1. If it seems at several times in my paper that Indianness and Hinduness are being conflated, this is because they usually functioned as a single term for Vivekananda, Nivedita, and other Hindu revivalists of this period. At the present time, the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party continually inscribes national geography as sacred geography. For an astute and historically rigorous critique of Hindutva’s production of an ancient, singular and recognizable Hinduism, see Romila Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity,” Modern Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (1989): 209–31. I do not, of course, wish to assert the sameness of Vivekananda’s Hindu revivalism and the anti-Muslim bigotry of today’s Hindu fundamentalists. Vivekananda’s address was not so much to a South Asian Islam as it was to a “west”; in this he was markedly unlike figures such as the nineteenth-century Bengali novelist Bankim, who frequently invoked the Muslim as the enemy. And while his speeches and writings do contain some conventionally anti-Muslim material (when he speaks of Islam or of Muslims at all), they also, sometimes simultaneously, conceive of Muslim Indians as contributing something worthwhile (physical strength, for one thing) to an imagined community. I am therefore in partial agreement with the assertion of Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, and Sambuddha Sen that the swami is not as easily appropriable for contemporary Hindu fundamentalism as the proponents of Hindutva would like to believe, though I also believe that he inaugurates the terms of a discourse that has persisted (with transformations) into the present day. It does seem to me that their claim that the swami would never (unlike contemporary religious rightists) have defended retrograde practices in the name of Hindu nationalism is altogether too generous. See Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1993), 6–8.

2. “M’s” (Mahendranath Gupta’s) Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita, published in several volumes at the turn of the century, is a highly unusual diary of one disciple’s encounters with his guru and with other disciples over the last four years (1882–1886) of Ramakrishna’s life. In this text, which is written in Bengali, Ramakrishna is referred to as thakur, which is both a common way of designating a Brahman as well as a word meaning god; “M,” who was a schoolteacher, is called “master” in this work. In the English translation of 1942 by Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1973 [1942]), “the Master” is the standard appellation for Ramakrishna; this usage may have been popularized by Vivekananda.

3. Partha Chatterjee, “A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class,” Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 65.

4. Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 219.

5. Quoted in ibid., 231. For further details, see Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna: The Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda, 2 vols. (Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1978 [1952]).

6. There were many references to the Paramhansa in Keshab’s journal, the New Dispensation, and in the late 1870s Keshab published Paramhanser Ukti, a ten-page Bengali booklet of Ramakrishna’s sayings.

7. Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (London: Methuen, 1965), 141.

8. Quoted in ibid., 124.

9. Cited in Brian K. Smith, “How Not to Be a Hindu: The Case of the Ramakrishna Mission,” in Religion and Law in Independent India, ed. Robert P. Baird (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 343–44.

10. Sumit Sarkar, “The Kathamrita as Text: Towards an Understanding of Ramakrishna Paramhamsa,” Occasional Paper 22 (New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 1985), 21 and passim. Also, see Sumit Sarkar, “‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti’: Ramakrishna and His Times,” Economic and Political Weekly, 18 July 1992, 1543–66. Ramakrishna’s disciples claimed that he had gone through his “Muslim” and “Christian” phases before he met Keshab; please note that all the dates in Ramakrishna’s life are culled from accounts by devotees and admirers.

11. The term heterosexuality is here used catachrestically, since Ramakrishna seems to be obviously outside the formations within which we would situate “modern” Indian subjects, including Vivekananda. The very terms homosexuality/heterosexuality (and, indeed, transsexuality, which may also be said to resonate for Ramakrishna) are too western and modern to be completely adequate to the task of analysis. I use them very provisionally, in the absence of another vocabulary and epistemology that might enable me to understand premodern, Indian/Hindu conceptualizations of sexuality. In this context, I am reminded of Diana Fuss’s generous and sensitive reading of Fanon’s claim (in Black Skin, White Masks) that there is no (male) homosexuality in the Antilles (“Interior Colonies,” 33):

Fanon’s insistence that there is no homosexuality in the Antilles may convey a more trenchant meaning than the one he in fact intended: if by ‘homosexuality’ one understands the culturally specific social formations of same-sex desire as they are articulated in the West, then they are indeed foreign to the Antilles.…Can one generalize from the particular forms sexuality takes under Western capitalism to sexuality as such? What kinds of colonizations do such discursive translations perform on ‘other’ traditions of sexual differences?

12. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 60–61.

13. S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 50–71.

14. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity”, 45. Sumit Sarkar claims, moreover, that the period of Ramakrishna’s popularity coincided with a “kind of hiatus in bhadralok history,” when dreams of social reform had been frustrated, official racism was marked, and liberation through the overthrow of British rule not really conceivable (“‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti,’” 1547).

15. It is interesting to note that the disciples of Ramakrishna, notably Vivekananda, preferred the term kamkanchan, “lust-and-gold,” over the Master’s kaminikanchan and went to great lengths to explain that the sage’s “symbolic” use of the term did not imply any misogyny.

16. Nikhilananda, Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, 701. All subsequent references will be incorporated parenthetically into the text.

17. This insight derives in a general way from Carole-Anne Tyler’s reading of the ambivalent politics of gay drag (“Boys Will Be Girls: The Politics of Gay Drag,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss [New York: Routledge, 1990]) as well from Kaja Silverman’s account of the mastery permitted by T. E. Lawrence’s reflexive masochism (“White Skin, Brown Masks”). In The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), 103, Sudhir Kakar characterizes Hindu transvestism thus: “Rituals such as these represent not only the boy’s attempt to identify with his mother but also the man’s effort to free himself from her domination. By trying to be like women—wearing their clothes, acquiring their organs, giving birth—these men are also saying that they do not need women (mothers) any longer.” For a sympathetic psychoanalytic reading of Ramakrishna’s assumption of femininity, see Kakar, “Ramakrishna and the Mystical Experience,” in The Analyst and the Mystic: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Religion and Mysticism (New Delhi: Viking, 1991), 1–40.

18. Cited in S. Sarkar, “Kathamrita as Text,” 9.

19. D. S. Sarma, Studies in the Renaissance of Hinduism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Benares: Benares Hindu University, 1944), 237.

20. I am grateful to Gayatri Spivak for pointing out to me the numerous, and discontinuous, ways in which the English term woman translates into Bengali (and/or Sanskrit). Even so, it is interesting to note how often other forms of femininity threaten for Ramakrishna to collapse into the figure of the kamini. Hence his warning to one of his young male disciples to beware of women who claim to be actuated by maternal feelings towards him.

21. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 113.

22. I put this term in quotation marks to indicate that is placed under erasure. One cannot assume that transvestism was inflected in the same way for a nineteenth-century (straight?) Hindu male as it might be for, say, a contemporary straight North American male. One has to concede that his masculinity might have been constituted differently, and in a different relationship to femininity, than might be the case for our hypothetical North American male.

23. I am thinking here of N. T. Rama Rao’s assumption of feminine attire, makeup, and jewelry, on one-half of his body in the days of his chief ministership of Andhra Pradesh, apparently in a bid to consolidate his political/spiritual power. Philip Spratt also provides detailed anthropological evidence of religious transvestic ceremonies all over India (Hindu Culture and Personality [Bombay: Manaktalas, 1966]). See, too, Kathryn Hansen’s splendid essay, “Making Women Visible: Female Impersonators and Actresses on the Parsi Stage and in Silent Cinema” (unpublished manuscript).

24. Ashis Nandy, At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38.

25. Wendy Doniger, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 319.

26. Ibid., 331.

27. Women could, on occasion, function as gurus; the Bhairavi Brahmani, for instance, was Ramakrishna’s first guru. Other historical and contemporary figures like Andal, Mahadeviakka, Mirabai, and Anandamoyi Ma come to mind as well. Sharada Devi (Ramakrishna’s wife) herself had several (female and male) disciples. I do not think, however, that this militates against my understanding of the guru-disciple relationship as functioning for the most part for and among males nor against my reading of its gendered significance in early nationalism.

