Abstract

The Bengali Swami Vivekananda is probably best known for his years of travels and lecturing as an Indian missionary to the United States and Europe, beginning with his address in 1893 to the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He also founded, in 1897 in Calcutta, the Ramakrishna Mission, a Vedantic religious society named after his guru, an illiterate village priest who, his followers believed, had had ecstatic divine visions. Vivekananda's interests and life reflected important currents in the development of modern India: religious reform and revival, anticolonial nationalism, and the intellectual and...