IN RESPONSE TO A READER'S THESIS THAT REVOLUTION IS RIFE EVEN NOW, THE FIRE LIT BY THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS BURNS BRIGHT STILL ... 1

But for that, Sir, an unbounded feeling for the motherland and an unassailable strength of character in the revolutionary is required, both being qualities in absence in the current crop of so-called revolutionaries. However, your idea in essence is absolutely valid for revolution is an ongoing process which knows no abating. Only it is a simmering phenomenon while in bud or in germination and manifests only in volcanic flow when times are propitious, the people are ready and the leader arrives to guide its direction. The idea matures in the fullness of time and great oppression hastens its advent when a people arise to shake off the 'sterile curse' of a consumptive civilisation and revolves round to alter its fate, when destiny is determined by the collective will of the masses and the existing order like a paper palace is rent and reduced to nothingness by the mighty stir of the populace that like an avalanche advances to reshape the existing order of things.

Such a historic moment freed us from colonial clutches when the Indian National Army led by Netaji directed our liberation. World War II provided the setting for the final assault when a debilitated people, suffering the yoke of a thousand-year domination by foreigners in the form of the barbarous Muslim invaders and the exploitative, perfidious British thereafter, revolved under the directorship of Netaji to free the country and set its future rolling once more in the direction intended by the Rishis (perfected seers of Truth), along the path of its natural evolution, unhindered by foreign occupation and its concomitant oppression. Netaji's armed revolution came as the climax to what had been simmering under the surface cover of political propriety given mass formation by that other great revolutionary, Gandhiji, to whom we owe our national awakening largely for it was he who had quickened the pulse of the nation at large in the first instance and carried forward the mass movement to its inevitable final confrontation with the conquering colonialist but shied away from striking the coup de grace in the form of revolutionary violence to uproot it from our soil on grounds of ideological compulsion and philosophical bankruptcy.

The Bengal boys, under the express inspiration of Swami Vivekananda who was in favour of a combined thrust of violent and non-violent force to oust the British from India, exhibited manhood enough to set the ball of revolutionary activity rolling and up came valorous souls like Kshudiram Bose, Prafulla Chaki, Aurobindo Ghosh, Barindra Ghosh, Bagha Jatin, Hemchandra Ghosh, Rashbehari Bose and a host of others, too countless to enumerate, who spilled their life's blood to shake the British Empire to its foundations and make it quit capital from convulsive Calcutta to a more temperate New Delhi.

Nivedita, protege and ideological inheritor of Vivekananda, was the great linkman between the departed prophet-patriot (to quote his revolutionary younger brother, Bhupendranath Dutta) and the Bengal revolutionaries. Herself an Irishwoman suffering the yoke of subjugation under the British, this leonine soul upheld the Swami's political philosophy ardently to provide the upsurge of nationalism in Bengal with the necessary philosophical basis and spiritual sanction as enshrined in the aspirations of the victorious Vivekananda whose volcanic personality had earlier set fire to the Celtic blood boiling in her veins. The result was that the Bengal boys found in her a living mother who embodied the otherwise disembodied ideal of nationalism. Ireland conspired with ignited India to free her from her colonial bondage. The Oriental hyperbole notwithstanding, the Irish free spirit in Nivedita synthesised with the Vedantic vision imbibed from her Master, laid the foundation of the national movement which through the terrible turbulence of the times led to our truncated freedom at midnight with a mutilated mother with arms amputated and trunk left bleeding with the wounds of her severed self. Had our leaders like Gandhi heeded her political mandate in time, it might have been a different saga altogether and the vision of Swamiji's united India would have been realised.

Alas! that was not to be for the Sister perished of hunger and disease, poverty and neglect, an overwhelmed heart, an overheated brain and an agonised soul that found neither friend nor solace in its solitary suffering for the commonweal, save in Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose and his wife, Lady Abala Bose, much before the fruition of her dream of a free India that would be the nerve-centre of human society for the coming millenium, the spiritual preceptor of the modern world and the seat of civilisation for future humanity.

Nivedita's contribution to the freedom movement, however downplayed institutionally for political expediency and as cover for historical imperatives, shines like the midday sun which may not be dimmed by mushrooming monsoon clouds. A solitary figure in those early days of awakening Bengal, Nivedita circuited the length and breadth of dependent India exhorting the sleeping masses to revolutionary action. Her mission transformed, from being a mere educator of a handful of Hindu girls to mass awakener of subjugated India, Nivedita attained to revolutionary fulfilment in line with her innate tendencies and in keeping with her understanding of what her Guru would have wanted out of her in those treacherous times when India struggled to be free of the British yoke and suffered relentlessly for it.

As the nation gears up to celebrate the sesquicentennial year of Sister Nivedita's advent on earth, it behoves us to remember that this Irishwoman of supreme selflessness and unimpeachable sincerity, who had dedicated her body, mind and soul to the cause of India's redemption, was much more than a mere educator of schoolgirls or even a protagonist of women's education in India. She was the very soul of bleeding India in those turbulent days of revolution when a suppressed people, long muted, found utterance in her organ voice and the spirit of India soared to its pristine heights to seek independence from material bondage whence she could fly to ethereal realms to fulfil her age-old aspiration of union of the heavens and the earth.

Long live revolution! Jai Hind!

End of Part 1
To be continued...