NIVEDITA --- A REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE ... 1

Nivedita read Vivekananda well and gave expression to his revolutionary aspirations for freedom. Alas, she must be studied in a robust light and not merely in the typical manner projected by certain quarters that she was, after all, mainly an educationist championing the woman's cause for life and light. Nivedita was surely that but much more. Her Irish descent and love of freedom made her the perfect vehicle for the propagation of Vivekananda's revolutionary ideas. Swamiji's statements in the final phase of his epic life were loaded with revolutionary content and Nivedita and the Bengal revolutionaries read deep into their import.

The disciple extraordinaire stands luminous in the pages of history as the real interpreter of all of Vivekananda's aspirations for his motherland and for humanity at large. While other disciples did not have the necessary fire in their belly to espouse the cause of the Swami in its totality and they cannot be faulted for that, for they pursued the spiritual line of his teachings which was far removed from all connection with politics, Margaret Elizabeth Noble was of a different fibre altogether and Swamiji very much knew it. Accordingly, the leonine monk gave off his repertoire of teachings to this fiery young woman of ardent aspirations. He proceeded step by step to destroy all her preconceptions of colonial and imperial glory, all her hangovers of past associations with Empire as subject and participant in a remote sense, and replaced them with new impressions of the glory of eternal India which now lay in bondage and had to be liberated for the overall renaissance of humanity. Vivekananda found in Nivedita a receptive interpreter of his ideas and a magazine of explosive potential. He, accordingly, trained her to be his heiress in the programme of the total transformation of the human species among which lay his cherished dream of the liberation of his motherland as its primary and preliminary project.
While the spiritual organisation founded by Vivekananda distanced itself from all political connections and it was Vivekananda himself who had laid it down as the cardinal content of its constitution, the monk extraordinaire was a larger than life figure and could not remain oblivious of or aloof to his countrymen's humiliation in colonial custody. He spat venom against the perfidies of the times in so many of his volcanic statements which fuelled the future revolution in India and spelled the doom of colonialism the world over. While his spiritual associates remained outside the ambit of his larger aspirations for humanity, his total programme of human development which left out no strand of human endeavour, and contented themselves in giving form to his socio-spiritual ideas, this Irish disciple of his of Celtic blood absorbed him in all his universal sweep, and trod the times, an intrepid pilgrim of the soul who gave utterance to her Master's aspirations for freedom to future India. She traversed the length and breadth of the land to waken the slumbering soul of India to political action for freedom.
And what was wrong in it, what so profane about it that made her a much misunderstood messiah of her adopted motherland's masses? Nivedita stood upright at a time in open defence of Empire when other luminaries of the times in subjugated India dared not openly oppose the regime that had reduced 'the descendants of gods and sages' to becoming 'next-door neighbours to brutes'.