Review of Living the Vivekananda Way: Practical Spirituality for Modern India, by Ananya Awasthi and Nikhil Yadav (Rupa 2025)
It is generally held, or at least it was held by the ‘spiritual entertainer’ Alan Watts, that the Buddha preached if anyone were to find the ‘Buddha,’ the latter should be ‘killed.’ The meaning of this twice-removed apocryphal legend—in the sense that Watts intended to convey—is that the Buddha-nature of human subjects cannot be crystallized to one object, for that would be liable to its commodification.
Whether one truly believes that the Buddha nurtured such an idea, or not, a nascent form of this realization exists in a large critical mass of people. That is why, human societies that have invested in educating themselves have a way of becoming skeptical about notions pertaining to mysticism, yoga, spirituality, and the like. The point remains, however, that such a skepticism cannot afford to degenerate into cynicism. Hence, when Ananya Awasthi and Nikhil Yadav ask if mysticism and yoga can be civic approaches, they deserve a fair hearing. And, if one has read their book, Living the Vivekananda Way (Rupa 2025), one will know that they offer a much-needed intervention in the widely-disseminated misconception that Vedanta and nondualism are about withdrawal from society. Rather, these are methodologies that can readily sustain civic technologies for the modern world.
The nineteenth-century Indian monk—and student of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa—Swami Vivekananda has been seen as a leader and reformer who preached the existence of God in every human. But he is yet to be widely accepted as a strategist for public good. For reasons intuitively comprehensible to all of us, mysticism does not seem to gel easily with structures of the modern nation-state. But what if the authors of this book told you that yoga could be turned into a civic pedagogy? Indeed, that is precisely what Awasthi and Yadav do, in what overtly seems like a concise, practical rendition of Vivekananda’s ideas. Challengingly, they seek to transport his Vedantic darshan from the realm of contemplative philosophy to the landscape of civic reforms and institutional ethics. The authors propose that Vivekananda’s principles of Raja Yoga and ideals of service can fund a feasible repertoire for education, commerce, leadership, administration, and social harmony. And, their book is rather readable. More importantly, it makes accessible the otherwise saintly aura of Swami Vivekananda, herein reconsidered as a pragmatic spiritual theorist. However, that pragmatism was not devoid of an ethics of inner discipline that permeated Vivekananda’s understandings of nationalism and—what is nowadays another heavily commodified global buzzword—civilizationism.
Books like this help marginalize the fallacy that Vivekananda was pietistic or fundamentalist about his religious values. In fact, it might impress enthusiasts of Vedanta and the authors to learn that Vivekananda was known to use the word ‘Veda’ as a generic noun for knowledge or vision—not a proper noun—for the word itself is the proto-Indo-European root for the more pedestrian and secular-sounding word, ‘video.’ It was, evidently, not the purpose of the authors to delve into such granular details about Vivekananda’s epistemology. Therefore, this book is not to be judged on such standards. However, the book succeeds in conveying the vision of the ‘Swami’ as an active social creature, whose tenets of self-mastery and spiritual salvation were not to undergird his abode in a heaven, so to speak, but very much the edifices of a this-worldly haven.
Authors like Awasthi and Yadav might do well to complement their affirmations and advocacy for Vivekananda with an engagement with his complex political afterlife—in the sense of how his spiritualist rhetoric can get easily appropriated by propaganda-driven groups whose priorities are far from self-realization and spiritual refinements. It also remains to be asked—and answered with scholarly acumen—whether Vivekananda’s rise as a thinker and his afterlife as an idealized icon were, in any discernible way, aided by colonial agency in India.
Indian nationalism was, in many parts, an undesirable (and sometimes even a desirable) product of British colonial rule, if seen through colonial lenses. Did the popularization of Advaita Vedanta, since the times of Raja Rammohun Roy in the early nineteenth century, also have similar colonial moorings, or is pursuing this correlation unproductive to the goal at hand?
Such, and other more complex, questions are bound to be raised whenever Vivekananda’s life and ideals are to be brought onto a public platform. Of course, this does not specifically apply to Awasthi and Yadav but indeed to all authors in the same league. It is this reviewer’s objective to make the present book more amenable to modern-day India’s debates on caste, gender, and regional diversity that have now spread from the academia to digital media to people’s living rooms and private thoughts. Hence, this is not a critique of the book or its authors but merely the glimpse of a description of the field of existing knowledge and available arguments in the discipline. The authors are, very likely, also aware of these critical moments in the discipline’s career as one of them (Dr Nikhil Yadav) has also previously researched and written on the impact of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda on the Gandhian freedom struggle.
Meanwhile, it would be extremely unfair to the authors, however, to be asked to bear the entire burden of proof. Living the Vivekananda Way does an excellent job of acting as a pedagogical bridge between readers unacquainted with the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. For those who may find this book programmatic and not probative, there is always the chance to write their own archivally informed thesis on the Swami. For those looking for a lucid reminder of—or introduction to, if it be so—Vivekananda’s relevance in contemporary ethics, social life, leadership values, and civic transformation, this book can be a good companion. In order to understand historical phenomena that, in certain periods of time tend to promote ideals akin to Vedanta or Neo-Vedanta, one must delve much deeper, taking this book as a decisive doorway to even more nuanced inquiries.
Arup K. Chatterjee 