Ruth Harris (1) (1958–)

Gwyneth Paltrow would have us believe she discovered yoga, but really, it’s been around in the West since the 1890s, popularised by the pudgy monk Vivekananda and his bevy of fawning followers. That said, it isn’t easy to place Vivekananda. The world’s most famous celibate, Mahatma Gandhi, cited his influence, but so did the priapic writer Henry Miller. Today, India’s Hindu nationalist ruler fashions himself as Vivekananda redivivus – Ruth Harris’ title sends up Narendra Modi’s own self-description as guru to the world – whereas his left-liberal critics remember him as a radical. Each of these appropriations is misguided. Vivekananda was the kind of chap that Modi’s cow-protecting acolytes would want to lynch. ‘Give me beef’, he is reported to have said in Chicago at the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893. No liberal, let alone leftist, he was a Hindu supremacist who wanted to save his faith from the clutches of Christianity.

He was also a man of his time, and Harris does a superb job of returning him to the 19th century. A historian of the Dreyfus affair, she’s on firm ground in the world of fin de-siècle ferment. This was still a time when science and séances, religion and rationality could peacefully coexist.

Born Narendranath Datta in 1863, Vivekananda grew up in a family of unreconstructed Brahmos who moved in Calcutta’s reformist circles, scorning idolatry and untouchability. Still, they gave him a Calvinist education, all damnation and hellfire, that he found inauthentic. Aged 18, a chance encounter with an ascetic, Ramakrishna, changed his life. Ramakrishna’s homespun philosophy, welding the easy enchantment of esotericism with an anti-intellectual habit of mind, spoke to Vivekananda, helping him see through the desultory attractions of capitalist life.

Ramakrishna liked to shock the Hindus with degrading acts unbefitting a Brahmin such as touching excrement with his tongue and urinating from a banyan tree. If this sounds puerile, it was intentionally so. He fetishised the innocence of childhood, living naked and resisting adult sexuality. The point was to lose oneself in worship, to find empowerment in submission.

Vivekananda was struck by Ramakrishna’s devotion to Kali, the exuberant goddess despised by Brahmos, commonly depicted with a lolling tongue and a garland of skulls. On the rebound from the formless, abstract God of Brahmoism, Kali must have made a refreshing change. For the first time, he felt he could take pride in the Indian philosophical tradition. Ramakrishna preached the gospel of Vedanta, stressing the underlying unity of all being. Man and God are one. Dualisms – mind and body; good and evil; man and woman – are illusory. There were days when he woke up as a pious Muslim, or a mad child. There were times when he apparently bled like a woman on her period.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Pratinav Anil’s Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77 is forthcoming from Hurst.… (more)

Review first posted on BookLikes: http://brokentune.booklikes.com/post/837292/the-man-on-devil-s-island

"The campaign for Dreyfus's final exoneration gathered pace in 1903 because it became linked to a partisan and bitter crusade against religious congregations, and not because there was a groundswell of support for his case. And even this campaign succeeded only because the Cour de cassation, the high court, used an obscure prerogative to take the case away from the system of military justice, which did not admit its error. The end of the Affair produced no clear conclusion and no real justice, merely a political truce."

The Dreyfus Affair is a fascinating and complicated subject, and this book does the story justice by approaching the events leading up to Dreyfus' conviction, imprisonment, and final release from a lot of different angles.

It's not the most entertaining read - and some parts are quite dry and academic - but it is quite a satisfying read - because Harris does not leave many stones unturned and as a result I have gained a much better understanding of fin de siecle France.… (more)

Ms. Harris tells the story of the wonderous events in the small town of Lourdes, and relates them to the history of France in the second half of the 19th Century. Her approach is to tell the story of the events through the lives of the people involved. To do so she quotes from letters and diaries as well as official records. In order to write in such depth, she must have read everything ever written during this period about Lourdes. Between the Notes and the Bibliography at the end of the book is a three page Dramatis Personae listing all the major people associated with the shrine. Not just for Catholics, the book devotes many pages to the role of women in 19th Century France and will be of great interest to anyone wanting to know about women's rights in France. It is also a "must read" for people interested in French social history. She also looks into the relationship of anti-Semitism to the Catholic piety of the time. People are never presented two-dimensionally to represent the ideals or concepts they championed. Ms. Harris treats the people she writes about with respect and intelligence. As for Bernadette's vision and the miracles, she tells what is known (and she knows a lot!) and the reactions they caused without taking a stand one way or the other herself. Truly a great work of historical writing.… (more)