… Professor Max Muller presented Shri Ramakrishna's life to the learned European public, in an article entitled "A Real Mahatman", which appeared in The Nineteenth Century in its August number, 1896.
The learned people of Europe and America read the article with great interest and many have been attracted towards its subject, Shri Ramakrishna Deva, with the result that the wrong ideas of the civilised West about India as a country full of naked, infanticidal, ignorant, cowardly race of men who were cannibals and little removed from beasts, who forcibly burnt their widows and were steeped in all sorts of sins and darkness -- towards the formation of which ideas, the Christian missionaries and, I am as much ashamed as pained to confess, some of my own countrymen also have been chiefly instrumental -- began to be corrected.
The veil of the gloom of ignorance, which was spread across the eyes of the Western people by the strenuous efforts of these two bodies of men, has been slowly and slowly rending asunder.
"Can the country that has produced a great world-teacher like Shri Bhagavan Ramakrishna Deva be really full of such abominations as we have been asked to believe in, or have we been all along duped by interested organised bodies of mischief-makers, and kept in utter obscurity and error about the real India?"-- such a question naturally arises in the Western mind.
When Professor Max Muller, who occupies in the West the first rank in the field of Indian religion, philosophy, and literature, published with a devoted heart a short sketch of Shri Ramakrishna's life in The Nineteenth Century for the benefit of Europeans and Americans, it is needless to say that a bitter feeling of burning rancour made its appearance amongst those two classes of people referred to above.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Translation of a review of
‘Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings’ by
Prof. Max Muller,
contributed to the Udbodhana, 14th March, 1899
The learned people of Europe and America read the article with great interest and many have been attracted towards its subject, Shri Ramakrishna Deva, with the result that the wrong ideas of the civilised West about India as a country full of naked, infanticidal, ignorant, cowardly race of men who were cannibals and little removed from beasts, who forcibly burnt their widows and were steeped in all sorts of sins and darkness -- towards the formation of which ideas, the Christian missionaries and, I am as much ashamed as pained to confess, some of my own countrymen also have been chiefly instrumental -- began to be corrected.
The veil of the gloom of ignorance, which was spread across the eyes of the Western people by the strenuous efforts of these two bodies of men, has been slowly and slowly rending asunder.
"Can the country that has produced a great world-teacher like Shri Bhagavan Ramakrishna Deva be really full of such abominations as we have been asked to believe in, or have we been all along duped by interested organised bodies of mischief-makers, and kept in utter obscurity and error about the real India?"-- such a question naturally arises in the Western mind.
When Professor Max Muller, who occupies in the West the first rank in the field of Indian religion, philosophy, and literature, published with a devoted heart a short sketch of Shri Ramakrishna's life in The Nineteenth Century for the benefit of Europeans and Americans, it is needless to say that a bitter feeling of burning rancour made its appearance amongst those two classes of people referred to above.
- Swami Vivekananda,
Translation of a review of
‘Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings’ by
Prof. Max Muller,
contributed to the Udbodhana, 14th March, 1899
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