Netaji was a preeminently spiritual person who for the time being consecrated his life for the liberation of his motherland from colonial shackles. His birth on 23 January, 1897 was just over a month after the landing of Swami Vivekananda on the soil of the subcontinent after his triumphant first visit to the West.
When Swamiji landed in Colombo and then in mainland India, Prabhavati Devi was carrying the babe -- who was to be the spirit of India's independence -- in her last month of gestation. The atmosphere in India was electric as the volcanic words of Vivekananda poured in from the West and lifted the spirit of dependent India to new heights of hope and energy with political activity taking a new turn towards increased radicalism and an uncompromising attitude towards subjugation by the British. The mother must have absorbed the waves as they hit her consciousness and passed them on to the babe lying in progressive animation within her womb. Thus, silently the first inroads into the citadels of British colonialism were made by the rising Indian consciousness as Swamiji made lightning progress through the vast terrain of the subcontinent with his thundering words of freedom. Prabhavati heard and so did the babe Subhas. The prenatal influence was deep and lasting as Subhas grew up to fulfil his nascent promise to unshackle his motherland from colonial bondage.
These are mere conjectures but our scriptures uphold these principles of prenatal influence upon the babe in the process of being, and modern medical science also corroborates this as a verified scientific fact.
The whole of India in 1897 was alive to the wave that was Vivekananda. In Lahore Swami Rama Tirtha gave up his mathematical career after hearing Swamiji for three days. He was so overwhelmed by the sage's lectures which he himself had overseen and brought into being in Lahore that he gave up his research to don the ochre and retire to the Himalayas whence he emerged an illumined saint. Another mathematician in South India got spiritually transformed after having touched Swamiji's feet when the sage was in the state of samadhi. Nivedita, likewise, was galvanised into revolutionary action in diverse spheres where she left her indelible mark and helped transform the fate of fallen India for good. So powerful was Swamiji's influence on her that she bled her way to an untimely death in her bid to give her all for her adopted motherland, India.
And all these happened in and around 1897, the year of the reorganisation of India by the Swami as he raced from end to end of India and poured forth the last reserves of his spirit to bring to life dying India. And like Lazarus India arose from her age-old slumber, responding to the clarion call which was sounded from every rampart of renascent India. Bagha Jatin met Swamiji around this time and was shaped by his fiery spirit into the redoubtable revolutionary he became. Rash Behari Bose absorbed likewise the spirit of the Swami but at a later date from this seminal year of 1897 when things were in the melt. However, Aurobindo Ghosh must have felt the current of the Swami's hurricane lectures across the length and breadth of the country as he was then located in India and was but brewing in the distillery of Baroda to emerge the lion whose roar shook the citadels of British India soon.
The times were turbulent with the Chapekar brothers carrying out Tilak's charge of active revolution to send the roguish Rand to the realm he belonged and brought upon themselves the noose which they kissed to unleash the force of freedom among the Bengal revolutionaries. In an interview with Tilak at Belur Math at the turn of the nineteenth century Swamiji joked that Bal Gangadharji ought to live in Bengal and Swamiji himself in Maharashtra to exchange the necessary forces of the spirit to activate both provinces in an equal measure. Swamiji that day, while strolling in the grounds of Belur Math with Tilak, had in an impassioned mood exclaimed, ''What India needs today is a bomb !" This single statement of Swami Vivekananda encapsulated his response to the perfidies of the times brought about by the British in India and must serve to be the factual defence against such assertions that he was, after all, the votary of the non-violent movement that was to surface in Gandhi two decades later.
And the bomb was born. On 23 January, 1897 itself Prabhavati Devi delivered the deliverer of India at Cuttack who was to be veritably the bomb that would explode on British colonialism and smash its citadels to smithereens.
Written by Sugata Bose
Sharmistha Chatterjee So well written to refurbish the whole history anew.
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