https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6916-0518
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Ruth Harris, Sarada Devi: Holiness, Charisma, and Iconic Motherhood. By Amiya P. Sen, The Journal of Hindu Studies, Volume 17, Issue 3, November 2024, Pages 383–384, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiae006
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Extract
Amiya Sen has written a fascinating and long-overdue introductory book on Sarada Devi. Known often as the Holy Mother, Sarada Devi was the wife and consort of Ramakrishna, the nineteenth-century mystic famous in India both as avatara and as guru to Vivekananda. While her husband died in 1884, Sarada outlived him by almost four decades, dying only in 1920. She was admired and even worshipped as a saint and guru in the decades after his death, but in historical understanding, she remains in shadow, an elusive yet remarkable presence. For the first time, Amiya Sen has put her into a larger context while retaining a sense of her rare human qualities and the complexity of her character which is not easily reduced to stereotypes.
This authoritative analysis of Sarada Devi steers a careful path between accounts that regard her as a feminist icon, and pious portraits that provide a two-dimensional vision of a ‘perfect Hindu woman’. Historians’ writings have thus far been so inadequate, perhaps, because of the tendency to project twentieth-century categories of human need, behaviour, and values onto a spiritual landscape in which apparent radicalism and convention existed in unfamiliar combinations.
