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The Ramakrishna Mission: The Making of a Modern Hindu Movement

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The book contains several independent chapters about certain aspects of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement. There are standard topics like the continuity of the teaching from Ramakrishna to Vivekananda and several non standard ones like the ten year law suit where the movement tried to show it was not Hindu but a religious minority. The author excels in carefully presenting the issues without own judgement but still presenting the needed details for the reader to judge for himself, and he also outperforms other writers by a subtle way of arguing, where a statement is considered from different view points before hinting at possible conclusions. The book may be especially interesting to people who would like to find a more analytic approach to the history of that movement without reading either propaganda or debunking about it. It has to be said, that the book assumes a certain familiarity with the movement to be fully comprehensible.