Vivekananda's Imagining India

Vivekananda’s thoughts and ideas can be unveiled through a vivid study of his writings. His literature deals mainly with social, religious and political reformations. His very objective understanding of any social panorama makes him a true social critic unknowingly. He was not a politician in the very common sense of the term. Yet, he was one the most intellectual nationalists of his time.

The thesis has no intention to treat Vivekananda as either a great religious saint or a manipulative Orientalist subject, the fact here is more critical than this dichotomy. He appears to be a dynamic character that simultaneously discarded oriental discourses and accepted material science and religious reformation of the West. Thus the purpose of the study

Inden(1986,1990), R. King (1999), Guha (1997) , Prakash (1990), Said(1994) and many other place their point of views in this matter in a very insightful way. The legacy of almost two hundred years (1757-1947) British colonial rule over India has created broad space for discussion on Orientalism and Indian counterpart. The English colonial rule on India was a history of domination and oppression. In Imagining India (1990) Ronald Inden uses Saidian argument to illustrate how the European scholars , the colonial rulers and trade masters assumed for the power to know and understand the hidden essence of the other and how to act upon them.(Inden,65). Inden’s work focuses how these assumed features of the Indian perpetuated the view that “the paternal, centralized administration that the British themselves had established in the subcontinent... would provide the way out of India’s developmental impasse” (1990, 65). The ‘undemocratic’ institution of caste and the plight of Indian mass have been discussed in the light of Oriental discourses and the distinction of human as Homo Hiererchius and Homo Aequalis (Prakash, 393) makes the European society inherently superior to Indian as per evolutionary theories are