SOURCE: "As the Master Saw Her," in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality, edited by Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 112-129.

In the following essay, Roy explores questions of gender identity as they relate not only to Vivekananda, but to his teacher Ramakrishna and to his British female disciple Margaret Noble, or Sister Nivedita.

The title of my chapter repeats with a difference the title of a book Margaret Noble wrote in 1910, a book entitled The Master as I Saw Him. Margaret Noble, known in India and elsewhere as Sister Nivedita, came to the subcontinent in the last decade of the nineteenth century in order to serve as a disciple to the Hindu monk and religious leader Swami Vivekananda, and to serve, at his behest, as a model and guide to downtrodden Hindu womanhood. In...