The Many Dialogues of the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita

Book excerpt: This book locates the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita within the critical framework suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination, where he posits that the novel is intensely dialogic or dialogue-ridden. This perspective uncovers in the Kathamrita many moments of the dialogic interface between song and philosophy (epistemology), faith and empiricism, myth and scientific actuality, story-telling and historical documentation, bhava and reason. These multiple dialogues become a powerful portrait of the swirling, teeming, history-making and epoch-creating energies of the 19th century in Bengal, much in the way that in the England of Charles Darwin (1850's), the rival claims of faith versus reason drove thinking minds to the ultimate borders of intellectual questioning. Through his multiple interactions with leading intellectuals of the time like Keshab Chandra Sen, Girish Ghosh, Dr. Mahendralal Sarkar, Mahendranath Gupta, and also Narendranath Dutta, Sri Ramakrishna posits the power of urjita bhakti whereby a devotee exists in a state of joyous freedom that enables engagement with the world without being entrapped in it. Sri Ramakrishna insisted that God was the highest rasa of all and 'loksiksha' should be the prerogative of those who ardently followed 'sadhana' in their lives.