Book Reviews

Numen 62 (2015) 143–148

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Book Reviews

Ferdinando Sardella Modern Hindu Personalism: The History, Life, and Thought of Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 342 pp. isbn 9780199865901 (pbk.)

Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī (Bimala Prasad Datta; 1874–1937) was the founder of the Gaudiya Matha, a Hindu movement promoting Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism. He was the guru of the famous A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swami (1896–1977) who travelled to New York in 1965 to missionize the teaching of Caitanya and the worship of Kṛṣṇa to the English speaking world, and founded iskcon, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or the Hare Krishna movement. This desire of A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swami to propagate bhakti to Kṛṣṇa outside of India to persons of non-Hindu background and give Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism a global pres- ence came from Bhaktisiddhānta, and many of the features associated with Bhaktivedānta and iskcon, such as the offering of the brāhmaṇa initiation on the basis of qualifications rather than birth and the Vaiṣṇava saṃnyāsa insti- tution, were also invented by Bhaktisiddhānta (and Bhaktisiddhānta’s father, Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda). The momentum created by Bhaktisiddhānta got lost soon after he died in 1937 because of organizational disputes and dis- ruptions. The story could have ended at that point with the movement slowly disappearing. It was A.C. Bhaktivedānta Swami who, almost thirty years after the death of Bhaktisiddhānta, gave the movement a new boost and made it into one of the most successful Hindu missionary movements targeting persons from non-Hindu background. This study of Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī by Ferdinando Sardella is a revised Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Gothenburg. The book is divided into five chapters and five appendixes. The author seems to share many of the views and evaluations of Bhaktisiddhānta, such as his views on bhakti and prema, the value of the Purāṇas, his critique of Śaṅkara and Advaita Vedānta, and the understanding of the divine, i.e., Kṛṣṇa or Bhagavān, translated as “Personality of Godhead” as the universal supreme personality. Bhaktisiddhānta’s main doctrine was that there is “a nonmaterial level of reality that possesses personal form and attributes” (p. 199), which is the ultimate aspect of brahman, and that all contradictions of experience are resolved “in the complete svarūpa, or nonmaterial form of Brahman — that is, Krishna” (p. 201). Devotional service

(practical engagement and not contemplation) to Kṛṣṇa should be the founda- tion of all religious activity. A large part of the mosaic of Hindu traditions is dominated by bhakti, and the author argues that this part has been overshad- owed in scholarship by monistic Hindu philosophies. With respect to current academic scholarship on Hinduism, the assertion does not seem to be correct. However, in Religious Studies among non-specialists on Hinduism, Śaṅkara’s monistic interpretation of the Upaniṣads has perhaps mistakenly sometimes been identified with Hinduism as such. In Chapter 1, “Rise of Nondualism in Bengal,” Sardella gives a description of the religious culture of Bengal in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the situation of the bhadralok. The author tries to explain why theistic Vaiṣṇava traditions, especially the worship of Kṛṣṇa, were not appreci- ated by the bhadralok, the paṇḍits, the Christian missionaries, and others. It was Advaita Vedānta that was seen as “the most genuine and essential face of Indian religion,” and “no one contributed more than Swami Vivekānanda” to this, according to Sardella (p. 46). This caused a dichotomy of “so-called non- dualistic, progressive, universal, and egalitarian, modern Hinduism and so- called iconic, regressive, conservative, and hierarchical traditional Hinduism” (p. 52). This dichotomy has, according to Sardella, “tended to cloud the fact that precolonial forms of image worship also possess a modern history of transfor- mation, as in the case of Vaishnavism” (p. 52). Chapter 2, “Life and Works,” details the life history of Bhaktivinoda and Bhaktisiddhānta, their religious practices, and the institutional development of the Gaudiya Matha. Bhaktisiddhānta was kāyastha, and he was attacked (as was Vivekānanda who was also kāyastha) for lacking the correct qualifications by not being a brāhmaṇa. Bhaktisiddhānta perhaps tried to solve this prob- lem by suggesting that the status of brāhmaṇa within the varṇāśrama system should be determined not by birth, but in accordance with personal qualifications. This was the start of a life-long conflict with the brāhmaṇas “over the social status, spiritual capacities, and priestly rights of the non-brāhmaṇic castes” (p. 85). Bhaktisiddhānta later started to give brāhmaṇic initiation to persons from lower castes. Sardella argues that Bhaktisiddhānta’s purpose was not social reform, but to strengthen the Vaiṣṇava community. Another purpose was perhaps to re-establish the varṇa system. He considered a hierarchical social order to be both sacred and natural. Equally innovative was the way Bhaktisiddhānta took saṃnyāsa: by sitting down in front of the picture of his guru and changing into the saffron dress of the saṃnyāsin (same color of dress as Vivekānanda). According to Sardella, in Bengal, saffron was “mostly identified with the colours of the non-dualistic Śaṅkara line” (p. 90). The author documents how Bhaktisiddhānta used preaching and the printing press, as

Numen 62 (2015) 143–148