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Biography 23.3 (2000) 565-568



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Robin Rinehart. One Lifetime, Many Lives: The Experience of Modern Hindu Hagiography. American Academy of Religions: The Religions 6 (series ed. Paul B. Courtright). Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999. 241 pp. ISBN 0-7885-0555-6, $29.95.

Regularly extolling the person of the guru as well as the guru's teachings, Hindu tradition can be a very fruitful context in which to study hagiography. And within the Hindu movements burgeoning in modern times, subjects--and especially writers--of hagiography have been particularly plentiful. Informed by a background in religious studies, Robin Rinehart makes the most of her modern Indian context, demonstrating clearly how different accounts of one guru, Swami Rama Tirtha, reflect different writers' experience of him. A turn of the century figure of less than major prominence, Swami Rama Tirtha nevertheless inspired an impressive series of hagiographical writings that spanned most of the twentieth century. While ample, the material Rinehart has to work with is also contained--much [End Page 565] more so than if she were treating one of Rama Tirtha's better known contemporaries, Vivekananda, say, or Sri Aurobindo. Her compact frame then allows Rinehart to treat her hagiographical issues easily from a number of different angles. She is able to present her arguments fully and give them some interesting turns, but to keep them within readable limits, too.

Swami Rama Tirtha's life was short but full. Born in 1873 to an unpretentious priestly family in a small village in the Punjab (and now in Pakistan), Rama Tirtha was an excellent student. Particularly apt in mathematics, he won scholarships to study in the city of Lahore, where he would teach college for several years. He was married off early, as was the custom, and fathered children, but eventually abandoned his family for the renunciate's life. Settling briefly in a Himalayan town, he attracted the attention of the local raja, who sent him to Japan--where Indian newspapers had erroneously reported the convocation of a world conference on religion. From Japan, the Swami made his way to the USA, teaching for nearly two years, mostly in Northern California. Although an ardent devotee of Krishna during his student years, Rama Tirtha's inward outlook later underwent a transformation, and by the time of his stay in the USA he was teaching a modern version of non-dualism he called "Practical Vedanta." When Rama Tirtha returned home it was 1904, and nationalist agitation against British rule was getting seriously under way. Now a luminary returned from abroad, he felt pressure to participate in the freedom struggle; he did not, however, finally seem to have much active enthusiasm for it, and retreated to the Himalayas. In 1906, living separately even from previously close associates, Rama Tirtha drowned while bathing in the Himalayas; he was thirty-three years old.

The Swami's life presents aspects contradictory enough for hagiographers to be able to portray him in different guises. A simple country boy who moved to the city, he was a scientific genius as well as a spiritual one. He had contact, at least, with political agitators, but wound up a recluse in the Himalayas. He was a householder and then a Swami; a Krishna devotee and then a Vedantin. He had some glamour from going abroad, and a somewhat mysterious death. In constructing accounts of Rama Tirtha's life from its contrasting facets, hagiographers sometimes worked with his writings--prose and poetry in English, Urdu, and Hindi--but they often seemed less impressed by the Swami's words themselves than by his persona as a religious teacher. By all accounts, Rama Tirtha's personal presence could be immediately forceful and leave a lasting impact on those it affected. Rinehart sees this personal impact as crucial in the hagiographical tradition: her major analytic distinction is between early accounts written by [End Page 566] those with personal experience of Rama Tirtha, and later ones by those whose experience is mediated by tradition.

The issues of experience in the early period focused on a tension between honest...

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