspiration and camaraderie throughout my PhD. Stephen McDowall came to the rescue by thinking up and then mocking up the cover design. Thanks are due also to my commissioning editors at Ashgate, Sarah Lloyd and David Shervington, for supporting this project through to publication and to the anonymous readers for their helpful comments. All and any errors, deficiencies and omissions are mine and mine alone. Although scholarship can often seem a solitary pursuit, I would not have been able to come through the trials and tribulations it involves without the support, encouragement, and distraction of friends – in Cambridge, Edinburgh and beyond – my family and, above all, Fliss. Edinburgh, October 2015 Abbreviations

ALS Müller, F.M. (1899), Auld Lang Syne: My Indian Friends

AR ——— (1891), Anthropological Religion

BR1-10 Vivekananda, Swami (2008), Svāmī Bibekānander Bānī o Racanā (10 vols.)

CGW1 Müller, F.M. (1894), Chips from a German Workshop, vol. 1

CGW2 ——— (1895), Chips from a German Workshop, vol. 2

CPR Kant, I. (1881), , tr. F.M. Müller

CW1-8 Vivekananda, Swami (1991-92), The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (8 vols.)

DL Müller, F.M. (1905), Deutsche Liebe: aus den Papieren eines Fremdlings

DPL ——— (1873), ‘Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language’

GSR Gupta, M. (1980), The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, tr. Swami Nikhilananda

IWCTU Müller, F.M. (1883), India: what can it teach us?

LL1-2 Müller, G. (ed.) (1902), The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller (2 vols.)

MA Müller, F.M. (1901), My Autobiography: A Fragment

NR ——— (1889), Natural Religion x Religion for a Secular Age

OGR ——— (1878), Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religions of India

PR Müller, F.M. (1891), Physical Religion

RKM Gupta, M. (2009 (1897–1932)), Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇa-kathāmṛta

RLS Müller, F.M. (1974 (1898)), Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings

RM ——— (1896), ‘A Real Mahâtman’

SH ——— (1903), The Silesian Horseherd

SL1-2 ——— (1885), Lectures on the Science of Language: New Edition

SR ——— (1873), Introduction to the Science of Religion

SSIP ——— (1899), The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy

SVW1.1-3.2 Burke, M.L. (1985–87), Swami Vivekananda in the West (3 vols. in 6 parts)

TLV Müller, F.M. (1894), Three Lectures on the Vedānta Philosophy

TPR ——— (1893), Theosophy or Psychological Religion

Upanishads ——— (1879), The : Part I Conventions of Transliteration and Translation

Throughout this work I shall use established roman renderings of Bengali and Sanskrit names where those already exist (for example, Keshab Chandra Sen, Vivekananda, Shankara, Krishna), rather than using diacriticals. For the names of philosophical traditions and texts, abstract concepts, titles of works, and for names in South Asian languages where there is no existing conventional roman transliteration, I shall use diacriticals (for example, Vedānta Sūtras, Vedānta, Viśiṣṭādvaita). I have retained diacriticals in quotations, although antiquated forms have been updated according to modern conventions (for example, ‘â’ becomes ‘ā’). I have endeavoured wherever possible to give my own translations of those writings of Vivekananda’s originally in Bengali due to the presence of inaccuracies and omissions in their translation in the English Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. I have given important terms in the original Bengali in brackets, and for passages where my own translation deviates significantly or controversially from that of the Complete Works I have provided the Bengali in a footnote. In all cases I also give references to the relevant passages in both the Bengali Svāmī Bibekānander Bānī o Racanā and the Complete Works. Dates are often missing for Vivekananda’s letters and lectures, but can sometimes be found using Mary Louise Burke’s Swami Vivekananda in the West (SVW) or Rajagopal Chattopadhyaya, Swami Vivekananda in India, in which case I have given the relevant reference. This page intentionally left blank Introduction

Were I to publish any of the innumerable letters which I receive from unknown correspondents from every part of India, some written in English, others in Sanskrit, they would surprise many readers by showing how like the present political, philosophic, and religious atmosphere in the higher classes of Indian society is to our own. My Indian friends are interested in the same questions which interest us, and they often refer us to their own ancient philosophers who have discussed the same questions many centuries ago.1

This book is about the intriguingly similar responses to a crisis of religious meaning of two of the most important commentators on religion of the second half of the nineteenth century: the German-born scholar of Sanskrit and founding father of the comparative study of religion, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), and the Bengali Hindu moderniser and advocate for Hinduism in America and Europe, Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902). Convinced that religion would have to adapt to survive amid ceaseless intellectual transformations, both men looked back to the Indian philosophical tradition of Advaita Vedānta as the blueprint for a form of religion able to flourish in a secular age. Studies of the connections between nineteenth-century Indian and European religious thought typically take either a bird’s eye view of the subject or focus on the idea of ‘India’ in Europe or vice versa, so this project, in being a close-reading of the works of two prominent figures, represents a departure from the norm. Wilhelm Halbfass and Peter van der Veer, for instance, have produced two of the most important contributions to the ‘interactional’ history of India and Europe, drawing both Müller and Vivekananda among many others into expansive narratives of modernisation and religious and societal ferment.2 My intention in beginning this project was not to question the undoubted value of these wide-angle approaches, but rather to take heed of van der Veer’s prescription that modernity and secularisation must be understood as transnational phenomena and apply it within a work of intellectual history, an approach based upon the close, contextualised reading of texts rich in ideas.3

