Vivekananda’s views on culture and national unity evolved in response to the nineteenth-century efforts to reform India. In the nineteenth century, reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy and Dayananda Saraswati targeted diverse social arenas, including education, women’s rights, economics, and the judicial system. Furthermore, they recognized the need to synthesize Western and Indian cultural influences to promote social change. Vivekananda, too, recognized that India needed to learn from the West to achieve material progress. However, he warned against accepting Western ideas uncritically because doing so would erode the Indian or Hindu culture. According to Vivekananda, the West’s theme was material progress and military conquest, whereas India’s theme was centered on religion and renunciation. The West was outward-looking. In contrast, India was introspective. Therefore, Vivekananda asserted that social change in India must occur through religion and be compatible with the nation’s social order. He believed that political ideas and social activism were ineffective in reforming India.