NETAJI AND SWAMIJI
I am sometimes carried away in my enthusiasm to call Netaji as great, sometimes even greater than Swamiji, so mesmerised I feel by the sheer luminosity of his character, career and contributions to India and to the world. Netaji's brilliance, one-pointed focus and superlative sacrifice for our motherland makes me feel this way. I cannot help wondering what it would have been like had the two titans, Swamiji and Netaji, met in person. Netaji has said that he would have been at Swamiji's feet then and I am convinced that this was no mere verbal rhetoric but was an articulation from the hero's lips which for sure would have been an accomplished fact were it to happen in real. I am convinced as well that Netaji must have had profound spiritual experiences in his life till 18 August, 1945 before he disappeared into the mist.
There was no power in the universe that could contain Swamiji and there was no power on earth that could contain Netaji. His epic life, his triumphant confrontation with the Mahatma, his unceremonious enforced abdication from duly elected Congress presidency, courtesy the machinations of the Mahatma and his coterie, his removal from the Congress itself, his befooling the British intelligence to stage the most daring escape from right under their nose, his arduous journey across the Himalayas in multiple disguise and, eventually, his reaching Kabul, Moscow and Berlin, his formation of the Free Indian Legion to wage war against British imperialism, his meeting the Fuhrer on equal terms and countering him daringly on several points of difference in perspective, his subsequent 90-day submarine journey across the war ravaged Atlantic and the Indian Oceans to reach Sumatra, his flight to Japan to seek alliance for the liberation of India, his formation, with the help of Rash Behari Bose and the Japanese, of the Indian National Army II and the Provisional Government of Free India, his final assault on the Anglo-American forces and entry into Imphal, his withdrawal with honour thereafter, and eventually, his sudden disappearance, all these are legendary feats that one comes across only in fiction or in epics, and which position our patriot premier on a pedestal where, perhaps, none may reach, a revolutionary redoubtable, a personality nonpareil.
Against this backdrop when I see Swamiji, I am overwhelmed, too. A college undergraduate then, desperately seeking the ultimate spiritual truth and finding sanctuary at the blessed feet of the peerless Paramahamsa, his arrival through trials and tribulations at the ultimate state of self-consciousness in Brahman at the Cossipore Garden House, his foundation of the Ramakrishna Order, his wanderjahre through the vast landmass of the motherland in his bid to discover the soul of India after he had discovered his own, his 'swimming to yonder point' in the Indian Ocean to meditate on the past, the present and the future of India, his mission across the seas to announce in trumpet voice the glad tidings of the Indian spirit in Chicago, his discovery of the soul of America, his articulation in modern terms the principles of the Sanatan Dharma, his virtual founding of the Hindu Dharma again after tracking it down from its ancient mountain moorings, from its forest florescence right to its intractable modern maze and setting it simple and profound before the peoples of the world, his reestablishment, thus, of India in the global imagination in clear concrete terms whence flowed the fertile fountain of a modern synthetic universal human culture, his return to India, a triumphant hero with tumultuous welcomes from Colombo to Almora and his enlivening, blazing lectures in response that awakened sleeping India from her age-old reverie and quickened her into 'life and freedom', his impact on the independence movement that forged revolutionaries of steel in the refractory crucible of the Vivekananda consciousness and liberated the motherland from the octopus-hold of British imperialism, his Complete Works which remain the Bible for future humanity, and his final sleep out of an act of Self-conscious self-willing at Belur Math, all these are the stuff of legend, the ancient epics brought alive in the modern thoroughfare of life.
Vivekananda was the synthetic embodiment of the past, the present and the future of world civilisation, for his was a cosmic spirit that traversed the confines of this puny world to help evolve it unto its destiny, his the soul serene in self-reflective meditation that determines the course and career of coarse humanity as it wends its way to spiritual fulfilment. Vivekananda embraced the whole of humanity and its entire civilisation in sprout and in seed. He stood tall among the ruins of the past to forge the future of the now-renascent humanity. His was the soul sublime, the Mozartian symphony of our times.
Subhas, ever at the feet of the leonine monk in his dreams and aspirations for enslaved motherland and humanity in colonial and imperial bondage, was the pupil perennial of the preceptor perfect, the 'kushalasya labdha' (adept receiver) of the 'ashcharya vakta' (wondrous speaker), to draw the allusion from that most poetic composition among the Upanishads, Swamiji's favourite Kathopanishad. His was a devotion that dared the heavens and brought upon earth the fountain of freedom even as his idol carried in his matted locks the river of the Ganga of spirituality and let it flood the world to gay abandon.
In Bengali the saying goes, 'Je jar chinta kore, shey taar sattva paye.' (Whosoever one thinks of, one assumes his nature.) So it must have been with Subhas. From boyhood contact with Vivekananda literature, when it inflamed his soul to traverse through the Himalayas in search of a spiritual preceptor who could guide him to God, to mature meditations on the works of the seminal Swami in his bid to solve the seemingly intractable political propositions that confronted the motherland and the world in its relation, Subhas and then Netaji followed the luminous Swami like the shadow that never leaves but ever approaches in its own diminution its leading bright source till the twain, thus far separated, unite and become one. So it was with Netaji as he unfailing followed his master, Vivekananda, and his master's master, Ramakrishna, to political and spiritual fulfilment, not for his own sake but for the sake of the wide world which was the charge he carried from the divine duo.