1 From Müller’s collection of reminiscences about his Indian friends published in 1899. ALS: 153. 2 Halbfass (1988); van der Veer (2001). 3 Skinner (1969). I am particularly indebted in adopting this approach to the seminars on Global Intellectual History run by Chris Bayly and Shruti Kapila at the University of Cambridge. 2 Religion for a Secular Age

The context for the religious thought of Vivekananda and Müller is never simply India or Europe and the USA; instead, I argue, we must regard these two thinkers as they regarded themselves and each other, namely, as participants in a cosmopolitan religious culture reaching far beyond the confines of their native or adopted lands. Müller noted in the epigraph above that ‘my Indian friends are interested in the same questions which interest us’. If we take many of Vivekananda’s statements at face value, it would seem that he took a quite different view, instead, regarding India and ‘the West’ as embodying fixed and opposed cultural essences: respectively, ‘spirituality’ and materialism.4 However, this only tells us part of the story, as Vivekananda would hardly have spent as much time and effort as he did cultivating American and British supporters if he believed that there was no possibility of mutual understanding. Vivekananda’s dichotomy of East and West was above all an attempt to restore pride on the basis that there was at least one field in which India remained superior to her conquerors, namely, religion or ‘spirituality’. Yet, the full realisation of this supremacy could only come once Hindus had assumed their responsibilities as the teachers of spirituality to humankind. Vivekananda acknowledged the important role which foreign friends of India and Vedānta, including Müller, had to play in this process as well as believing that through the British Empire he might better spread his ideas and thereby hasten India’s spiritual conquest of the world.5 The cosmopolitanism that brought Müller, Vivekananda and many other Indian and Western intellectuals into conversation was, as Peter van der Veer has shown, characterised by a preoccupation with religion and its place in the modern world.6 Speaking to an audience in London on the subject of ‘Reason and Religion’ in 1896, Vivekananda depicted the crisis he saw facing religion in the starkest of terms:

The foundations have been all undermined, and the modern man, whatever he may say in public, knows in the privacy of his heart that he can no more ‘believe’.7

A similarly grim outlook was depicted by Müller in his 1891 Gifford Lectures, Anthropological Religion, in which he declared ‘we live in a time of serious … honest atheism’, with a measure of sympathy for those who had ‘parted from their belief in the existence of a god’ after a ‘heart-breaking struggle’.8

4 Halbfass (1988): 237. With this dichotomy Vivekananda perpetuated an established trope of insider and outsider interpretations of Hindu India van der Veer (2001): 46. For example, see Sen (1901). 5 Vivekananda argued as much in an article entitled ‘On Dr. Paul Deussen’ in the Brahmavadin, 1896: ‘May they [Müller and the German Indologist Paul Deussen] be as bold in showing to us our defects, the later corruptions in our thought-systems in India, especially in their application to our social needs!’ CW4: 277. See Sen (1993): 324. 6 See van der Veer (2001), especially Chapters 1 and 3. 7 18 November 1896. CW1: 367; SVW2.2: 447, 478. 8 AR: 91. Introduction 3

The late nineteenth century has been a period of particular interest to scholars of ‘secularisation’, described by Owen Chadwick as ‘an age admitted by every historical observer to be central to any consideration of the theme’.9 However, the question of secularisation in Europe in this era has attracted such attention partly because it is so problematic and complex. In the first place, the epochal crisis for religion perceived by some contemporary observers is not borne out by statistical measures, which, for instance, show no steep decline in religious participation in Britain in this period; indeed, such a phenomenon is not observable until the 1960s.10 However, the situation that is being described by Müller and Vivekananda is not the outcome of a process of societal change leading to the loss of cultural and political influence of religious institutions and a fall in their membership or attendance, but rather a crisis of meaning in which religious belief has become untenable to ‘modern’ people. In the words of Chadwick, a much later Gifford lecturer, this was a ‘secularisation of minds’.11 The subjectivity of secularisation understood in this sense renders it necessarily resistant to measurement; instead, we must make do with qualitative assessments of the spirit of the age of the sort offered above by Müller and Vivekananda or, more subtly, for instance, by Charles Taylor’s idea of the transformation in ‘the context of understanding’ for religious belief or unbelief:

The shift to secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others ...... at least in certain milieux, it may be hard to sustain one’s faith. There will be people who feel bound to give it up, even though they mourn its loss. This has been a recognizable experience in our societies, at least since the mid-nineteenth century.12

