After Ramakrishna’s death, Vivekananda travelled to America in 1893, where he spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, following which he embarked on a lecture tour of America and Europe, attracting a mass following of ‘converts’ to his teachings and mission (Vedanta).

In 1894, he founded the Vedanta Society of New York and published numerous monographs and lectures. In 1897, he returned to immense popularity in India, establishing the Ramakrishna Math and Mission in Kolkata.

Most notably, however, Vivekananda finds immense popularity as an icon of Hindu nationalism and right-wing Indian politics, particularly among the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) who began appropriating his legacy early on. He is hailed as a hero, one amongst many 19th-century Hindutva icons, who contributed to a nationalist discourse through the galvanisation of Hindus.

The politicisation of Vivekananda’s Memorial

In an 1894 letter, Vivekananda recalled that he had “hit upon a plan” in Kanniyakumari in 1892, whereby sanyasins would be called upon to educate India’s needy. In the 1940s, the Ramakrishna Math and Mission began to curate sites of ‘sacred geography’ linked to Vivekananda, including his ancestral home in Kolkata.

Looking to appropriate heroes for its Hindu Rashtra ideology, it was the RSS that spearheaded the campaign to establish a memorial on the occasion of his birth centenary (1963) in Kanniyakumari, not Kolkata. This has had the consequence of ensuring that no other part of India is as closely tied up with his memory.

In 1962, M S Golwalkar, the then RSS supremo appointed Eknath Ranade (1914-1982) the head of a committee of RSS Ramakrishna Mission members to mobilise support for building a memorial in his honour on Sripada rock, off the coast of Kanniyakumari. The site was of immense significance to Hindus since a small indentation in the rock is believed to be the footprint or sripada of the eponymous Devi Kanya Kumari after whom the town is named.

Simultaneously, however, local Christian fishermen, who believed the rock had also been visited by Saint Francis Xavier (1506-52 CE), erected a cross on the site to lay claim to it. Fearing communal tension, the Tamil Nadu government headed by Chief minister M Bhaktavatsam had prohibited the placing of any memorial on the rock.

Following a judicial probe, however, it was found that the cross was ‘trespassing’, and was surreptitiously removed overnight. A tablet commemorating Sripada rock as Vivekananda rock was set up in 1963.

The RSS-backed All India Swami Vivekananda Centenary Celebration and Vivekananda Rock Memorial Committee led a campaign to overturn this ban. The two biggest opponents to RSS plans of co-opting Vivekananda were M Bhaktavatsam, who was a Gandhian and freedom movement leader and the then Union cultural affairs minister, Humayun Kabir, father of Altmas Kabir, the 39th Chief Justice of India.

Ranade led a campaign against Kabir in Kolkata, where he claimed that Kabir was preventing the creation of Vivekananda’s memorial, forcing him to retract his stand.

The final stage of Ranade’s plan involved convincing India’s Parliament of the committee’s goal. Upon being presented with the signatures of over 320 Members of Parliament, Bhaktavatsam green-lit the project.

Construction on the Memorial finally began in 1964 and was opened to the public as a ‘national monument’ in 1970.

Constructing a public narrative

Establishing myths and legends around popular icons assists in strengthening cultic reverence towards them. The same, of course, is true with Vivekananda.

One of the most dramatic elements of Vivekananda’s enlightenment tale is that, after failing to find a ferry, he had to swim from the mainland through the shark-infested sea to reach, not the sripada but the Devı’s “temple.”

There he subsequently “passed into a deep meditation on the Present and the Future of his country” for “hours upon hours”, as Prof. Gwilym Beckerlegge highlights in his work, ‘Swami Vivekananda’s Legacy of Service: A Study of the Ramakrishna Mutt and Mission’. Interestingly, Vivekananda himself never alluded to this swim in his “sitting on the last bit of Indian rock”.

The relocation by the RSS of Vivekananda’s legacy from Kolkata to Kanniyakumari in addition to going beyond associating his name with the Hindutva also signalled a striking reconfiguration and redefinition of the thrust under Vivekananda’s mission and the nature of its legacy.

The Rock Memorial proclaims that Kanniyakumari was the scene of the turning point of Vivekananda’s mission, and not Kolkata or Chicago. This, as Beckerlegge points out, also signals the capture of his story by Hindutva-influenced groups, who have “associated themselves with long-established locations of particular significance to Hindus. L. K. Advani’s “India Shining '' yatra (pilgrimage, procession) of 2004, for example, began at Kanniyakumari and provided Advani with an opportunity to eulogise Eknath Ranade”.