he turned to gandhis eastern spirituality to save the brutal west from violence he maintained that ramakrishna had given him the key to understanding the preverbal maternal origins of creativity he also wrote a volume about vivekananda and the american spiritual landscape he encountered as an american these connections fascinated me i wanted to know why so many westerners turned to eastern spirituality and yoga i asked myself why did people listen to vivekanandai asked these questions while teaching many brilliant south asian students at oxford where britains imperial legacy is omnipresent i was impressed by the way they had mastered marx mill and freud while we had never even heard of ramakrishna vivekananda or many other greats of indian religious and political life it seemed high time to put the multiple legacies of my life in play the american the british and the colonial in a book that explored the crucial if often hidden impact of india on contemporary global spirituality you mention that he wrote the first english manual on yogahis raja yoga 1896 was so important because it deployed the concepts of william james the great american intellectual using his psychological and scientific language in discussing consciousness and selfhood in this volume he offered a sophisticated but uncomplicated manual for achieving selfrealisation and god consciousness by doing this he followed ramakrishnas dictum that the good guru must tailor his teaching to different audiences and speak in their languagedescribe vivekanandas relationship to the irish activist margaret noble we tend to think of vivekananda as a manmaker but my book reveals that he could not have propagated hindu universalism without women both in the east and west i have called his relationship to margaret noble a clinch because her spiritual apprenticeship to him was both painful and transformational for years she was unable to relinquish the personal love she felt for him and yet she also confessed that this passionate attachment had become the entre into her understanding of the universal love he preached she also extended and remade his ideas during the first nationalist upsurge of swadeshi and laid the groundwork for vedantas relationship to other western fields such as science art history and even sociology