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About the Author

Ruth Harris is the author of Lourdes and The Man on Devil’s Island,which won the Wolfson Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. Sheis Senior Research Fellow at All Soul’s College, University ofOxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and Professor of EuropeanHistory at the University of Oxford.

Reviews

This is a deeply researched and compellingly argued biography ofSwami Vivekananda, one of the first Indian religious thinkers tobecome known in the west, and one of the makers of modernIndia.
*BBC History Magazine*

Guru to the World is a triumph of research and ambition, drawingconnections between a dazzling array of philosophies, figures,languages, geographies and religions.
*Literary Review*

This will be the standard biography of [Vivekananda] for years tocome…Admirable.
*Spirituality & Practice*

Vivekananda’s life was an embarrassment of epiphanies andcontradictions, and Harris exhaustively uncovers all of them.
*History Today*

The definitive book on [Swami Vivekananda] that seeks to presenthis complexity as a person and in his teachings…useful and perhapseven fascinating.
*Library Journal*

Vivekananda was many things to many people: the first globalreligious celebrity, an apostle of Indian nationalism, a man whosemessage was heard, and heard differently, in salons as well asslums. It’s not just any biographer who can do justice to such acomplex life. He’s fortunate to have found a perfect interpreter inRuth Harris.
*Benjamin Moser, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winningSontag:Her Life and Work*

In Ruth Harris’s vivid portrait of India’s Vivekananda, we discovera compelling story of interconnected lives—the guru, his disciple,the international followers, his own teacher—that sheds new lighton religion, race, gender, colonialism, and nationalism. Thisimpressive book introduces us to some important but half-forgottencultural currents in the life of India, Europe, and America at theend of the nineteenth century. To understand contemporary India, weneed to pay more attention to these currents, and Harris is asure-footed guide.
*Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury*

In Guru to the World, Ruth Harris gives us riveting accounts ofboth the Indian and the international sides of Swami Vivekananda,one of the most provocative personalities of the nineteenthcentury. The connections between tradition and modernity forged byhim over a century ago continue to influence culture, politics, andreligion worldwide. A brilliant read.
*Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, author ofAn Aesthetic Education inthe Era of Globalization*

An inspired blend of religion, politics, and biography, Guru to theWorld takes a novel approach to the history of empire andcross-cultural encounters that foregrounds the workings of love,friendship, and faith. In the lives of Vivekananda and hisassociates, Ruth Harris delivers insight into topics ranging fromyoga to anticolonial nationalism that should interest any readerscurious to understand the workings of what might be calledglobalized culture.
*Maya Jasanoff, author ofThe Dawn Watch*