For, it was at this conclave of the finest minds of the fin de siecle that Swami Vivekananda had declared: ``If anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion would soon be written, in spite of resistance, Help and not Fight, Assimilation and not Destruction, Harmony and Peace, and not Dissension.''

Nowhere is the catholicity of Hinduism expressed more eloquently than in the Shivamahima Stotra, which the swami quoted in his inaugural address. Thestotra states: ``You alone are the object of all human quest, the way all rivers merge into the ocean. They follow straight or winding paths because their tastes happen to vary.'' Vivekananda highlighted the stotra to emphasise the point he subsequently made in his speech: ``We do not merely tolerate all religions, but accept them all to be true.'' He was merely re-stating the philosophy of his guru, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa, who, in one of his famous Bengali epigrams, had said: ``Jato mat, tato path (there are as many ways as there are creeds).''

In an inimitably folksy analogy, Ramakrishna had commented, pointing to rain water coming out of gargoyles at a disciple's house, that different people have different words for water, but water doesn't change its character from one place to another. As Vivekananda explained to one of his first American disciples, Ole Bull: ``My master used to tell us that Hindu, Christian, etc, are but different names of the same truth. They are barriers to fraternal feelingsbetween human beings.... Even the best among us behave like monsters under their evil influence.'' Ramakrishna not only believed in this core principle of sarvadharma sambhava, but also participated in Islamic and Christian rituals in his life -- a point made by Max Mueller in his well-known essay on Ramakrishna.

Not surprisingly, as historian Tapan Raychaudhuri illustrates in Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation Of Hinduism, an anthology edited by William Radice, the Ramakrishna Movement's mouthpiece Brahmavadin carried translations from religious texts in Arabic and Persian ``as the basis for an inquiry into the fundamental truth underlying all scriptures.'' Non-Hindu disciples of the Ramakrishna Movement, in fact, are not required to convert to Hinduism, in line with what the famous disciple had to say about his master: ``He was the one who would resolve all conflicts all distinctions, between Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Hindus, all these disappeared. Those sectarian conflicts belong toanother age; in this age of truth, everything is submerged in the flood of his love.''

Vivekananda, clearly, doesn't belong to those who have appropriated him today. As he did not in his time, when he refused to atone (unlike the young Gandhi) for having `crossed the seven seas', or when he spoke up for the Age of Consent Bill and found himself ranged against a phalanx of conservatives, or when he expressed his great admiration for Pandita Ramabai, a Hindu widow who had converted to Christianity and became a tireless crusader for women's emancipation, though he had sought to correct the image of Indian women being projected by the Ramabai Circle in America.

And even as he did all this, his faith in Hinduism was unshakeable, which gave him the confidence to declare: ``Let the missionaries of Christ come to India by the hundreds and thousands. Let Him be preached in every village and corner of India.''