• DOI:10.1080/13688790600657835
• Corpus ID: 144046925

Sri Ramakrishna, the Kathamrita and the Calcutta middle classes: an old problematic revisited

@article{Sen2006SriRT,
  title={Sri Ramakrishna, the Kathamrita and the Calcutta middle classes: an old problematic revisited},
  author={Amiya P. Sen},
  journal={Postcolonial Studies},
  year={2006},
  volume={9},
  pages={165 - 177}
}

• Amiya P. Sen
• Published 1 June 2006
• Sociology
• Postcolonial Studies

In a well-known essay of 1976, Walter G Neevel alerted us to certain ‘transformations’ in the Bengali mystic, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836 /1886). The three transformations that Neevel speaks of were effected, if one reads him correctly, not so much on account of Ramakrishna himself as despite him. The first*/the transformation of the ‘madman’ of the early years to the benign, saintly figure of the later years*/appears to have been brought about more by shifting public gaze than some personal spiritual progression. Here Neevel implicitly also urges us to believe that the ‘widespread and enduring influence’ that the saint left behind on the religious life of India was greatly contingent on this transformation. It is a sane and much sanitized Ramakrishna that ‘renews’ and ‘authenticates’, as it were, the Hindu religious tradition. As would appear from more recent writings, this is also the Ramakrishna that the gathering middle-class discourse of late nineteenthcentury Calcutta was happy to accept and appropriate. The second and third transformations, likewise, are seen to reflect not historically verifiable ideas or events in the life of the saint, but myth-making and misrepresentation, often performed by his most intimate followers and disciples. In one case, as Neevel alleges, the saint is dubiously depicted as an advaitin of the Sankarite school, that is, as one who accepts the idea that the world is an illusion. In the other, his social and spiritual discourse is taken to be wholly consistent with the altruistic and activist social gospel later propagated by Swami Vivekananda (1863 /1902) and the Ramakrishna Mission*/again quite unjustifiably. Reading Neevel’s essay a second time, some thirty years after I first read it, it occurs to me that its arguments, though extremely persuasive, overlook certain problems. I was a trifle disappointed to find that Neevel does not situate the ascriptions of Ramakrishna as an advaitin or vedantin amidst the larger problem of why and how Advaita Vedanta, especially since the days of Rammohun Roy (1772 /1833), has come to be seen as quintessential Indian philosophy by the Western-educated intelligentsia. It is also my feeling that Vivekananda’s claim to have derived the social service gospel under direct inspiration from Ramakrishna rests very substantially on the liminal quality of the Master’s message. Ramakrishna’s ‘mandate’ to Vivekananda that he consume his life in doing ‘good’ to the world is ambiguous enough to permit