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There are devotees and there are biographers. Honest devotees worship sages, while serious biographers study their lives. (Here, we are not including charlatans who pose as godmen or godwomen and their propagandisers.) Devotees and biographers rarely double up, which is a good thing for devotion and also not a bad thing for biography writing. But when devotion and historiography do work together, albeit rarely, the results can be startling. 

The Light of Asia, Edwin Arnold’s unparalleled portrayal of Buddha’s life in dramatic verse, which appeared in 1879, must head the list of such works, closely followed by Max Mueller’s Ramakrishna: His Life and Teachings (1898). Romain Rolland’s biographies of Ramakrishna (1928) and Vivekananda (1931) and an altogether great study of Ramana Maharshi, A Search in Secret India by the British journalist Paul Brunton (1934), remain irreplaceable. 

Writing about the sage of Dakshineswar, Christopher Isherwood produced, in Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965), a worthy successor to Rolland’s study of the extraordinary mystic. If Alexander Lipski’s Life and Teachings of Sri Anandamayi Maa (1977) satisfied the extraordinary saint’s numerous adherents, Peter Heehs’ The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (2021) and Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda (2022) by Ruth Harris provoked devotees of both epoch-making figures as much as they pleased biography buffs. 

“So!” the reader of this review might exclaim, “are all the acclaimed biographies of Indian sages authored by non-Indians?” No, though it must be acknowledged the genre has been led by writers not born in India. Why and how has this happened?

India is devout. Thus, Indian biographers have to balance the impulse of devotion with the injunctions of biography writing. The word ‘hagiolatry,’ referring........

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