At a time when the language of Hinduism is increasingly spoken in the accents of anxiety and exclusion, I found myself returning – not to slogans or speeches but to books. Specifically, to Swami Vivekananda, read slowly and without intermediaries. I began, fittingly, with an old volume: a 1915 Mayavati Memorial edition of The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.
Today, The Complete Works are available in nine volumes, but previously Vivekananda’s words were scattered across pamphlets, lecture notes, newspaper reports and private letters. These editions gave coherence to a voice that spoke across continents and contexts and it ensured that future generations would encounter Vivekananda whole, not in fragments shaped by convenience or ideology.
My own nine-volume 1986 edition could easily take a year to read. It regularly reminds me that Hinduism, at least as Vivekananda understood it, was expansive, confident and radically plural.
The introduction contains one of his most quoted (and most ignored) declarations: “If one religion is true, then all the others must also be true. Thus, the Hindu faith is yours as much as mine. We Hindus merely do not tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the cross of the Christian. We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the infinite. So we gather all these flowers, and binding them together with the cord of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet of worship”. For Vivekananda, there existed only Humanity and Truth; everything else was scaffolding.
Every January, Vivekananda returns to public life as a question we have not finished answering. What does it mean to be strong without being cruel? To be rooted without being rigid? To have faith unafraid of reason, and nationalism that does not collapse into insecurity?
These questions confront me whenever I stand before the shelves that carry him. They are multi-volume biographies, edited letters, reminiscences by disciples from the east and the west, scholarly monographs, devotional works, polemics, and popular retellings.
All compete to ‘explain’ a monk who distrusted explanations and preferred awakenings. One could spend a lifetime reading Vivekananda and still feel one has merely circled the fire without touching its heat.
In his birth month, it is tempting to ask what Vivekananda would say to India today. He would likely reject our false binaries: spirituality versus materialism, tradition versus modernity, nationalism versus universalism. He would remind us, as he did a century ago, that weakness is the real sin: moral weakness, intellectual laziness, and the cowardice that hides behind borrowed outrage. He believed divinity was not a distant reward but an immanent possibility. Education, for him, was not the accumulation of information but the unfolding of character. Religion was not belief, but realisation.
The Complete Works, compiled after his death in 1902, was first published in the early twentieth century. The volumes were revised, expanded, and corrected over time by Advaita Ashrama and the Ramakrishna Mission. They preserve not only his philosophy, but the evolution of a mind in motion, thinking its way through India and the world. Yet books alone are not enough. Vivekananda survives not because he is preserved, but because he provokes. In January, as another garland is placed and another quotation circulates, the more honest homage may be a quieter one: to close the book for a moment and ask whether we are living with even a fraction of the courage he demanded.
Taken together, the nine volumes form a unified vision: a call to awaken the individual soul, serve humanity, and restore confidence in India’s spiritual genius. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda remains not merely a religious text, but a blueprint for personal strength, social responsibility, and universal harmony.