The common ground between Müller, Vivekananda and Taylor here lies both in the sense that it has become difficult to maintain religious faith, but also in recognising the reluctance with which faith is often abandoned. While neither Müller nor Vivekananda used the term ‘secularisation’ to describe this situation – it was not commonly used with this sense until the middle of the twentieth century13 – they were clearly speaking to what we could now, following Taylor, regard as a secularised public. Both men assumed that religious belief was now hard to maintain and offered religion to their audiences in what they believed to be a more plausible form. Even in his lectures on language, Müller’s standing as a great Victorian public

9 Chadwick (1975): 18. 10 Brown (2001): Chapter 7. 11 Chadwick (1975). 12 Taylor (2007): 3. 13 Bremmer (2008). 4 Religion for a Secular Age intellectual was established on the basis of his reassurance to those unsettled by the findings of modern scholarship and this was still more true of his works on the ‘Science of Religion’.14 He occupied a position of secular religious authority among a global public which outweighed his faltering academic reputation, such that he received letters from unsettled believers and the unchurched around the world seeking his spiritual guidance.15 That there was a substantial audience for such reassurance can be ascertained from the popularity of Müller’s lectures and published works, but determining how far and in what sense the late nineteenth century can be characterised as ‘secularised’ is a problem beyond the scope of this work to resolve. While such questions are likely to remain contested, there can be no disputing that Müller and Vivekananda spoke and wrote of religion in the belief that they were living in a secular age, in Taylor’s sense of the term. If speaking of secularisation in Victorian Britain is problematic, then doing so with reference to late nineteenth-century India would seem to be even more so, not least because there is no equivalent of church attendance as a measure for assessing levels of religious belief and practice.16 However, there is some evidence at least of concern about a ‘secularisation of minds’, in the shape of religion losing its hold on those exposed to foreign learning. The story of Vivekananda’s conversion at the feet of Ramakrishna from rationalist scepticism to Kālī worship and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s (1838–94) eventual rejection of Positivist atheism do suggest continuities with the experiences of faith and doubt of British contemporaries.17 Vivekananda’s words above warning of the undermining of religion’s foundations were directed at a British audience, yet, as Vivekananda saw it, educated Hindus were confronted by similar problems, albeit intensified and complicated by the experience of subjection to colonial rule: ‘Scylla and Charybdis, rank materialism and its opposite arrant superstition, must be avoided.’18 In the same lecture he urged his co-religionists to reject both the contemptuous rubbishing of all ‘Hindu thought’ by those captivated by ‘Western wisdom’ and the foolish ‘degradation’ of ‘educated monomaniacs’ with their ‘puerile explanations’ of each and every superstitious belief or practice.19 Vivekananda thus articulated what has arguably been the defining problem for modern Hindu religious thought; how to remain Hindu while embracing the critical spirit of modernity.20 Vivekananda’s solution was to place Hindu religion at the centre of the struggle for national

14 Dowling (1982): 161. 15 See especially LL2 and SH. 16 van der Veer (2001): 14–15. 17 See Chapters 1 and 5; for Bankim see Kaviraj (1995). 18 ‘The work before us’, lecture delivered at the Triplicane Literary Society, Madras, probably in early 1897. CW3: 269. 19 See note above. CW3: 269. 20 Kaviraj (1995); Raychaudhuri (1995). Introduction 5 revival, but it would be a religion transformed; a ‘purified Hinduism’, cleansed of the ‘ugliness’ he attributed to the vestiges of a ‘stranded Buddhism’.21 At the vanguard of modernity’s challenge to religion, as Müller and Vivekananda conceived of it, were the sciences. Vivekananda’s solution was that Hinduism itself would have to be made ‘scientific’.22 This scientific religion would not be for India only, but for the whole world, as we can see from Vivekananda’s remarks regarding Müller’s apparent conversion to Vedānta:

I always thought that although Prof. Müller in all his writings on the Hindu religion adds in the last a derogatory remark, he must see the whole truth in the long run. As soon as you can, get a copy of his last book Vedantism; there you will find him swallowing the whole of it—reincarnation and all. ... I am glad now the old man has seen the truth, because that is the only way to have religion in the face of modern research and science.23

While Müller might not have put it quite like this, he was broadly in agreement with the assessment that only Vedānta, or a new form of religion very like it, could be reconciled with science.24 The word ‘Vedānta’ (veda:anta) means literally ‘the end of the Veda’ and refers to the latter portion of the Vedic corpus of śruti texts25 and to those later textual traditions which are interpretative of these śruti source texts of Vedānta.26 The śruti texts which form the basis for all subsequent intellectual traditions of Vedānta are the Upaniṣads; the most influential of which were composed between the middle of the first millennium BCE and the beginning of the Common Era.27 As the Upaniṣads were composed over centuries in different regions of northern India, and seem to draw upon a variety of sources which are no longer extant, they do not obviously constitute a single unified philosophical system. However, the synthesis of Upaniṣadic thought in the Vedāntasūtras or Brahmasūtras attributed to Bādarāyaṇa and composed in the first half of the first millennium CE provided later commentators with the material to construct interpretations consistent with their own metaphysical convictions. The most important of these later Vedāntins from our point of view (precisely because he was considered the authoritative

