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.

Sri Ramakrishna Mission's celebration of Christmas should be understood, and then appreciated or criticized, in the larger context of Hindu engagement with Christianity.

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.

Sri Ramakrishna’s 'Christ experience' came in 1874. His biography published in 1924 has this to say about it:

For three days Sri Ramakrishna was held in the grip of his experience of Christian devotion.

He could not bring himself to Hindu Divinities despite his appeal to the Divine Mother (Kali). Then on the fourth day he had an experience:

Theologian Daniel E. Bassuk in his Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity points out the significance of this experience of Sri Ramakrishna:

After this, in 1882, an American missionary, Joseph Cook of ‘Protestant orthodoxy’ met Sri Ramakrishna in a cruise arranged by Brahmo leader Keshab Chandra Sen. The official organ of Brahmo Samaj, ‘The New Dispensation’ (26-Feb-1882) reported this about the meeting:

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.'

While Sri Ramakrishna once enquired from Mahendranath Gupta ('M') about Cook and his lectures in Kolkata, Joseph Cook himself never mentioned Sri Ramakrishna. In 1893, he saw in Swami Vivekananda an enemy. Prof. Lola Williamson in her study of ‘Hindu inspired meditation movements’ in the US writes:

Even as the expression of Hindu Bhakti of Sri Ramakrishna, which also included a mystic experience of Christ, had no impact on the evangelist, the impact Christian theology had on Sri Ramakrishna is important. Seven months after Rev. Cook witnessed Sri Ramakrishna, the following conversation of Sri Ramakrishna with Keshab Chandra Sen, was recorded by ‘M’, on 27 October 1882:

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.

O 'Mother, when shall I be blessed

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.

Swami Vivekananda had taken missionaries' propaganda head on. He even pointed out the subliminal racial aspects in the missionary propaganda against Hindus and Hinduism. In his reply to the congratulatory meeting held for his success in the United States World Parliament of Religions he wrote to his fellow countrymen this:

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

Later, Sri Aurobindo in a letter to Dilip Kumar Roy observed:

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

In 1926, answering an American Christian leader Milton Newberry Frantz, who had sent him an article on Jesus positioning him as god, Gandhi wrote back:

Then in 1935, when he was talking to a group of missionaries, he told them bluntly:

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.

Writes Sita Ram Goel, in the preface to his work on Hindu-Christian encounters said:

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.

The Hindu response in terms of religion and theology can be divided into two broad categories.

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:

He concludes in the book:

The other dominant Hindu attitude to Christianity is characterized by the highly popular lecture, ‘Christ we Adore’, of Swami Ranganathananda of Sri Ramakrishna Mission. He gives a complete Vedantic gloss over the life and teachings of Jesus. Here is a typical sample passage from ‘Christ We Adore’:

Most of the Hindu responses to Christian core belief system varies between these two approaches. And that provides quite a lot of middle ground.

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

Elsewhere Ram Swarup elaborates:

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.

Swami Ranganathananda also makes a detailed exposition of this problem even as he presents a Vedantic gloss over the life and teachings of Nazarene. In the end of his ‘Christ We Adore’, Swami Ranganathananda states:

One can see how in a deeper process of samanvaya, the voice of Ram Swarup and Swami Ranganathananda unite. It is an on-going process and there are no defined boundaries. When we deal in set-categories we can easily become the dragon we fight. Hindutva as a nation-building process is far more complex, organic and assimilating than we like to imagine with the instant gratification provided by social media and hatred.