28. I am obliged to Sandhya Shetty for pointing this out to me. The gurudakshina (the gift to the guru) is situated outside (economic) exchange and functions in a symbolic capacity only. The instance of Drona the archer and his low-caste disciple Eklavya, who had to sacrifice his thumb to ensure the superiority of the guru’s favorite pupil Arjuna, only demonstrates that in the guru-shishya configuration what is offered by the disciple is incommensurable with what is given by the guru.

29. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, Compiled from Various Authentic Sources (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964), 296.

30. Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, ed. Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 13.

31. There is no “secular,” critical biography of Ramakrishna except that by Max Mueller, Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899). While this inveighs against the miraculizing tendencies of Ramakrishna’s disciples, not excepting Vivekananda, and refuses to take Ramakrishna’s avatarhood seriously, it is nonetheless entirely reverential about the man himself.

32. Life of Sri Ramakrishna, 117.

33. Ibid., 144–45.

34. Ibid., 294.

35. Swami Chetanananda, ed. Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis, Mo.: Vedanta Society of St. Louis, 1990), 110.

36. Sumit Sarkar notes: “Girish Ghosh confessed that seeing Ramakrishna ‘playing’ with a young disciple made him recall a ‘terrible canard’ that he had once heard about the saint” (“Kathamrita as Text,” 103).

37. Sister Nivedita [Margaret E. Noble], The Master as I Saw Him (Calcutta: Udbodhan Office, 1910), 64.

38. Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples, 204.

39. This is not, of course, to assert that the conflicts were unique to Naren; as we have seen, in terms of class position and intellectual training he appears to have been no different from the majority of the disciples. The others, however, appear to have been less outspoken in their skepticism than he was. I hardly need add that the memory and the narrative of these conflicts is overdetermined; if Naren had not become Vivekananda, we would probably have heard far less of his interactions with his guru. As it is, in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna his iconoclasticism is not as evident as that of, say, Bankim or Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar (neither of whom was a disciple). Nonetheless, he does seem to have been the unequivocal favorite of Ramakrishna. And it also seems clear that he was accorded a degree of freedom of speech and behavior not permitted most of the other disciples. (Girish Ghosh, who was notorious for his drinking, patronage of prostitutes, and occasional foul-mouthed invectives against the guru, was one of the very few others who was granted such a license.)

40. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.” Sumit Sarkar emphasizes the saint’s determined pursuit of bhadralok disciples as well as his reticence about religious practices (of the Baul, Kartabhaja, and vamachari Tantric varieties) that might have offended their sensibilities (“The Kathamrita as Text,” 36).

41. Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him, 385–90.

42. My thanks to Inderpal Grewal for suggesting this possibility to me.

43. Hervey De Witt Griswold, Insights into Modern Hinduism (New York: Henry Holt, 1934), 58.

44. Nationalism’s dependence on colonialism has been extensively documented, to some degree by Nandy, Intimate Enemy, but most notably by Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought. Certainly nationalism-and-colonialism seems to function as one category for Vivekananda.

45. Not all Brahmos were as skeptical as Shibnath Shastri, who, much though he admired Ramakrishna, believed that the saint’s austerities at the beginning of his spiritual career had had deleterious effects on his mental state; Keshab for one seems to have been less incredulous of the spiritual nature of the saint’s trances. Sumit Sarkar points out, interestingly, that while Ramakrishna’s family and neighbors in Kamarpukur and Dakshineshwar attributed the trances to madness or “possession,” his bhadralok disciples and admirers described them as the samadhi state extolled by high Hindu doctrine.

46. Ramakrishna himself made conflicting assertions about his own avatarhood; at points he dismissed the possibility derisively, while at other times he claimed to be an avatar of Krishna, Chaitanya, and/or Kali.

47. Swami Nikhilananda, Vivekananda: A Biography (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1953), 42.

48. It is not possible to establish whether any of the swami’s supporters were simply admirers or actually disciples. It is not inconceivable that they may have become disciples retroactively, following Vivekananda’s success in the west.