Written by Sugata Bose
I am sometimes carried away in my enthusiasm to call Netaji as great, sometimes even greater than Swamiji, so mesmerised I feel by the sheer luminosity of his character, career and contributions to India and to the world. Netaji's brilliance, one-pointed focus and superlative sacrifice for our motherland makes me feel this way. I cannot help wondering what it would have been like had the two titans, Swamiji and Netaji, met in person. Netaji has said that he would have been at Swamiji's feet then and I am convinced that this was no mere verbal rhetoric but was an articulation from the hero's lips which for sure would have been an accomplished fact were it to happen in real. I am convinced as well that Netaji must have had profound spiritual experiences in his life till 18 August, 1945 before he disappeared into the mist.
There was no power in the universe that could contain Swamiji and there was no power on earth that could contain Netaji. His epic life, his triumphant confrontation with the Mahatma, his unceremonious enforced abdication from duly elected Congress presidency, courtesy the machinations of the Mahatma and his coterie, his removal from the Congress itself, his befooling the British intelligence to stage the most daring escape from right under their nose, his arduous journey across the Himalayas in multiple disguise and, eventually, his reaching Kabul, Moscow and Berlin, his formation of the Free Indian Legion to wage war against British imperialism, his meeting the Fuhrer on equal terms and countering him daringly on several points of difference in perspective, his subsequent 90-day submarine journey across the war ravaged Atlantic and the Indian Oceans to reach Sumatra, his flight to Japan to seek alliance for the liberation of India, his formation, with the help of Rash Behari Bose and the Japanese, of the Indian National Army II and the Provisional Government of Free India, his final assault on the Anglo-American forces and entry into Imphal, his withdrawal with honour thereafter, and eventually, his sudden disappearance, all these are legendary feats that one comes across only in fiction or in epics, and which position our patriot premier on a pedestal where, perhaps, none may reach, a revolutionary redoubtable, a personality nonpareil.
Against this backdrop when I see Swamiji, I am overwhelmed, too. A college undergraduate then, desperately seeking the ultimate spiritual truth and finding sanctuary at the blessed feet of the peerless Paramahamsa, his arrival through trials and tribulations at the ultimate state of self-consciousness in Brahman at the Cossipore Garden House, his foundation of the Ramakrishna Order, his wanderjahre through the vast landmass of the motherland in his bid to discover the soul of India after he had discovered his own, his 'swimming to yonder point' in the Indian Ocean to meditate on the past, the present and the future of India, his mission across the seas to announce in trumpet voice the glad tidings of the Indian spirit in Chicago, his discovery of the soul of America, his articulation in modern terms the principles of the Sanatan Dharma, his virtual founding of the Hindu Dharma again after tracking it down from its ancient mountain moorings, from its forest florescence right to its intractable modern maze and setting it simple and profound before the peoples of the world, his reestablishment, thus, of India in the global imagination in clear concrete terms whence flowed the fertile fountain of a modern synthetic universal human culture, his return to India, a triumphant hero with tumultuous welcomes from Colombo to Almora and his enlivening, blazing lectures in response that awakened sleeping India from her age-old reverie and quickened her into 'life and freedom', his impact on the independence movement that forged revolutionaries of steel in the refractory crucible of the Vivekananda consciousness and liberated the motherland from the octopus-hold of British imperialism, his Complete Works which remain the Bible for future humanity, and his final sleep out of an act of Self-conscious self-willing at Belur Math, all these are the stuff of legend, the ancient epics brought alive in the modern thoroughfare of life.
Vivekananda was the synthetic embodiment of the past, the present and the future of world civilisation, for his was a cosmic spirit that traversed the confines of this puny world to help evolve it unto its destiny, his the soul serene in self-reflective meditation that determines the course and career of coarse humanity as it wends its way to spiritual fulfilment. Vivekananda embraced the whole of humanity and its entire civilisation in sprout and in seed. He stood tall among the ruins of the past to forge the future of the now-renascent humanity. His was the soul sublime, the Mozartian symphony of our times.
Subhas, ever at the feet of the leonine monk in his dreams and aspirations for enslaved motherland and humanity in colonial and imperial bondage, was the pupil perennial of the preceptor perfect, the 'kushalasya labdha' (adept receiver) of the 'ashcharya vakta' (wondrous speaker), to draw the allusion from that most poetic composition among the Upanishads, Swamiji's favourite Kathopanishad. His was a devotion that dared the heavens and brought upon earth the fountain of freedom even as his idol carried in his matted locks the river of the Ganga of spirituality and let it flood the world to gay abandon.
In Bengali the saying goes, 'Je jar chinta kore, shey taar sattva paye.' (Whosoever one thinks of, one assumes his nature.) So it must have been with Subhas. From boyhood contact with Vivekananda literature, when it inflamed his soul to traverse through the Himalayas in search of a spiritual preceptor who could guide him to God, to mature meditations on the works of the seminal Swami in his bid to solve the seemingly intractable political propositions that confronted the motherland and the world in its relation, Subhas and then Netaji followed the luminous Swami like the shadow that never leaves but ever approaches in its own diminution its leading bright source till the twain, thus far separated, unite and become one. So it was with Netaji as he unfailing followed his master, Vivekananda, and his master's master, Ramakrishna, to political and spiritual fulfilment, not for his own sake but for the sake of the wide world which was the charge he carried from the divine duo.
Written by Sugata Bose
No comments:
Post a Comment