Note: The following is an excerpt from the recently published book Vivekananda: The Philosopher of Freedom (How the Sangh Parivar’s Greatest Icon Is Its Archnemesis) by Govind Krishnan. V. Published by: Aleph Book Company.
Vivekananda wrote: The duty of the ordinary man is to obey the commands of his “God”, society; but the children of light never do so. This is an eternal law. One accommodates himself to surroundings and social opinion and gets all good things from society, the giver of all good to such. The other stands alone and draws society up towards him.’
Vivekananda goes on to make clear that he sees social liberty and spiritual liberty as two sides of the same coin. They were both expressions of the same principle of freedom, which for Vivekananda was the ultimate goal of human existence…
(Editor’s note: A quote present at this point in the original text has been omitted for ease of reading and continuity.)
Scriptures, Rituals, and the Gods
Vivekananda’s attitude towards the scriptures, holy men, and sacred sites of Hinduism was informed by the same principle of freedom discussed above. They were means to achieve spiritual realisation, not ends in themselves. He constantly reiterated that real religion was not to be found in books.
Vivekananda the Philosopher of Freedom by Govind Krishnan V. (Aleph Book Company, May 5, 2023)
Drawing upon the Vedantic tradition of Hinduism, Vivekananda emphasised that Hinduism did not recognise the authority of any books, not even the Vedas. The Vedas were guides which the Hindus believed contained spiritual laws discovered by ancient seers. They are guides to spiritual realisation, not a prescriptive set of rules for living. The fact that the Vedas say something is not a reason for that something to be considered true. Its truth has to be ascertained on its own merit.
“Vedanta does not believe in any of these teachings. First, it does not believe in a book – that is the difficulty to start with. It denies the authority of any book over any other book. It denies emphatically that any one book can contain all the truths about God, the soul, and the ultimate reality. Those of you who have read the Upanishads remember that they say again and again, ‘Not by the reading of books can we realise the Self,’ he told a San Francisco audience around the same time he wrote to Mary Hale, in a lecture titled ‘Is Vedanta the future religion?'”
According to Vivekananda, Hinduism teaches that scriptures are not sources of normative authority. Vivekananda looked upon the sacred scriptures as texts to be treated critically, not sacrosanct objects which should be worshipped blindly. This allowed him to treat scriptures as historical objects and negotiate their contents using reason. The way he described the Vedas to an American audience was typical of his attitude. “These Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, are a vast mass of accumulation – some of them crude – until you come to where religion is taught, only the spiritual.” (That is, the Upanishads).
He would freely criticise the scriptures where he felt they did not agree with reason, or when he found they advocated socially unjust practices. In a letter to Singaravelu Mudaliar, a disciple, he criticised the Vyasa sutras, which are traditionally considered to be Vyasa’s commentary on the Vedas, as exclusionary: “Read the Gita and the Sutras of Vyasa, or get someone to read them to you. In the Gita, the way is laid open to all men and women, to all caste and colour, but Vyasa tries to put meanings upon the Vedas to cheat the poor Shudras. Is God a nervous fool like you that the flow of His river of mercy would be dammed up by a piece of meat? If such be He, His value is not a pie!”
He also mocked the religious orthodoxy’s puritanism. He would quote the scriptures against the conservative pretensions of the traditionalists. Referring to the Vaishnavites who prohibited taking meat and alcohol on religious grounds, he said: “Instances are found in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata of the drinking of wine and the taking of meat by Rama and Krishna, whom they worship as God. Sita Devi vows meat, rice, and a thousand jars of wine to the river-goddess, Ganga.”
Vivekananda rued that the upper-caste Hindu society of his day was completely indifferent to the oppressive and deprived conditions in which the lower classes and castes lived. He was irked by the attitude among contemporary Hindus that morality consisted of following the injunctions of the scriptures, and which countenanced apathy towards the sufferings of the poor and the marginalised. Such tradition-bound religiosity struck Vivekananda as nothing but selfishness and hypocrisy cloaked in the garment of religion. During a talk with his disciple Sharat Chandra Chakravarty in 1899 on the importance of doing humanitarian work, Vivekananda told him bluntly, “Throw aside your scriptures in the Ganga and teach the people first the means of procuring their food and clothing, and then you will find time to read to them the scriptures.”