49. Sankari Prasad Basu and Sunil Bihari Ghosh, eds., Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers 1893–1902 (Calcutta: Dineshchandra Basu Bhattacharya, 1969), 9.

50. It should be noted that the swami’s Indian reputation was—to some degree, at least—induced by himself, as a defensive measure no doubt against the criticisms he encountered not only from Christian ministers in the United States but also from members of the Brahmo Samaj and perhaps the Theosophical Society as well. His early letters to his disciples in Madras were full of exhortations to them to hold a meeting in his honor and to proclaim him to the west as a true spokesperson of Hinduism. He was also careful to keep them informed about favorable reviews in the U.S. press.

51. Rakhal Chandra Nath, The New Hindu Movement 1886–1911 (Calcutta: Minerva, 1982), 126.

52. Ibid., 129.

53. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.”

54. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 115.

55. Vivekananda was rarely consistent in this view; this was typical of him. At times he deployed the rhetoric of free trade to imply mutual and equal advantage to east and west; at other times he insisted that Indians were superior to the west in their indifference to material things and that in fact the west called out for spiritual conquest by an “aggressive Hinduism.” In this vacillation Vivekananda was not untypical of the bourgeois neo-Hindu nationalists of his time.

56. He also enjoined his brother monks in India not to insist on the acceptance of Ramakrishna’s avatarhood in would-be devotees and disciples of the new order.

57. Harold W. French, The Swan’s Wide Waters: Ramakrishna and Western Culture (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1974), 58.

58. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 230.

59. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity.”

60. Nath, New Hindu Movement, 114.

61. Ibid., 17. Note that Bankim’s novel was undoubtedly the product of a distinctly westward-looking nationalism. Nath describes Aurobindo’s “Bhawani Mandir” as derived from Anandmath (and remarkably similar to Vivekananda’s own cult of the warlike monk) in its emphasis on manliness and in its devotion to Kali.

62. Chatterjee, “Religion of Urban Domesticity,” 61.

63. Vivekananda, Vivekananda: The Yogas and Other Works, 151.

64. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s cult of physical fitness and martial arts training has a great deal in common with Vivekananda’s endorsement of “beef, biceps, and Bhagavad-Gita.”

65. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, by His Eastern and Western Admirers (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964 [1961]), 347.

66. At this point in Indian history, bourgeois and Hindu nationalisms—the first represented by “moderates” in the Congress Party calling for secular and constitutional reforms, the latter by Tilak, Bankim, and others—have assumed the status of two distinct categories, though quite often they function as one. I bear in mind also Sudipta Kaviraj’s important caveat against the conflation of distinct nationalisms (his own concern is with “early” and “mature” nationalisms), which must be seen as disjunct rather than articulated phenomena in Indian history; see Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991).

67. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 27.

68. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 231.

69. Ibid., 388 (emphases in the original).

70. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 252. The speaker in this instance was a woman, Constance Towne.

71. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda in America: New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1958), 16.

72. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 14.

73. Swami Vivekananda and His Guru (London and Madras: Christian Literature Society for India, 1897), iv.

74. There is, to the uninstructed viewer, little if anything of the disarrangement of limbs or clothing that normally marked the sage’s experience of samadhi.

75. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 1987), 264.

76. Nivedita functions here as a type of the western female disciple.

77. Mary Ann Doane, “Dark Continents: Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema,” in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 244.

78. Marie Louise Burke, Swami Vivekananda: His Second Visit to the West; New Discoveries (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1973).

79. Kakar, Inner World, 160.

80. See, for instance, Romila Thapar: “[The ascetic] is celibate and yet, at the same time, the most virile of men. The ascetic’s demonstration of sexual prowess is not a contradiction in terms: it is in fact a demonstration of his complete control over body functions, since ideally the emission of semen is prohibited to him” (“Renunciation: The Making of a Counter-Culture?” in Ancient Indian Social History: Some Interpretations [Delhi: n.p., 1978], 94). Also see Joseph Alter: “The whole purpose of brahmacharya [celibacy] is to build up a resilient store of semen so that the body—in a holistic, psychosomatic sense—radiates an aura of vitality and strength” (“Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 [1994]: 51).

81. Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 277–87.

82. Ibid., 286.

83. Swami Vivekananda, “The Future of India,” in Lectures from Colombo to Almora (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1956), 267.

84. Reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, 196. Sister Christine (Christine Greenstidel) goes on to remark on the companionship of Sadananda and Vivekananda on their North Indian pilgrimage: “Both were artistic, both were poets by nature, both were attractive in appearance. Artists raved about them.”

Nivedita also confesses, though far more discreetly, that she was drawn to the swami by his “personality” rather his philosophy, which she initially found unoriginal. Her “biography” of him, The Master as I Saw Him, is remarkable for its reticence about his corporeality.

85. That such a construction of femininity was not necessarily exclusive to Hindu reformers/revivalists is borne out by Faisal Fatehali Devji: “[Muslim] reformist literature replaces the aggressive sexual woman with the pathetic or suffering woman-as-mother” (“Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim India, 1857–1900,” South Asia, 14, no. 1 [1991], 151).

86. Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 237.

87. Sister Nivedita, The Web of Indian Life (London: William Heinemann, 1904), 32–45.

88. See, among others, Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments; and Madhu Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” Economic and Political Weekly, 5 October 1985, 1691–1702.

89. Monier Monier-Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974 [1883]), 184–85. Also see David R. Kinsley, “Kali: Blood and Death Out of Place,” in Devi: Goddesses of India, ed. John S. Hawley and Donna M. Wulff (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1996); and Ajit Mookerjee, Kali: The Feminine Force (New York: Destiny Books, 1988).

90. Sumanta Banerjee, “Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 158.

91. Ramakrishna was married at the age of twenty-three to Sharadamoni Debi, a child-bride of five. According to custom, she remained in her natal home, while Ramakrishna continued his spiritual disciplines at Dakshineshwar, forgetful of her existence. At eighteen she sought him out at Dakshineshwar and acceded to his request that their marriage remain unconsummated. Over the remaining decade and a half of Ramakrishna’s life, she spent extended periods at Dakshineshwar, doing his housekeeping and cooking and (usually) living in a separate building in the temple complex.

92. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 65.

93. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Routledge, 1987), 244.

94. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 83.

95. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 242.

96. Swami Vivekananda, Letters of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1964), 167–68.

97. Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922) was a notable scholar and a Hindu widow who converted to Christianity during a visit to England and dedicated her life to the uplift of young Hindu widows. Her book, The High-Caste Hindu Woman (London: George Bell and Sons, 1888), as well as her travels in England and the United States, gained her sympathy from feminists as well as Christian missionaries abroad and censure from Hindu conservatives at home. Her shelter for widows, the Sharda Sadan in Pune, was supported in large part by funds raised by Ramabai Circles in the United States and England. Her travels in the United States in the 1880s received extensive coverage in the U.S. press.

98. Basu and Ghosh, Vivekananda in Indian Newspapers, 421–68.

99. This is necessarily a simplification of Vivekananda’s very complicated responses to the issues of (gender and other) reform, nationalism, and colonialism. The split was not simply between “home” (where reform had to endorsed) and abroad (where Hinduism had to be defended); even at “home” he had decidedly mixed responses to reform and (religious and social) orthodoxy.

100. The phrase is Nivedita’s (The Master as I Saw Him, 124). In an interesting departure from the hagiographical tradition in which accounts of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda are produced (and in which tradition Nivedita’s own work uneasily belongs), she emphasizes not the continuity of their respective “gospels” but their distinctness from each other. She does this, besides, in a fashion that highlights the swami’s struggles and doubts: “Sri Ramakrishna had been, as the Swami himself said once of him, ‘like a flower,’ living apart in the garden of a temple, simple, half-naked, orthodox, the ideal of the old time in India, suddenly burst into bloom, in a world that had thought to dismiss its very memory. It was at one the greatness and the tragedy of my own Master’s life that he was not of this type. His was the modern mind in its completeness.…His hope could not pass by unheeded,…the hope of men of the nineteenth century” (The Master as I Saw Him, 124–25).