21 Letter to Mrs Bull, Calcutta, 5 May 1897. CW8: 505–6. 22 CW5: 104. See Chapter 3. 23 New York, 5 May 1895, CW8: 337. The book Vivekananda refers to must be Three Lectures on the Vedānta Philosophy, published in 1894. 24 See Chapter 3. 25 Texts which are believed to have existed eternally and have been ‘heard’ by ancient ṛshis or ‘seers’, as opposed to ‘smṛti’ texts which pass on the accumulated experience of tradition and which are thus acknowledged to be of human origin. 26 Cf. Nicholson (2010): 40–41. 27 Olivelle (1996): xxxvi–xxxvii. 6 Religion for a Secular Age commentator by Müller and Vivekananda) is Shankara (c. 700 CE),28 who was a leading exponent of Advaita (non-dualistic or monistic) Vedānta.29 The fundamental metaphysical position of Advaita Vedānta, as Müller and Vivekananda interpreted it, was quite straightforward. Müller used a single line attributed to Shankara to summarise it:

Our Vedāntist says: ‘In one half verse I shall tell you what has been told in thousands of volumes: – is true, the world is false, man’s is Brahman and nothing else.’30

The aim of this teaching among traditional exponents was not to encourage in its hearers a correct understanding of metaphysics for its own sake, but rather to enable those of sufficiently high birth and good character to realise their identity with Brahman and thereby be released from the cycle of rebirth and the suffering and delusion of mundane existence. It is worth noting here that, although Müller and Vivekananda were not unaware of the unsystematic nature of the Upaniṣads, and the differing metaphysical views of the various schools of Vedāntic exegesis, they usually used the term ‘Vedānta’ as if it represented a single cohesive philosophical position, hence their tendency to talk about ‘the Vedānta philosophy’. Shankara’s Advaita Vedānta was treated by both Vivekananda and Müller as apogee of the Hindu intellectual traditions and, accordingly, his interpretation of the Upaniṣads and Bādarāyaṇa’s Vedāntasūtras was generally held by them to be the most accurate and philosophically rigorous.31 This bias meant that unless Müller and Vivekananda were discussing the historical schools of Vedānta, not all of which were monistic, they usually used ‘Vedānta’ as synonymous with ‘Advaita Vedānta’ and tended to conflate the Upaniṣads, the Vedāntasūtras, and the commentaries upon those sūtras by later philosophers, especially Shankara and the philosophical tradition which followed him, into a single monistic system of philosophy. As such, throughout this work, unless indicated otherwise, the term ‘Vedānta’ should be read as referring to the modern interpretations of Advaita Vedānta put forward by Müller, Vivekananda and their contemporaries; ‘modern Vedānta’ will be used where further disambiguation is required and ‘traditional Advaita’ will be used to refer to the teachings of Shankara and other earlier Advaitins. This systematisation marks one respect among many in which these late nineteenth-century thinkers interpreted Vedānta according to their own lights and

28 King (1999): 42. 29 Recent scholarship has attempted to redress the disproportionate attention paid to Shankara at the expense of other Vedāntins: see, for instance, Nicholson (2010). 30 TLV: 171–2. Müller appears to be paraphrasing verse 20 of Vivekacuḍamani. Grimes (2004): 70. Vivekananda cites the same verse in his ‘Discourses on Jnana ’. CW8: 5. 31 ‘The Advaita Vedāntists...having nearly the whole range of the Upanishads in their favour, build their philosophy entirely upon them.’ CW1: 362. ‘Shankara ... is indeed the principal representative of the Vedānta philosophy in the literary history of India.’ TLV: 62. Introduction 7 arguably deviated significantly from earlier Vedānta traditions.32 I shall be more concerned with analysing the uses and meanings of Vedānta in this period, rather than measuring Müller and Vivekananda against traditional Advaita, but it is worth noting some of the differences which were central to the calibration of Vedānta as the religion best fitted to survive secularisation. Perhaps the most significant difference between these modern Vedāntas and traditional Advaita is in soteriology, since, while Shankara is ultimately concerned with liberation from the cycle of rebirth, neither Müller nor Vivekananda pay very much attention to this salvational aspect which tends to be displaced by a concentration on metaphysics and ethics.33 Another crucial distinction lies in the attitude to scripture in traditional Advaita as opposed to modern Vedānta: the method of traditional Advaita is fundamentally an exercise in the exegesis of the Upaniṣads, Vedāntasūtras and other canonical texts, whereas Vivekananda and Müller interpreted Vedānta as a philosophical and religious system founded upon spiritual experience or natural reasoning and were generally not convinced of the value of scriptural reasoning in any tradition.34 The terms ‘neo-Hinduism’ and ‘neo-Vedānta’ have sometimes been used with a pejorative sense to repudiate Vivekananda’s (and others’) departures from Vedāntic tradition,35 but there does not need to be any such implied criticism in the acknowledgement that modern Hindus and, indeed, modern Europeans, had very different priorities and intentions from those of an ancient Advaitin. Müller and Vivekananda engaged with Vedānta in order to respond to a set of nineteenth- century questions regarding the nature of religion, its compatibility with scientific knowledge and its moral and metaphysical significances:

My Vedānta Lectures are meant to show how some of the greatest problems which occupy us now, occupied the minds of the earliest philosophers who are known to us.36

The teachings of Vedānta I [i.e. Vivekananda] have told you about were never really experimented with before. Although Vedānta is the oldest philosophy in the world, it has always become mixed up with superstitions and everything else.37

32 Hacker (1995); Rambachan (1994). 33 Hacker (1995): 240. 34 Rambachan (1994). I owe this interpretation of traditional Vedānta as primarily exegetical to Hugo David’s seminars on Vedānta at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge in Michaelmas Term, 2009. See also Hacker (1995): 153 and Nicholson (2010): 40. 35 Hacker (1995): 231–3. Cf. Nicholson (2010): 187–8. When I (rarely) use the expression ‘neo-Vedānta’ as opposed to ‘traditional Vedānta’, there is obviously no such critical intent. 36 Letter from Müller to Sir Robert Collins, 16 May 1894, LL2: 315. 37 ‘Is the Future Religion?’ delivered in California, 1900, CW8: 141. 8 Religion for a Secular Age

Although Vivekananda is perhaps more perceptive here of his departures from tradition than Müller, they were united in their ambition to show how Vedānta could help to resolve contemporary problems despite its ancient origins. The question at stake for us is not then whether Müller was right in believing ancient Indian philosophers were wrestling with the same intellectual problems as he was, but what made Vedānta appear to him and Vivekananda as if it could speak so effectively to the late nineteenth-century situation. Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to analysing how Vedānta fitted in to the religious climate of the last decades of the nineteenth century. Although the ethical or philosophical dimensions of Vivekananda’s Vedānta have attracted scholarly interest,38 relatively little has been written which seeks to set his interpretation of Vedānta in context, and there has been no work of comparable quality to Hatcher’s study of the ‘Bourgeois Vedāntins’ of the middle of the nineteenth century,39 perhaps because his unsystematic and often inconsistent writings make Vivekananda a challenging figure to interpret.40 I have hardly been the first to notice that Müller and Vivekananda inhabited an era in which the ideas of religion held by liberal intellectuals in India, Europe and the USA drew upon concepts that had gone global. Müller is himself perhaps the figure who embodied this zeitgeist more than anyone, particularly with regard to India; as Killingley, among others, has observed, ‘[Müller] contributed more to Indian self-understanding than any other Western indologist.’41 A concrete example of this is discussed by Partha Chatterjee in his study of Vivekananda’s guru, Ramakrishna, and the urban middle classes of Calcutta where he analyses the ‘bilingual dialogue’ in the Kathāmṛta42 between ‘Indian philosophical discourse’ and ‘nineteenth-century European logic’. Drawing the reader’s attention to a section of the text entitled ‘Perception of the Infinite’, which in a footnote asks readers to ‘Compare discussion about the order of perception of the Infinite and of the Finite in Max Müller’s Hibbert lectures and Gifford lectures’, Chatterjee comments:

It is as though the wisdom of an ancient speculative tradition of the East, sustained for centuries not only in philosophical texts composed by the learned but through debates and disquisitions among preachers and mystics, is

38 For scholarly accounts see Halbfass (1995); Baumfield (1991); Rambachan (1994), but there have also been many works of a more apologetic nature, for instance, Mital (1979). 39 Hatcher (2008). 40 Hatcher (1999): 69–70. 41 Killingley (1995): 185. 42 A series of dialogues between Ramakrishna and various disciples and other contemporaries recorded by Ramakrishna’s householder disciple Mahendranath Gupta (1854–1932) published in Bengali as Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇa-kathāmṛta (RKM) (1902–32) and translated into English as The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Swami Nikhilananda (GSR). Introduction 9

being made available to minds shaped by the modes of European speculative philosophy. (The invocation of Max Müller is significant.)43

The reference to Müller is indeed significant, but not only because it serves to highlight the convergence of educated Bengali religious thought with its European counterpart: more specifically for our purposes, this passage also suggests that in the circles in which the young Vivekananda (known then as Narendra Nath Datta, or Naren/Narendra for short)44 developed intellectually – Naren was referred to by name during this very conversation and arrived late on during the discussion45 – Müller was a figure regarded as sympathetic and authoritative. There was no contemporary Indian figure who could rival Müller’s recognition and influence among a foreign public; a fact which is unsurprising given the relative prestige in general of European intellectuals vis-à-vis their Indian counterparts in this period. While this might lead us to postulate that the similarities between the religious thought of Vivekananda and Müller simply result from the former’s assimilation of the ideology of the latter,46 this hardly helps us to understand why it was that the ideas of Müller and other European thinkers were found so congenial by Bengali intellectuals in the first place. In responding critically to such diffusionist histories where Bengalis are viewed as passive mouthpieces for derivative ideas of Western origin we need not go to the extreme of claiming that Vivekananda’s religious thought was a ‘reversion to an ancient mode of religiosity’;47 we can instead question the rigid dichotomy such views imply existed between non-Western and Western world-views.48 We ought not blithely to presume that when Vivekananda engages with a form of thought which originates in ‘the West’ (for instance, Müller’s ‘Science of Religion’), his ethnicity dictates that something qualitatively different is happening from when Müller draws upon Kant’s critical philosophy.