An inward-looking religiosity which focused too much on rituals and ceremonies showed, according to Vivekananda, not only an absence of real spirituality but given the social conditions that prevailed in India, a lack of basic human empathy. Spending extravagant amounts of money on religious activities when India was not free of poverty and people suffered from want of basic needs seemed to Vivekananda nothing less than blasphemy against humanity and God. Following in the footsteps of his Advaitic predecessor Shankaracharya, Vivekananda eschewed rituals and ceremonials as useless in the pursuit of religion. He saw ritualism as a bane of Hinduism and as representative of a superstitious, intellectually regressive mindset.
He wrote home from America in a letter to his brother-disciples (the disciples of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa): “Those into whose heads nothing but that sort of silliness [ritualism] enters are called imbecile. Those whose heads have a tendency to be troubled day and night over such questions as whether the bell should ring on the right or on the left, whether the sandal-paste mark should be put on the head or anywhere else, whether the light should be waved twice or four times – simply deserve the name of wretches, and it is owing to that sort of notion that we are the outcasts of Fortune, kicked and spurned at, while the people of the West are masters of the whole world…. There is an ocean of difference between idleness and renunciation.
If you want any good to come, just throw your ceremonials overboard and worship the Living God, the Man – god – every being that wears a human form – God in His universal as well as individual aspect. The universal aspect of God means this world, and worshipping it means serving it – this indeed is work, not indulging in ceremonials. Neither is it work to cogitate as to whether the rice-plate should be placed in front of the God for ten minutes or for half an hour –that is called lunacy. Millions of rupees have been spent only that the temple doors at Varanasi or Vrindaban may play at opening and shutting all day long! Now the Lord is having His toilet, now He is taking His meals, now He is busy on something else we know not what. …And all this, while the Living God is dying for want of food, for want of education!”
On India’s decline
Vivekananda’s constant concern about the upper classes’ apathy towards the masses was not an isolated matter. It was an essential theme in an array of factors he understood to be involved in the degeneration of India. The Sangh promotes the idea that the fall of Indian civilisation began with foreign invasions by Muslims and continued through the ‘foreign rule’ of the Mughals and the British.
Representational image.
Vivekananda had a completely different view on why India declined from its position as a leading civilisation of the ancient world. According to him, foreign invasions were only external causes. The real cause for India’s fall was internal and lay within herself.
Vivekananda’s efforts for India’s national regeneration had two aspects. One was to instill confidence, self-worth, and pride in a people who had lost all these under British colonialism. The other was to sharply criticise and oppose the attitudes and tendencies which led Indians to their fall from civilisational greatness to social and cultural degradation and economic destitution. People who portray Vivekananda as an uncritical or dogmatic glorifier of India and Indian values exaggerate the former aspect while completely ignoring the latter. Vivekananda saw India as potentially great, with an ancient past whose philosophical and spiritual achievements were unparalleled and could be an inspiration for the future. But he also saw with stark clarity the mistakes of the past as well as the present, and he had no compunctions in laying the blame squarely at the feet of Indians and Indian civilisation.
Also read: Hindutva and the Question of Who Owns India
During a lecture on the Vedanta philosophy delivered in Lahore in 1897 on his return from the West, Vivekananda contrasted the condition of the American lower classes with those of India. While in America, he had seen the self-confidence that economic and social opportunity gave the poor, in India, they were sunk in a state of debasement.
“Aye, in this country of ours, the very birthplace of the Vedanta, our masses have been hypnotised for ages into that state. To touch them is pollution, to sit with them is pollution! Hopeless they are born, hopeless they must remain! And the result is that they have been sinking, sinking, sinking, and have come to the last stage to which a human being can come. For what country is there in the world where man has to sleep with the cattle, and for this, blame nobody else, do not commit the mistake of the ignorant. The effect is here, and the cause is here, too. We are to blame. Stand up, be bold, and take the blame on your own shoulders. Do not go about throwing mud at others, for all the faults you suffer from you are the sole and only cause.”
Some months earlier, Vivekananda wrote to Sarala Ghosal (later Devi Chaudhurani), editor of the Bengali magazine Bharati, and Rabindranath Tagore’s niece, from Darjeeling… (Edited) Vivekananda’s pen alighted on what he considered a historical flaw in the national character, and which was as much an impediment to progress as the lack of material goods and resources. “We have brains, but no hands. We have the doctrine of Vedanta, but we have not the power to reduce it into practice. In our books, there is the doctrine of universal equality, but in work, we make great distinctions. It was in India that unselfish and disinterested work of the most exalted type was preached, but in practice, we are awfully cruel, awfully heartless – unable to think of anything besides our own mass-of-flesh bodies.”
Govind Krishnan V is a long-form journalist based in Bangalore. He won the 2014 Red Ink Award for Human Rights reporting. He is a published poet and is deeply interested in Western philosophy.