Vivekananda

Narendranath Datta arrived in the United States in 1893 with the intention of speaking at the World's Parliament of Religions, no delegate credentials, no organisation behind him, and not enough money. He very nearly failed to be admitted, and got in on the strength of a letter from a Harvard professor who had met him.

His opening address, delivered in September, began by addressing the audience as sisters and brothers of America, and the reception is one of the well documented moments in the history of religion in the West. He spoke on Hinduism as a tradition that had taught tolerance and universal acceptance, quoted verses about all paths leading to the same goal, and criticised sectarianism directly to an assembly convened to celebrate religious diversity.

What followed was three years of lecturing across the United States and Britain, the founding of Vedanta societies, and the publication of four books that shaped the modern presentation of Hindu practice more than any other: Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Jnana Yoga and Raja Yoga. The four yogas scheme, in which paths of action, devotion, knowledge and psychological discipline are alternative routes suited to different temperaments, is largely his organisation of the material, and it is now so widespread that it is often mistaken for an ancient classification.

When Vivekananda returned to India he was received as a national figure, and in 1897 he founded the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. The Math is a monastic order in a recognisable Indian form. The Mission is not: it is a body of monks and lay workers committed to famine relief, hospitals, schools and disaster work, which was not what Hindu renunciants had traditionally done.

The justification is theological rather than philanthropic. If the divine is genuinely present in every person, then serving the poor is not a good deed performed alongside worship but an act of worship in itself, and he coined a formulation, service to God in the poor, to say so. Renunciation, on that account, does not release a monk from the world; it releases him for it. The order he founded is now one of the largest institutional providers of relief and education in India.

He was also a nationalist, and his rhetoric about strength, self respect and the spiritual vocation of India was taken up by the independence movement and has been claimed since by movements with very different politics, a use he is not in a position to consent to or refuse. He died in 1902 at thirty nine, having predicted that he would not see forty, and having done more than anyone else to give modern Hinduism a public vocabulary in which to describe itself.