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Vivekananda, Sarah Farmer, and global spiritual transformations in the fin de siècle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2019

Ruth Harris
Ruth Harris*
Affiliation:
All Souls’ College, Oxford, OX1 4AL, UK
*
Corresponding author. Email: Ruth.Harris@history.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

As Swami Vivekananda travelled West at the end of the nineteenth century to propagate what has become known as ‘Hindu Universalism’, the American Sarah Farmer travelled to Palestine to embrace the new Baha’i faith. This article will ask why both wished to create ‘universal’ religions, and why they found inspiration at Green Acre, Maine in 1894 in the wake of the Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893. Visitors to Green Acre discussed ‘divine femininity’, engaged with men such as Vivekananda and Abdu’l-Baha, and began to criticize colonial hierarchies in the search for spiritual reconciliation, all concerns which touched on questions of ‘Eastern’ religion. However, spirituality was not a mere epiphenomenon of larger historical developments. Rather, the ‘transformation’ discussed here drew on an essentialized notion of ‘Eastern wisdom’ that contrasted spirituality with materialism, tolerance with intolerance, transcendence with instrumentalism. Yet, such polarized characterizations misjudged the ways in which Baha’i and Hindu Universalism destabilized the very categories of East and West, while retaining a vision of ‘Eastern wisdom’ untouched by Western corruptions.

Keywords

anti-imperialismBaha’iGreen AcreHindu UniversalismSarah FarmerVivekananda
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 179 - 198
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Global History and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions that helped shape the final version of this article; as always, I am grateful to Iain Pears and Lyndal Roper for all they have done on this piece.

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35 For his activities, see Lewis G. Janes, Lewis G. Janes: philosopher, patriot, lover of man, Boston: James H. West, 1902. The school’s work is described in ‘Comparative religion notes’, Biblical World, 8, 1896, p. 166.

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50 These quotations all come from Vivekananda, ‘The religion of India’, in Complete works, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_9/Notes_of_Lectures_and_Classes/The_Religion_of_India (consulted 25 February 2019).

51 Vivekananda, Raja yoga, ch. 3, in Complete works, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_1/Raja-Yoga/Prana (consulted 25 February 2019).

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54 Ibid., ch. 1, in Complete works, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_1/Raja-Yoga/Introductory (consulted 25 February 2019).

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66 Vivekananda to Alasinga Perumal, 1 July 1895, in Complete works, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_5/Epistles_-_First_Series/XLIII_Alasinga (consulted 25 February 2019).

67 This problem was acute for Sister Nivedita, or Margaret Noble, who described it in her letters, Basu, Sankari Prasad, ed., Letters of Sister Nivedita, 2 vols., Calcutta: Nababharat Publishers Google Scholar, and intermittently in ‘The master as I saw him’, in Atmaprana, Pravrajika, ed.,The complete works of Sister Nivedita, 5 Google Scholar vols., 5th reprint, Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2014, vol. 1.

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83 Ibid., p. 287.

84 Ibid., p. 293.

85 Ibid., p. 302.

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101 There are those who say that she was taken to New Hampshire without her consent; others imply that friends acted benignly. See Schmidt, Restless souls, pp. 210–11.

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103 See Carrie Kinney’s account of the rescue of Sarah Farmer from Dr Cole’s sanatorium, unpublished manuscript in the Baha’i Archives, Wilmette, IN.

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107 Ibid., p. 776.