VIVEKANANDA was the religious name of Narendranath Datta, or Dutt (1863–1902), a leading spokesman for modern Hinduism and neo-Vedānta in the late nineteenth century, and the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission in India and the Vedanta Society in the West.

Life

Narendranath came from a Bengali family, kāyastha by caste, that since the early nineteenth century had improved its social status through the process of westernization. Narendranath's great-grandfather had clerked for an English attorney in Calcutta, while his grandfather took the vow of saṃnyāsa (renunciation) and abandoned his family shortly after the birth of his son, Vishwanath, who would be Narendranath's father. Vishwanath became a prosperous lawyer in the Calcutta High Court. The Datta home was a cosmopolitan one, in which the worlds of Bengali Hinduism and Indo-Muslim culture merged with European learning. Vishwanath knew Sanskrit and Arabic, enjoyed the poems of Ḥāfiẓ, and read...