From Sri Ramakrishna To Sita Ram Goel: A Description Of Hindu Engagement with Christianity

Come Christmas season and Sri Ramakrishna Mission-bashing becomes a ritual. Photos of the Mission celebrating Christmas, available on social media, become the focus of attacks.

The most influential and defining format for Hindu interaction with Christianity was set in modern times by Sri Ramakrishna, the guru of Swami Vivekananda. He demonstrated that a Hindu can have direct experience of Jesus without having to accept Christianity.

In 1886 Indian Mirror in its obituary of Sri Ramakrishna mentioned that 'Mr.Cook the American evangelist, ...witnessed Ramakrishna's divine exercises and he expressed his great surprise at it and remarked that he was not aware before that a man could become so much immersed in divine spirit as to lose all perception of the external world.'

In the room of Sri Ramakrishna along with the pictures of Hindu Gods, Goddess and saints there was also a picture of Jesus ‘raising the drowning Peter’. When Sri Ramakrishna applied vermillion brought by a devotee to the pictures of Hindu Gods and Goddesses, he left out that of Jesus. So, he clearly respected the cultural context of Jesus while at the same time holding on to his own experiential conviction of the universal divinity manifesting through Jesus.

One of the songs he often heard from his disciples including Naren (later Swami Vivekananda), had the following lines:

O Mother, make me mad with Thy love!

...

Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Gauranga,

All are drunk with the Wine of Thy love.

By joining their blissful company.

This situating of Jesus in the company of other spiritual masters and seeing them as filled with the love for the Goddess rather than the masculine transcendental Father, further enriches the space for engagement and dialogue with Christian tradition.

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna also records the visit of one Misra – who was born in ‘a Christian family in northwestern India and belonged to the Quaker sect.’ He visited Sri Ramakrishna and in the course of their conversation told that he had a vision of Jesus. Misra said that ‘it is Rama alone who dwells in all beings' and Sri Ramakrishna said looking at 'young Naren' that 'Rama is one but He has a thousand names' and that whom Christians call 'God' and 'is addressed by the Hindus as Rama, Krishna, Isvara, and by other names.'

Misra told the devotees there that Jesus was not son of Mary but God Himself and that Sri Ramakrishna too was God Himself and that he had seen Sri Ramakrishna too in his vision. Later Sri Ramakrishna blessed Misra saying that he would obtain what he sought.

Thus, with Sri Ramakrishna, Hinduism acquired a spiritual framework to understand Christ and his teaching and experience the spiritual possibilities within Christianity, without acquiring the theological and institutional colonialism that comes with proselytizing. Most of the later Hindutva engagements and dialogues with Christianity are anchored on this, with Veer Savarkar and Guru Golwalkar being clear instances and Sitaram Goel being a prominent exception.

This perhaps is the first Hindu observation of the anti-Hindu propaganda material published in the United States by the Christian missionaries.

In modern times, Mahatma Gandhi made a definite contribution to the contours of later Hindutva's interaction with Christianity.

Hindus per se do not have any criticism of Christianity as a false religion or have a compulsion to reject Jesus as a 'false' god or messiah. However, two centuries of attacks on Hindus directly and indirectly through academia and polemics through institutional means and through cultural wars have made many Hindu ideologues study Christianity, if only to defend themselves.

While Hindu influence on Christianity has been positive with respect to inculcating it with Yoga and diverse spirituality, the Christian-Hindu encounter in India has been that of a battle-field. Christianity—from the Catholic Church to evangelists of Protestantism—wants to conquer Hinduism and sees it as a potential field of harvest for the current millennia.

One is represented by Sita Ram Goel – characterizing Jesus as ‘an artifice of aggression.’ In his book, Sita Ram Goel starts with his own experience:

Ram Swarup, the Guru and mentor of Sita Ram Goel, considered the Bible as the source that raised English language morally and spiritually.

This is more in tune with Gandhian approach. While accepting that Jesus did have spiritual passion, there is rejection of the exclusivist theology of Christianity and its evangelical actions derived from that theology.