Ruth Harris, an American author and historian, has expressed a deep fascination with India’s role in global spirituality. In a recent interview with the Times of India, Ruth opened up about her curiosity and how she embarked on a journey to explore India’s crucial yet hidden impact on spirituality around the world. She delved into India’s rich cultural heritage, ancient wisdom, and spiritual practices, uncovering how they’ve influenced modern-day spiritual practices. Ruth’s research provides a fresh perspective on India’s impact on global spirituality and highlights the importance of understanding India’s enduring legacy.
Ruth Harris, an Oxford University scholar, recently spoke to Sunday Times about her latest work exploring the impact of Indian religion and spirituality on contemporary global thought. Harris questions why figures like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, who have had such a significant influence on spiritual thinking, are not read widely by students worldwide in the same way as Marx, Mill, and Freud.
Harris christened Vivekananda as “Guru to the World” because of his bold decision to teach Indian religion to the West through the World Parliament of Religions. Through his teaching, Vivekananda challenged and tempted people from diverse backgrounds from Swadeshi “terrorists” to respectable New Englanders. Harris argues that Vivekananda contributed most by making both westerners and Indians think outside the confines of their culture and upbringing.
In India, Vivekananda’s great innovation was the idea of practical Vedanta. With this idea, he hoped that his compatriots would throw off the subservience imposed on them by British rule. Through his transformed vision of karma yoga, Vivekananda inspired both sanyasis and householders to new forms of service. He believed that such transcendence was necessary both for personal liberation and in cultivating the militant spirit required to fight colonialism.
Harris’s interest in Vivekananda and Indian religion stems from her previous work on Lourdes, the world’s largest healing shrine of contemporary Christendom, and her observation of the similarities between Bernadette Soubirous and Ramakrishna’s sadhanas. Harris was also fascinated by the fact that so many westerners turned to “eastern spirituality” and yoga. Harris questioned why so many brilliant South Asian students had mastered Marx, Mill, and Freud, while figures like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda remain unknown.
Vivekananda’s “Raja Yoga” was his most crucial contribution because it employed the concepts of William James, the great American intellectual, using his psychological and scientific language in discussing consciousness and selfhood. With this work, Vivekananda offered a sophisticated, but uncomplicated manual for achieving “self-realisation” and “God consciousness” following Ramakrishna’s dictum that a good guru must tailor his teaching to different audiences and speak in their language.
According to Harris, women were just as vital to Vivekananda’s propagation of universal Hinduism as men. Harris called Vivekananda’s relationship to Margaret Noble a “clinch” because her spiritual apprenticeship to him was painful and transformational. For years, she was unable to relinquish the “personal” love she had for him, yet she confessed that this passionate attachment had become the entrée into her understanding of the universal love he preached. Margaret Noble also extended and remade Vivekananda’s ideas during the first nationalist upsurge of Swadeshi. She laid the groundwork for Vedanta’s relationship with other western fields, such as science, art history, and even sociology.
Harris’s work highlights the hidden impact of Indian religion and spirituality on global contemporary thought. Finally, she hopes that her scholarship can help bring figures like Ramakrishna and Vivekananda into greater public recognition.
