A LIFE LIVED TO PERFECTION ... 2

Nivedita remains a singular character in the recent history of India. She is India's forgotten heroine. This leonine Irishwoman who dedicated her life to the cause of this country is well-nigh erased from public memory, thanks to the authorities who have been in charge of preserving her legacy for posterity. As we step into the sesquicentennial year of her advent on earth, we ought to pledge to undo this grave injustice to our national cause in allowing such a state of oblivion of our great ones to precipitate. It does us no good to forget the great and not to remember the very greatest of them --- an epithet that adorns Nivedita admirably well ---, harms us immeasurably, for it cuts us off from our virile base of patriotism, our roots in history, our sense of belonging to a common heritage of service and sacrifice that fetched us freedom at no distant date from the Sister's demise. The Indian Government ought to adequately honour the great patriot in her sesquicentennial year and, so, set a trend of rightful recognition of all our honourable ones, men and women who have laid down life and labour at the altar of the motherland to bring her to freedom and fruition. Of these, Sister Nivedita, that leonine protege of Swami Vivekananda, occupies pride of place, for in those years of volcanic revolutionary activity sweeping across the country, especially, the Presidency of Bengal, she held the ideological reins of the movement with such intrepid fervour that her Irish antecedents would have been proud of. The question that confronts us now is this : Are we equally proud of our motherland even as the Sister was whose adopted home it was, and, are we then prepared to pay our homage to her in a befitting manner that posterity will not dare level charges of ingratitude on us?

Nivedita is no more. But we are there to perpetuate her memory and make her live among us, her spirit inspiring us to higher attainments, nobler aspirations and sublime sacrifices for our motherland whose liberation from the shackles of colonial bondage was her earthly dream, whose transformation into the future India of hope and light was her heavenly vision. And, to achieve it all, she lived in the hell of this world, far away from her own people, in dire poverty and physical misery, for her very subsistence also she would dispense for the national cause, such was her love for her India. Such dedication to the nation's cause has only once more been seen thereafter and that was witnessed in that other epic life, that of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. And yet, it must be remembered that Netaji was no less inspired by Vivekananda, who he considered his spiritual guru at a distance, as was Nivedita and there lies the common link binding the twain. Moreover, every revolutionary in post-Vivekananda era had fallen under the spell of this redoubtable Irishwoman who listened to her conscience alone and to none else, and that conscience dictated to her a different reading of her preceptor and his message which resulted in her alienation in person, though never in spirit, from her parent spiritual body, the Ramakrishna Mission, which chose to distance itself from her then supposedly seditious activities directed at ousting the British from India. Much controversy reigns over this episode of the Sister's isolation from the Mission and only time will clarify the murkiness that defines it in many a mind even now. But her spirit that had felt the oneness of Brahman in Almora in 1901 when she had gazed into the vast void of the Absolute in fulfilment of her Guru's benediction on her, could not be partitioned into components that could be fitted into institutional compartments. She, thus, overrode all circumstantial encumbrances to carry out her own mission, her Master's mission in her mind, to free India from all forms of bondage of which political slavery served to secure supreme significance.

Those were heady days as Bengal erupted against Curzon and his bid to partition the State. Vivekananda was dead but his spirit animated the youth of Bengal as they broke out in open fury against the British Raj. Tagore took to the streets tying the fraternal bond of union (rakhi) between the severed halves of Bengal. Swadeshi and Boycott ruled the roost even as extreme activities of terror perpetrated periodically against British officers forced the Raj to rethink its decision to fracture the land of Bengal. It was the sagacity of Nivedita, her philosophical maturity, ideological clarity and her unflagging energy, optimism and leonine spirit that had guided many a revolutionary through the turbulent times when Bengal was aflame with the call to freedom and the British had not the means to douse the flame. Bengal was reunited in 1911 and the British called it quits here as they shifted capital to New Delhi. Bengal had become too hot a seat for the barbarous British who received their own medicine in copious doses from the young revolutionaries they chose to term 'terrorists'. Kshudiram died on the gallows to set up the standard of youthful valour in the national cause. Aurobindo Ghosh fled British Indian territory to seek refuge in Pondicherry, then a French colony. These antithetical events all found harmony, however, in Nivedita who remained to all of India, 'the mistress, servant, friend in one' as her Guru had envisaged.

There is so much more to Nivedita than this short essay can depict. This is a feeble attempt from a fallible hand. Others more able will surely write treatises on this incomparable Irishwoman who had so identified with her adopted country that she has set for all of India the benchmark of eligibility for being called a true Indian. Born 28 October, 1867, Nivedita was laid to rest on 13 October, 1911. Barely two months later, Bengal was re-unified.