<i>Passages through India: Indian Gurus, Western Disciples, and the Politics of Indophilia, 1890–1940</i> by Somak Biswas

Historical interest in globally recognized Indian “gurus,” such as Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), waxes and wanes with historical and political fashions. At times, such figures have been recognized as liberal, progressive exemplars of a composite Indian religiosity and purveyors of irenic political practices. At other times, these same figures have been branded as narrowly nationalist, racist, casteist, and guilty of various crimes against women. In recent years, scholars have approached these individuals from other angles, including global and transnational historical frameworks. Biswas’ book is the latest study in the global and transnational historical approach to these figures, their impacts on their times, and their imprints on later generations.Biswas centers “Western disciples” in his account of the 1890–1940 period, with a focus on Anglophone “Indophiles” who were obsessed with these Indian men. In doing so, Biswas neither celebrates nor condemns these followers but rather examines what he terms “deep discipleship” through a study of “intimacies cultivated between major Indian guru-figures (Gandhi, Vivekananda, Tagore) and some of their Western disciples through ashrams and letters” (4).In five substantive chapters, Biswas offers extended historical studies of a spectrum of “deep disciples,” such as male Christian missionaries, like Charles Freer Andrews and William Pearson, alongside female followers of Gandhi like Madeline Slade (Mira Behn) and Margaret Noble (Sister Nivedita), the famous disciple of Vivekananda. Others, like the Jewish journalist and writer Henry Polak and the Jewish philanthropist and Gandhian Hermann Kallenbach, receive significant attention as well. Biswas’ overarching argument suggests that “all of them were attracted to some form of immanent spirituality that inhered in the figures of Vivekananda, Gandhi, and Tagore” (25).Attentive to affect, emotion, and the unique guru-disciple relationship that grew around such figures, Biswas divides his book into three parts. Part I features one chapter about letters and the epistolary realm of discourse between disciples and their gurus. Part II includes a chapter about ashrams such as Tolstoy Farm and Phoenix Settlement in South Africa and Sabarmati, Sevagram, and Santiniketan in India. Biswas claims that the ashram became “a major mode for Indophile disciples to invest in an idealised India” (103). The following chapter examines how rallying around the end of indentured labor became an important site of deep discipleship for Western Indophiles. Part III consists of two detailed chapters about Vivekananda. One chapter pursues a systematic study of female disciples, such as Josephine MacLeod, Noble, and Sara Bull. The other chapter focuses on how politics of Hindu identity grew in the Western world because of Vivekananda’s networks among Indophiles from the 1890s through 1910.The focus on a motley cast of white Indophiles, or “affirmative Orientalists” in Fox’s terms, offers an understanding of this period outside of familiar histories of Vivekananda, Gandhi, or Tagore.1 Andrews is well known for his relationship with Gandhi, but a deep disciple like the American Bull, who willed a big part of her fortune to causes promoted by Vivekananda, is rarely studied alongside Andrews, Pearson, and many others together in one book. In this regard, Biswas follows in the path of Harris, who examines Vivekananda in multiple contexts, including significant sections on how he was perceived in “the West” as well as the implications of his global brand after his return to India near the end of his life.2The author’s intended departure from “methodological nationalism” leaves the audience of such a study questionable, the connective tissue linking the chapters into a coherent entity remaining unclear as the author swerves from thematic studies of letters and ashrams to two lengthy chapters on Vivekananda.The book’s most salient contribution lies in chapter 3, the study of the abolition of indentured labor, which brings together a range of historical actors. This chapter offers a textured history of an important phase in the history of India, the history of empire, and the history of labor. It sits awkwardly before two detailed chapters that feature Vivekananda and center exclusively, as the book promises, on Indophiles and discipleship, probing how Vedanta developed in the global discourse of Hinduism at the turn of the twentieth century. These two Vivekananda-themed chapters lead the author to conclude that “Western Indophile investments around Vedanta revolved around producing a Hindu India that was moral, high cultured and representative of its stature” (246).It is not clear how this revelation advances our understandings of Vedanta; the author does not intervene in any of the debates about the content of Vivekananda’s ideas. Biswas rather only analyzes the reaction to, and appropriation of, some of his speeches and writings, as well as the mobilization of his brand by Americans like MacLeod and Bull to mount speaking tours and lecture series about religion and spirituality. In this regard, Biswas misses the opportunity to enter debates about the content of Vivekananda’s contribution to the history of Hinduism and the history of Hindu nationalism. Important interventions include work by Sharma as well as Medhananda’s opposing positions on Vivekananda’s relationship to Hindu nationalism.3Biswas sticks to analyzing figures like Vivekananda and their followers primarily for the purpose of viewing “forms of India and Hinduism for both universalist and nationalist consumption” (156). Such a purpose helps build a strong sense of how Vivekananda’s followers viewed him but leaves out the important question of sorting out his own politics, his own conceptions of religion across a range of experiences, and his larger impact on religion, philosophy, and nationalism. A study of Vivekananda in such a context must include his relationship to Ramakrishna as well as the many important relations between mystical, non-rational approaches to religion and formal social movements in the name of religion.Reflections on letters, ashrams, and Vivekananda’s powers over Indophilic white women are potentially interesting but remain only hazily located in the history of religion, the history of nationalism, the history of gender, or any other such clearly defined historical subfield. It is certainly true that Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken possession of my body” and that Bull’s bequests to Nivedita and others caused great controversy in early-twentieth-century New York, as conveyed in the opening anecdote in the book’s epilogue (34). But how important were these incidents and aspects of deep discipleship to a broader history beyond the lives of these Indophiles? Biswas mentions that the networks of these deep disciples in the 1890–1940 period “were instrumental in producing new forms of Indophilia, such as the growth of transnational Hinduism around the Indian Emergency in 1979 and after” (263). Stating this tantalizing speculation on the penultimate page of a 256-page book only teases the reader to wonder about this important potential continuity; it may explain today’s content and form of transnational Hindu nationalism.The book claims the period of focus as 1890 to 1940, but the 1930s are hardly dealt with. The periodization and the precise goals of the work produce questions for the specialist, but the richly detailed portrayals of letters, ashrams, and white female adoration for Vivekananda gives much to think about for future studies of gurus and their shishyas.