ABSTRACT
‘Up, India, and conquer the world with your spirituality!’ Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), perhaps Hinduism’s most famous modern monk, issued this challenge to his fellow Indians and provided a personal example of spiritual conquest when he became a major sensation at Chicago’s 1893 Parliament of World Religions (see Image 10.1). In his public lectures before the Parliament, Vivekananda not only defended Hinduism against its Evangelical Christian critics, he just as importantly won over an American audience craving spiritual truths from ‘the East.’ Building on his success, Vivekananda went on to establish the Vedanta Society, the first Hindu religious organization to spread across the western world. Through his personal charisma and the institutional support of the new society, Vivekananda helped ensure that his particular interpretation of Vedantic Hinduism would become dominant well into the twentieth century and beyond (Jackson 1994). Notwithstanding Vivekananda’s unique accomplishments, he was by no means the only modern Hindu monk to yoke his status to the task of sanctioning a particular vision of Hinduism. As this chapter will demonstrate, modern Hinduism has been promoted and represented by a number of celibate ascetics, world-renouncing monks, and saffron-robed sadhus.
