VIVEKANANDA AND THOSE VOLCANIC DAYS ... 1

Born with a blinding brilliance and bred with a bleeding heart witnessing the barbarism of the British on his hapless countrymen, Subhas soared to a spiritual sanctity early in life whose derivative was necessarily patriotic fervour in those days rife with revolution in the air.

Ramakrishna had lit the flame and Vivekananda was born to spark off the mighty conflagration that would consume the colonists and free the peoples of the world suffering the yoke of British imperialism for centuries. The hero was done with his marathon run when he lay stretched on the pyre short of his fortieth birthday.

But the flame that he lit blew into a forest fire, burning the dross and engendering a forest of ideas that met the British masters head on in ideological terms and challenged them in the field of action with a war cry that sent them shuddering into the refuge of divisive politics to contain the conflagration. When Bagha Jatin, Hemchandra Ghosh, Aurobindo Ghosh and the redoubtable Sister Nivedita were inspired by Swamiji's message of freedom through fearlessness and service to the motherland, the thunderbolt that was to strike the British had already been been set on course and it was but moments before the Mahatma would emerge from behind the scenes to carry forward the programme of political revolution, albeit, in a direction different from the earlier robust revolutionary activity and along a more mass-based gentler variation that suited the temperament of the docile Indian masses, so some critics claim. Was it opposed to the vision of revolution as envisaged by Vivekananda? Certainly not. For his was a vision far larger than a Gandhi or a Bose or an Aurobindo to give fullest expression to and, so, all these experiments in expulsion of the British were but fractional applications of the universal vision of the prophet patriot.

Subhas was born in 1897 in the very year Swami Vivekananda roared from Colombo to Almora, giving the clarion call for the freedom of the soul from the shackles of Maya. The atmosphere of India was surcharged with the sublimity of the sage, the hero who had broken his own chains only to find his motherland fettered to a malevolent machinery that was eating into the vitals of the nation and stripping it bare of all dignity and decency, rendering the children of Annapurna famished and destitute. The times were turbulent, the policy of the British masters perfidious and the air reeking of the rot that had set in on the festering corpse of colonialism. The Congress was pleading and petitioning with their protagonists, their British masters, as the plight of the people plummeted to pathetic proportions sending millions to hunger, disease, death and despair, and the diabolical doubt if ever they were to be rid of the octopus-hold of the white supremacist that had ruined their life in every possible way.

It is into this volatile atmosphere, pregnant with the possibilities of a revolution to evict the British, that Swamiji descended, preaching his gospel of equality, service and social raising-up in the light of the universal Upanishads. The British were quick to scent danger and responded by setting the intelligence on his trail but dared not touch him for fear of a violent uprising in the light of the prestige the prophet commanded in the hearts of his people.

End of Part 1
To be continued...