Vivekananda’s Ramakrisna: an Untold Story of Mythmaking and Propaganda
The author argues that the familiar Vedantin and messiah image of Rāmakrsna Paramahamsa was created deliberately by his great disciple Svāmā Vivekananda. The Svāmī’s global Hindu evangelical mission called for the master’s respectable image. Hence he rejected the sincere rendering of the Paramahamsa’s biographies by others and, in place of the rustic ecstatic but authentic Gadadhar, fabricated the awesome figure of a modern messiah-the Vedantin Paramahamsa. This paper documents the history of this purposive distortion.
Ramakrisna Paramahamsa: A Psychological Profile (1991)
In the entire corpus of Ramakrsna research, carried out mostly by his disciples, devotes, and admirers, only a handful have attempted to analyze his divine reputation. Yet none has examined the Ramakrsna phenomenon fully. This is the first comprehensive psychoanalysis of Ramakrsna’s sexuality in general and his androgyny in particular, as well as a critical examination of his sermons samadhis. Instead of the popular paramahamsa there now emerges the less attractive but more authentic profile of an utterly selfish, capricious but highly intelligent spiritual master who elicited awed submission from everybody by his unpredictable and frenzied behaviour. The author asserts that Ramakrsna’s spiritual odyssey is better explained as his desperate but successful effort to deal with his emotional and sexual crisis, rather than as the universally acknowledged outcome of a divine teleology. Attempting to distinguish the historical Ramakrsna from the godhead of hagiography, this study offers a challenging debate on mystic phenomenon.
Swami Vivekananda: A Reassessment (1997)
All the existing biographies of Swami Vivekananda(Narendra Nath) affirm the larger-than-life stature of a princely, handsome, erudite, and eloquent young man who conquered the Christian West spiritually. This work is the first critical analysis of the Vivekananda myth.
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