Relationship Between the Spiritual and the Secular: Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan

This article explores the repeated invocation of the spiritual by Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan. It attempts to understand the nature of the relationship they established between the spiritual and the secular domains while invoking the spiritual. The article argues that what was distinctive about frequent usage of the spiritual was its usage to articulate both the secular and the otherworldly goals in different ways. Moreover, none of them are strictly secular, if it means differentiation of the social and political domain from religion on the one hand and rise of ‘exclusive humanism’ on the other. For them, the domain of secular is the domain of realizing the spiritual. They are not two separate domains but constituted an integral whole where the activities of secular were defined and redefined in the light of the quest for the spiritual and vice versa