SARADESHWARI 3

It is hard to fathom who Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi was. She was the acme of feminine perfection, the prototype of the perfected woman for the Age and the fulfilment of all feminine aspirations long suppressed by the tyranny of the times, the oppressive culture of the patriarchal State. Holy Mother’s birth marks the advent of the New Age for woman if one is to put faith in her being the Universal Mother and that she had descended to our terrestrial plane to awaken the feminine power of humanity long suppressed but never quite obliterated by the persistent perversity of patriarchal power. Purity incarnate she was and this seems to encapsulate her message to humankind for in the very fragrance of her unsullied living lies the essence of her all-encompassing love for all of sentience. Mother she was, indeed, to all that came her way and to those who did not, she sent her benediction in her parting words of love, pulsations of which echo even today and will do so through the corridors of time as she gathers up her children, errant as they are, to set the course of evolution straight here on strife-stricken Earth. All these may sound to the rationally bent as effusions of the devout having little semblance to the pervasive reality and utterly incongruous in terms of dimensional estimations. But the heart never counts its beats as it throbs to the pulsations of love nor do inspirations of the Spirit seek exactitude in numbers but are content to flood the banks of the soul, bathing it in ineffable bliss. So are these heart-felt assertions of the devotee and they gain their sanction from the life-transforming power that he experiences from the loving memory of Holy Mother who never fails to reciprocate the love in an immeasurably greater abundance.

And this brings us to this singular feature of Holy Mother --- love. She was veritably the incarnation of motherly love in all its sublimity, in all its pervasiveness, a love that enfolded in its arms all of sentience from the prophet-like children of Ramakrishna to the lowliest of humanity in the garb of the sweeper or the convict. Her love knew no bounds and gently overflowed to all around, never in gushes or wild flourishes but ever like the nourishing dew-drop, like the coolness of the autumn breeze, like the first rays of the morning sun, to awaken the fortunate ones to life eternal, a veritable springtime of harvest of yesterdeeds and future possibilities brought to attention in the moment. So natural a garb she wore in love that all recognised their own mother in her who emphatically, on the rarest of occasions, was heard to disclose her true identity as the Universal Mother who has borne us all. Again, this may seem to be the facile averment of the devout that seeks hyperbolic affirmations of his beliefs and may seem grotesque to the rationally inclined with his empirical limits of statistical estimations but such is the recorded experience of many a devotee, perfectly sound in mind and body and with no disreputable history of fact-distortion or tale-concoction and who, for truth’s sake, have gone on to disclose their self-witnessed revelations of the Holy Mother as the Mother Goddess Jagaddhatri, Kali and the like on occasions when she chose to shake off her mortal garb for a moment out of her own boundless grace for her child. And all this she did out of her limitless compassion for her children on Earth, suffering, as they do, the three-fold agony of human life.

There was a softness to Holy Mother’s character, a sweetness of nature that permeated her whole being and lent it a refreshing feminine grace despite her considerable rustic background, also an aristocratic bearing with a catholicity of understanding and appreciation of the diverse cultures of peoples, almost with an innate, spontaneous perception that endeared her to all who came across her, and which marks her out as the prototype of the ideal modern woman of present and future humanity. Her innate simplicity, immaculate purity, loftiness of thought and bearing, and the subterranean current of incessant love for her divine husband which eventually overflowed in cascading terms for all of humanity, set her up as the acme of perfection of awakened womanhood of modern times, nay, of all times, and one dares to hazard that she is the descent of the Divine Mother among fallen humanity to set things right, in especial, the plight of the purest emblem of her own self, the woman of all races and climes, depressed, ravaged, despised, the bearers of the freshest flowers of humanity lying in abject misery, whose very birth is in many a clime considered ominously evil and whose existence at birth is nipped and nullified to negate the oncoming familial misfortune.

Such is our Holy Mother, holier than the Ganga, purer than purity itself, the essence of sweetness whose aroma pervaded her entire being and drew all to her from the prophet to the pariah who she embraced in her unsurpassed maternal love, the awakener of the spiritual consciousness of fallen man, the emancipator of womankind, the hope of humanity as it traverses its path of error impelled by the blind fury of the times but never quite failing to know that there is a mother waiting for all with open arms in whose love there is neither ebb nor flow and who will lift up her errant child in the fullness of time when his play is over at last. Jai Ma!