43 Chatterjee (1993): 44. 44 This was Vivekananda’s name at birth, by which he was known until taking his religious name on the eve of his departure for the USA in 1893. 45 11 March 1885, RKM: 574–85; GSR: 724–36. See also RKM: 321 for a further reference to Müller’s lectures. 46 For example: ‘[Vivekananda’s] ideas of what religion was, as well as his beliefs concerning the characteristics of different religions and the relationship between different creeds, owed their basic presuppositions to the Science of Religion [of Müller].’ Brekke (2002): 21. 47 Raychaudhuri (2002): 220. Sarkar (1997) has levelled cutting criticism at scholarship which applies Edward Saïd’s interpretative trope of Western intellectual hegemony over Eastern subjects to the Bengali context. 48 Hatcher (1996) offers a persuasive model of ‘convergence’ within a ‘vernacular’ Bengali culture to account for the mingling of ‘Indian and European themes in Vidyāsāgar’s world-view’: 2. However, the fact that Vivekananda’s adulthood was spent largely outside of Bengal and his greater distance from traditional scholarship add a further layer of complexity. 10 Religion for a Secular Age

Vivekananda and his educated Bengali contemporaries were scions of a recognisably modern intellectual culture, which, while it had its own idiosyncratic interests and projects, had as much right to embrace modern forms of thought, such as the ‘Science of Religion’ or neo-Hegelianism, as ideas to think with and through creatively as did Victorian Britain. But we cannot limit a man like Vivekananda to the confines of a Bengali national history no matter how intellectually cosmopolitan and universal in its ambitions the intelligentsia of nineteenth-century Bengal may have been.49 This is partly because Vivekananda, perhaps more than any of his Indian contemporaries, saw himself, and was seen by many of his countrymen and foreign supporters, as a figure on the world stage. His famous speeches tothe Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893, his initiation of Western disciples into sannyas,50 his authorship of seminal texts in the history of ,51 all justify this image of the ‘cyclonic Hindu’52 sweeping through America and Britain leaving bemused Christian missionaries and enthusiastic sympathisers or even converts in his wake. We are concerned here, however, not so much with Vivekananda’s admittedly captivating overseas exploits as the ideas which made them possible. Wilhelm Halbfass has written of Vivekananda that ‘[h]e lives and practices the problematic and ambivalent position which Neo-Hinduism occupies between India and the West’.53 So problematic is his position that we often cannot tell which parts of his ‘Neo-Hinduism’ are Indian and which are ‘Western’. This is because Vivekananda’s religious thought was overwhelmingly directed towards a problem which he saw as universal: the survival of religion in the face of modernity. The Vedāntic religion intended to fulfil this end was situated in a cosmopolitan and secular public realm, reaching far beyond the concrete and particular religious forms of Bengali Hinduism. Too stark a distinction has sometimes been made between Vivekananda’s ideology as expressed in India and the West. Raychaudhuri, for instance, argues that Vivekananda preached Vedānta in the West but ‘was concerned almost exclusively with national regeneration at home’.54 Although Vivekananda sometimes contrasted the urgency of meeting practical needs at home with the spiritual crisis facing Europe and the USA, in both contexts a modernised Vedānta would provide the solution. Vedānta or ‘Vedāntism’ was the message of the majority of

49 See, for instance, Kopf (1979), Sartori (2009) and Hatcher (1996) for studies which are particularly attentive to this spirit of universalism and to Bengal’s place in global intellectual history. 50 A Hindu form of religious life requiring renunciation of the world. 51 De Michelis (2004). Cf. Singleton (2010): 3–6. 52 This is how Vivekananda was apparently described in an American newspaper, CW6: 283; CW8: 302. 53 Halbfass (1988): 228. 54 Raychaudhuri (2002): 9. Introduction 11

