ABSTRACT
The idea of individual Hindu modernity had been born from the Vedanta; collective Hindu modernity was fed by Protestant Brahmoism and had acquired intellectual and emotional poignancy in Bankim. Sri Ramakrishna’s realisations were wide-ranging. Narendranath Datta came from a highly educated upper-middle-class Hindu family. Vivekananda’s influence on Hindu modernity and late nineteenth-century Hindu nationalism lies not only in what he said and wrote but more so in what he was, namely a world-renouncer. Shamita Basu has devoted a sociological study to Vivekananda’s Hinduism as a nationalist religious ideology. In her view Vivekananda ‘wanted to advocate a form of Hinduism that was a far cry from the parochial version of the religion which the orthodox Hindu leaders wanted to popularize’. In 1894 Bankim had died and Arabindo – who in the meantime had studied Bankim’s novels and philosophical writings – wished to preserve in public memory Bankim’s accomplishments in Bengali literature.
