Kali's Child: The Mystical and Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna.

• Author: McLean, Malcolm

Westerners have been interested in Ramakrishna (1836-86) since his best-known follower and founder of the Ramakrishna Movement, Swami Vivekananda, represented Hinduism at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Most of the interest, however, has been shown by people who were personally affected by the man or his message, and the studies they produced were hagiographical in nature, rather than critical academic work.

Yet even these sympathetic and uncritical studies revealed a very strange figure, one worldly enough to reject the path of complete renunciation (sannyasa) yet other-worldly enough to be constantly going into trances, oblivious of the world around him. Ramakrishna was married, yet he claimed to have never had sexual relations with his wife. His sexual behaviour, in fact, was so unusual that it became the source of much speculation, and many theories have been put forward to explain it, and to see how, if at all, it might be linked to his strange religious behavior.

It is only recently that serious critical attention has been paid to Ramakrishna, and it was not until 1991 that a book-length study by an author who could read Bengali appeared.(1) Now Kripal has published a major comprehensive study which must be seen as the most important yet of this fascinating and important religious figure.

The reference to Bengali is critical here. Even scholarly attempts to understand Ramakrishna, before Sil, were by scholars who were not able to use original sources. While two of the major sources have been translated into English, these translations are not complete and are not reliable. The first important feature of Kripal's book is his analysis of and use of sources. He begins by showing how the followers of Ramakrishna divided into two groups, the householders and the renunciants, and how after his death the renunciants, under the leadership of Vivekananda captured the movement and controlled the tradition. This Ramakrishna Movement was responsible for the translation, and publication of the English translation, of the primary source on Ramakrishna, the Srisri Ramakrsna Kathamrta,(2) and this version is both incomplete and bowdlerized. And they have virtually suppressed what Kripal considers an equally important source, Ram Chandra Datta's Srisriramakrsna Paramahamsadever Jivanavrttanta, which has never been available to English readers and has never to my knowledge been used by any other scholar writing in English.

This...