RAMAKRISHNA ... THE SILENT REVOLUTIONARY 1

Ramakrishna came for the masses. Thus was he born in a poor man's family. Like the illiterate masses, he chose to remain almost illiterate and spoke in the language of the people which all could understand.

To break down the barriers of the divisive caste-system that plagued society, the boy Gadadhar took his first alms after the sacred thread ceremony from a low-caste woman, his mother's mid-wife, Dhani Kamarini despite severe remonstrances from his orthodox Brahman family. In later life, during his days of spiritual austerity, Ramakrishna cleaned up the toilet of the sweeper Rasik with his long matted hair to sweep aside any vestige of caste-notion he may have had. A Brahman cleaning the toilet of an untouchable with his own hair!

Women suffered a sub-status with respect to men throughout the world in those days, especially in socially underdeveloped countries like India. They had been reduced to procreative machines with their youth wasted solely in child-bearing and child-rearing and all their creative faculties stifled or stilled. Ramakrishna sought out a unique way in redressing this situation. He took up a woman Guru, the erudite Bhairavi Brahmani who was the embodiment of the four Vedas, he stayed in the temple garden complex of Dakshineshwar which was owned by a rich landlady of Kolkata, Rani Rashmoni by name, and he stayed on there for 29 years to worship the Mother Goddess Kali. Finally, on the Phalaharini Kali Puja day of 1872, Ramakrishna set the seal on his worship of divinity in the human feminine form when he worshipped his own wife Saradamani as the Divine Mother.

When in later life Ramakrishna pronounced that a devotee had no caste and went about practising his theory in the heart of caste-ridden Kolkata by urging his devotees and disciples to arrange for festivals centring him where all were welcome to sit together and have prasad (sanctified food), he created a silent social revolution. Owing to these liberal spiritual gatherings, gradually the hold of casteism relaxed in Kolkata, the heart of British India.

Ramakrishna freely mixed with members of all religious denominations and exchanged spiritual ideas with them thereby enriching his social culture and expanding his spiritual dimensions as also revivifying these schools of spiritual thinking that were stagnating. The most revolutionary step of Ramakrishna's life was however when he, for days, practised Islam and Christianity by turns and gained illumination along these paths thus pronouncing the famous dictum : As many faiths, so many paths.

What more shall I say but to conclude that never has the world seen such a spiritual phenomenon as Ramakrishna who in catholicity of spirit, sweetness of nature, depth of feeling and sublimity of consciousness scaled spiritual peaks far higher than humankind has ever had access to and worked up a silent revolution in human thinking whose fruition we shall see in the millenium that is unfolding before us.

Jai Ramakrishna!