ABSTRACT
THE BRITISH INDIAN ASSOCIATION T he intellectual confusion in which the educated Indians found themselves in the ’seventies and the ’eighties of the last century has already been men tioned. It was because of this that a section of them at that time had swung completely round to a more orthodox position as regards their religious beliefs. Dayanand and Ramakrishna had discovered that the Western-educated intellectuals were more eager to hear them even than the masses who were tradi tionally accustomed to look up to saints and monks for advice. Men devoted entirely to meditation, who have lived and died in sanctity, have always existed in India. Their spiritual achievements have remained an object of admiration to the ordinary Hindu, but they have hardly been able to alter the course of events, nor have they attempted to do so. But with Dayanand and Vivekananda we are faced with an entirely new situation. They were expressing pro found judgments on national events in a public manner. Men of affairs, highly educated in the Western ways, were seeking their counsels and guidance in their reaction against the impact of the West.