Vivekananda’s speeches on his homecoming tour of India in 1897. He explained to an audience in Madras that Vedāntic ideas would penetrate the consciousness of ‘the world’, at once a consequence and cause of internationalisation: ‘The second great idea which the world is waiting to receive from our Upanishads is the solidarity of this universe. The old lines of demarcation and differentiation are vanishing rapidly. Electricity and steam power are placing the different parts of the world in intercommunication with each other ....’ Yet these and the other Vedāntic boons now becoming available to ‘foreigners’ (‘physical, mental and spiritual freedom’ and ‘the explanation of morality’) were wanted ‘twenty times more’ by Indians.55 Of all modern Hindu thinkers, Vivekananda, alongside perhaps (1888–1975),56 is probably the one most famously associated with Vedānta. This is the ideology around which the organisations he founded (the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, plus various Vedānta Centres and Societies around the world) define themselves to this day,57 while Vedānta is also the focus of criticism from scholars who wish to distinguish clearly between Vivekananda as a rationalist ‘neo-Vedāntin’ and his guru, Ramakrishna (1836–86) as a Tantric Goddess worshipper.58 Vivekananda’s views were in fact more complex than these dichotomies suggest; a state of affairs we can only appreciate as we delve deeper into some of the ambiguities of his Vedānta. Müller, by contrast, has more commonly been associated with the emergence and popularisation of various disciplines in the humanities, so that while he has been the subject of several recent works of intellectual history, these are mainly concerned with his contributions to Vedic studies, philology, mythology and the study of religion59 and there has been almost no attempt to investigate the development of his conception of Vedānta aside from Bosch’s necessarily brief comments in his biography.60 This focus on Müller’s more academically influential early works is defensible, but if we want to understand his religious and philosophical thought we can hardly avoid dealing with Vedānta since it forms a crucial reference point or focus in so many of his later works.61 There is the further

55 ‘Vedānta in its application to Indian life’, delivered in early 1897. CW3: 240–41. 56 Parthasarathi and Chattopadhyaya (1989). 57 ‘The ideology of Ramakrishna Math and Mission consists of the eternal principles of Vedanta as lived and experienced by Sri Ramakrishna and expounded by Swami Vivekananda. This ideology has three characteristics: it is modern in the sense that the ancient principles of Vedanta have been expressed in the modern idiom; it is universal, that is, it is meant for the whole humanity; it is practical in the sense that its principles can be applied in day-to-day life to solve the problems of life.’ From the organisation’s webpage: http://belurmath.org/Ideology.htm. 58 See Chapter 5. 59 See, for instance, Rocher (1978); Neufeldt (1980); Masuzawa (2003); Masuzawa (2005); Strenski (1996); Dowling (1982); Girardot (2002). 60 Bosch (2002): 434, 437–8. 61 Cf. Masuzawa (2003). 12 Religion for a Secular Age problem, which I address in Chapter 3, as to how far we can regard Müller as ‘confessing’ Vedānta, or whether we should consider him merely as a committed liberal Christian who responded positively to traditions which he perceived as sharing common ground with his own. I want to propose here, perhaps quite provocatively, that Vivekananda was no more unambiguously a ‘Vedāntin’, if that implies it constituting the core of his faith, than was Müller. The ideas of religion analysed in the following chapters were largely matters of public discussion rather than private conscience. Vedānta was put forward as proof that religion could be compatible with secular conceptions of history and nature in front of audiences whose faith had been shaken by the apparent failure of orthodox Christianity or Hinduism to come to terms with the onward march of knowledge. Vivekananda and Müller shared the view that Vedānta could strengthen other religions by reorienting them to their essential teachings and both men seem to have simultaneously maintained forms of simple inner piety unrelated to Vedānta. Despite his rationalist doubts, Vivekananda nurtured a fervent yet private devotion to both Ramakrishna and God as mother that is revealed occasionally in letters to intimates. Müller, meanwhile, held on to the pietistic faith of his mother even as he delivered lectures which questioned central dogmas of orthodox Christianity.62 This distinction between inner piety and the outward expression of broadly rationalistic religious teachings is one respect in which I would claim that Müller’s and Vivekananda’s religious ideas, including Vedānta, were adaptations to secularisation in a different sense to that discussed above: that is, ‘secular’ in the sense of allocating faith its place in the private conscience away from the state or other public institutions, while restricting religion’s role in the public sphere to neutral spaces where ‘reasonable’ views can be aired and debated.63 Hence the natural habitat of modern Vedānta is the public lecture theatre at, for instance, the Royal Institution or the Harvard Graduate Philosophical Society.64 Van der Veer argues that the drive to separate state and religion in Britain and India in the nineteenth century failed to create secular societies in either case, but succeeded in pushing religion into ‘a newly emerging public sphere’.65 While public lectures on Vedānta in Britain and the USA were sufficiently abstract to be compatible with and even conducive to the privatisation of religious belief, Vivekananda’s lectures on Vedānta in India could be interpreted as attempts to carve out a ‘Vedāntist’ or Hindu political identity, insofar as they call for a national revival rooted in Hindu spirituality.66 Even here, though, we might perceive a further form of secularisation, referring now more to the character of religious