101. Chatterjee, “Nationalist Resolution,” 237–38.

102. She was not, however, recognizably a nineteenth-century British feminist—at least from the evidence of her early writings—even though much has been made in the biographies of her feminism and other “excesses.” Apparently Vivekananda himself made fun of her putative feminism.

103. Quoted in Barbara Foxe, Long Journey Home: A Biography of Margaret Noble (Nivedita) (London: Rider, 1975), 32–33.

104. Quoted in Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 121.

105. Sharada Devi seems to have been a figure who was not unequivocally reverenced by the followers of Ramakrishna. Many devotees visited her at Jayrambati and Kamarpukur, and she initiated several people into discipleship. She was sometimes spoken of as an avatar—like her husband—and the heiress to his spiritual kingdom. But she was also often accused of being excessively worldly. Ramakrishna’s most prominent disciples visited her only rarely; Swami Nikhilananda says that this was because they hesitated to “[make] a display of their spiritual fervour.” See his Holy Mother: Being the Life of Sri Sarada Devi, Wife of Sri Ramakrishna and Helpmate in His Mission (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). Spivak speaks of the way in which her official biographer, Swami Gambhirananda, staged her as “a counter-echo to what he perceived as the strong voice of the Western Narcissus” (“Asked to Talk about Myself…,” Third Text 19 [Summer 1992]: 17). I would argue that this could only happen retrospectively, and at a later moment from the one that Vivekananda inhabits.

106. See, for instance, Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), esp. chaps. 8 and 9; Ghulam Murshid, Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernization, 1849–1905 (Rajshashi, Bangladesh: Sahitya Samsad, 1983); and Kumar, History of Doing, esp. chaps. 2 and 3.

107. The Indian woman was, obviously, recast in the nationalist moment—as was the Indian man; but recast and fixed, with little room for negotiation after the recasting had been effected. For an analysis of a nationalist woman’s struggles with gendered identities in nationalism, see chapter 5.

108. Romain Rolland, The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel, trans. E. F. Malcolm-Smith (Mayavati, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1947), 152, n. 2.

109. Nivedita, The Master as I Saw Him, 136–37.

110. Quoted in Pravrajika Atmaprana, Sister Nivedita of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda (Calcutta: Sister Nivedita Girls’ School, 1961), 30.

111. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 128.

112. Rakhal Nath maintains that the Ramakrishna Mission was the only non-political body to come out of the “New Hindu” or Hindu revivalist movement (Nath, New Hindu Movement).

113. Foxe, Long Journey Home, 136.

114. Ibid., 150–51.

115. Barbara N. Ramusack, “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 130.

116. S. B. Mookherjee, “Nivedita and Indian Womanhood,” in Nivedita Commemoration Volume, ed. Amiya Kumar Majumdar (Calcutta: Dhiraj Basu, 1968), 244.

117. She met Gandhi briefly in Calcutta, in the early years of the century. Gandhi (who in so many ways would grow to resemble the figure of Ramakrishna) admired her Hindu partisanship but was unable to agree with her on nationalist politics. The Congress Party under Gandhi had a profoundly uneasy relationship with militant nationalist women like Nivedita and the Rani of Jhansi.

118. Lizelle Reymond’s The Dedicated: A Biography of Nivedita (New York: John Day, 1953) also helped disseminate this image, though its factual claims have since been contested. Kumari Jayawardena’s chapter on Nivedita (“Irish Rebellion and ‘Muscular Hinduism,’” in White Woman’s Other Burden) describes the contradictory ways in which the disciple of Vivekananda is remembered.

119. My thanks to Carole-Anne Tyler for sensitizing me to this possibility.

120. Foxe’s biography, Long Journey Home, is particularly derisive in this regard. What had been admirable “manliness” in Vivekananda was forwardness in the female disciple.

121. Ibid., 205.