A sceptical Calcutta student who mocked his guru's visions later electrified Chicago
Narendranath Datta read Hume, Kant and Spencer, asked every notable in Calcutta whether they had seen God, and dismissed Ramakrishna's trances as hallucinations. A decade later, as Swami Vivekananda, he opened his address to the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions with a greeting to the sisters and brothers of America.
He was born on 12 January 1863 into a well-off Kayastha family in Calcutta, one of nine children of a High Court attorney; his grandfather had walked out at twenty-five to become a monk. A restless, mischievous child, he was also a gifted reader with an extraordinary memory. He trained in classical music, played sport, took first-division marks in the Presidency College entrance exam, and translated Herbert Spencer's book on education into Bengali. His principal, William Hastie, said he had never met a student of such promise, even in German universities.
His early religion came from the reformist Brahmo Samaj, which rejected idol worship and caste, and scholars such as De Michelis argue that milieu shaped him as much as Ramakrishna did. Ironically it was Hastie, explaining the word trance in a Wordsworth poem, who told the class to visit the mystic at Dakshineswar. Narendra went, argued, ridiculed the idea of identity with the absolute, and kept returning.
His father's sudden death in 1884 plunged the family into debt and left him among the poorest students in his college. Sent to ask the goddess Kali for money, he went into the temple three times and each time asked only for knowledge and devotion. He nursed Ramakrishna through his final illness, received the ochre robe, and was charged with leading the other young monks.
Wandering India afterwards, he saw how harshly ordinary people lived under British rule. After Chicago he lectured across America and Europe, founded Vedanta Societies in New York and San Francisco, and in India set up the Ramakrishna Math and the service-oriented Ramakrishna Mission. He died on 4 July 1902, and India now marks his birthday as National Youth Day.
Source: Swami Vivekananda