62 Chaudhuri (1974): 374–9. 63 van der Veer (2001): Chapter 1. 64 Vivekananda spoke at Harvard in 1896; Müller lectured on Vedānta before the Royal Institution in 1894. 65 van der Veer (2001): 24. 66 Sharma (2013). Introduction 13 forms rather than to the spaces they occupy. Vivekananda’s politicisation of Vedānta could be seen as unwittingly promoting secularisation, if religion becomes a mere handmaiden to this-worldly purposes of sectarian mobilisation.67 Attempts to redefine ‘the secularisation thesis’ have tended to reject Whiggish histories in which religion eventually gives way before the onward march of reason in favour of accounts which instead acknowledge transformations in the character of religion.68 The secular world is then no longer a world free, or void, of religion, but a world in which ‘the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable’,69 and in which myths, scriptures and hitherto sacred histories undergo often traumatic shifts in meaning under the sway of non- religious forms of knowledge.70 The ideas of religion and Vedānta propagated by Müller and Vivekananda were attuned to secular norms, insofar as they emphasised the ‘practical’ side of Vedānta and conceived of religion in terms of its moral fruits, and insofar as the disciplines of history and science became their yardstick of credibility.71 If we take secularisation in this last sense, it may begin to acquire more salience when applied to at least some extra-European contexts.72 In Vivekananda’s Bengal, Hindu reformers fulfilled their religious vocation by building hospitals and founding schools and the greatest Bengali novelist of the nineteenth century, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, transformed the mythic figure of Krishna from an amorous cowherd into a puritanical rationalist.73 The terms ‘secularisation’ and ‘secular’, when used to describe such shifts in the conditions of belief and, consequently, in the character of religious forms of thought, are probably the best options we have for describing the interconnected nineteenth-century world with which we are concerned here.74 This book, then, is a study of what happens to ‘religion’ when its proponents seek to wrest it away from specific cultural contexts, scriptures and institutions in order to ensure its survival. Vivekananda and Müller both conceptualised the predicament for religion in modern times through narratives of secularisation

67 Such a process has been observed in Islamist movements in present-day Pakistan by Iqtidar (2011). 68 For instance Chadwick (1975); Taylor (2007); Asad (2003); van der Veer (2001). 69 Taylor (2007): 19. Cf. Asad (2003): 61–2. 70 Asad (2003): 62–6; Chadwick (1975): 265. 71 Vivekananda may have at times resisted secularising Vedānta, as Halbfass (1988) suggests, but as I hope this work demonstrates, he can hardly be said to have succeeded. ‘Vivekananda wants to avoid compromising with Western secularism, but cannot avoid the following unresolved dilemma: India should prove its secular value as a nation using the standards of the West; but it should also preserve its spirituality and avoid the Western entanglement in samsāra. The secularization of the Vedāntic tradition is yearned for and yet again shunned’: 242. 72 van der Veer (2001): 15–16. 73 Kaviraj (1995): 81–91. 74 Asad (2003): 23–4; van der Veer (2001): 24. 14 Religion for a Secular Age and globalisation long before such terms were available, as they reached for the universal, essential core that could persist. And yet, at the same time, in Vedānta, they appealed to the authority of an ancient intellectual tradition to give deep roots to this enterprise. Chapter 1 analyses the development of Müller’s and Vivekananda’s religious and philosophical ideas as embedded in the intellectual history of, respectively, mid- to late-nineteenth-century Germany and England, and Bengal in the 1870s–1890s. I show that modernist interpretations of Vedānta, idealism and , liberal and progressive forms of religion, and uneasiness about the spread of materialism were strong presences in the ostensibly very different contexts in which they developed their religious thought. This chapter begins the task of explaining how it was that Vivekananda and Müller were able to develop similar accounts of Vedānta and religion which drew upon a common set of concepts and responded to broadly comparable problems. Chapter 2 explores how the Science of Religion, whether as a crypto-confessional academic discipline or an experimental Yogic religious science, united Müller and Vivekananda in the creation of an ideal of religion. This would be at once resistant to secularisation and shaped by its demands, purged of the inessential and mythological by the rigours of naturalism, historicism and empiricism. Chapter 3 turns to Vedānta and its reinvention in the late nineteenth century as the religion for ‘modern man’. I argue that Müller and Vivekananda embraced Vedānta as a rationalistic religious philosophy which, in its subordination of the natural world to the transcendent Brahman or Absolute, attempted to place religion beyond the reach of positivist critique. Chapter 4 continues this analysis of modern Vedānta by showing how both Müller and Vivekananda responded to the moral dimension of the nineteenth- century ‘crisis of faith’ by insisting that Vedānta could provide the soundest religious and metaphysical basis for ethics. I argue that an ethical turn in religion was common to educated Europeans, Americans and Indians in this period and that, therefore, the innovative transformation of Vedānta into a moral philosophy should be understood as taking place in a transnational context. Chapter 5 draws the work to a close with a study of the interactions between Müller and Vivekananda as they collaborated to present Ramakrishna to the English-speaking world as proof of the vitality of Vedāntic religion in modern India. This episode provides a vivid illustration of the crucial importance of transnational exchanges in the history of late nineteenth-century religion and of the transformations in its content wrought by such exchanges. Bibliography

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