Until 22nd February enjoy free access to Ankur Barua’s full article, ‘The Hindu Cosmopolitanism of Sister Nivedita (Margaret Elizabeth Noble): An Irish Self in Imperial Currents’, published in Vol. 133 Issue 1, Harvard Theological Review.

Looking back at Britons, Europeans, and Americans who wrote about India and inhabited the land’s socioreligious milieus during the timeframe of 1800 and 1950, how should we envision them today? According to a ruling idea in academic spaces, we should dismiss all of them simply as a motley group of Orientalists who, from their normatively white and west-centered standpoints, viewed India as the epitome of the perennial heart of darkness.

I agree with this scholarly estimate to some extent—but not entirely. I have spent two decades now meticulously studying Indo-British, Indo-Germanic, and Indo-American interactions, and I have encountered quite a few individuals who were able to develop experientially sensitive and conceptually sophisticated understandings of Hindu sociocultural streams. From their interstitial locations, these pioneers can speak to us in our own engagements across cultural horizons, but unfortunately their thought-forms remain understudied because they continue to be incorrectly depicted—and immediately rejected—as merely “Orientalist.”

To rehabilitate, and resituate for our times, the cosmopolitan projects of such westerners is a central project in my academic life.

In particular, I have been working on the life and thought of three remarkable British women:  Annie Besant (1847–1933), Margaret Elizabeth Noble (1867–1911), and Madeleine Slade (1892–1982). I am fascinated by the highly synthetic formations of their existential tapestries: they always lived elsewhere even as they remained firmly rooted to their origins. Such hybridity is particularly clear in the writings of Margaret, who was given the name Sister Nivedita by her guru Swami Vivekananda, an extremely significant figure in the narratives of Hindu modernity. She insisted that Indians should seek the boundless universal in and through the concrete particularities of their national histories, cultural norms, and religious systems.

As I read her reflections on Hindu milieus, I continually had to ask myself: how should I assess her invocations of universality given that she—as a daughter of her own times—operated from within a binary opposition between a “materialistic West” and a “spiritual East”? Precisely such a dichotomy has been “problematized” in recent decades as an instance of a pernicious essentialization of complex civilizational currents. However, as I continued to work with her writings, I realised that her locations within this disjunction generated a dynamic combination of highly perceptive readings of Indian styles of living; ahistorical idealizations of traditionalist Hindu worldviews; global visions of internationalist exchanges across humanity; and pointed critiques of the operations of the British empire.

That an Irishwoman could learn to immerse herself sensitively in the existential densities of “alien” Indic worldviews can be seen as a concrete enactment of a Hindu theological motif—she who becomes rooted in the universal being (ātman) becomes one with everyone and one with everything.

And her distinctive configuration of Hindu cosmopolitanism—the dialectic of travelling light through the world by becoming heavily grounded in the spirit—can speak to some of our own perplexities as we live, move, and have our cultural being in a world of multiply contested identities.