VIVEKANANDA -- A VOICE WITHOUT FORM ... 1

VIVEKANANDA -- A VOICE WITHOUT FORM ... 1

Blessed were the parents who gave birth to Vivekananda. Vishwanath Dutta and Bhuvaneshwari Devi were those blessed parents of the incarnate soul of humanity, Narendranath Dutta, whose advent on 12 January, 1863, just six years after the great War of Indian Independence, marked the beginning of a new age. Perhaps, the cry of agonised humanity groaning under the heels of oppressive imperialism, colonial capitalism and growing materialism, awakened the Great Monarch of Mercy who descended as the Saviour of humanity, what in Indian parlance is called the Avatar. Yes, Swami Vivekananda is the Avatar of the Age.

Those were turbulent times. The East India Company had brought India to her knees after the failed attempt by the Indian kings to free the motherland of colonial yoke and the Queen's Proclamation of 1858 had formally brought India within the imperial realm of Britain. India had been enslaved completely with the Princely States numbering in the hundreds merely being vassals to the British Crown. India was in imminent danger of cultural capitulation as the imperial colonists with their tripartite machinery of merchant, missionary and military set to sealing her fate in a comprehensive manner.

The thesis was invariably to find its antithesis in the Indian awakening that followed and up rose the stalwarts of the Bengal Renaissance in Rammohan, Vidyasagar, Derozio and the like but the response to the challenges of the times needed a character entirely Indian and not an apologetic one of sorts that adjusted and accommodated the alien culture as the dominant one and could not accept the Indian culture, ancient and existing then as the basis for reformist growth. Denunciation of India's customs became the order of the reformers even as they set about ordering the polity according to their fractional conceptions which rejected more of India than accepted with the result that these elitist movements could scarce gain a foothold in the imagination of the masses. They remained confined to privileged circles largely and India waited as yet the birth of the Avatar who would deliver her from her colonial consequence that threatened to destroy her religion through proselytising Christianity, her commerce through rapacious exploitation and her independence through imposed imperialism.

Macaulay's 'Minutes on Education' which came into effect from 1836 set about refurbishing the indigenous academic structure by supplanting the existent Gurukula system with a European system specially designed to churn out a class of clerks who would serve British interests. The master plan had been laid and awaited execution. India was being meticulously undermined and her cultural strengths eroded by introduction of systemic changes which would have far-reaching consequences.

For a millennium India had been invaded, marauded and enslaved in a very large measure by Muslim conquerors from alien lands. Their invasion was followed by cultural despotism as well as the Sanatan Dharma was throttled in large parts and Islam imposed by force on the subjugated masses. Hindu society was also largely to blame as undue privilege accompanied social stratification along lines of the Varna, what is European parlance was erroneously dubbed as the caste system, an incorrect epithet that persists to this day. This fragmentation of the Hindu polity along lines of the Varna and its endless subdivisions, instead of anymore serving to harmonise social functioning and allow for organisational and executive excellence, was the cause of terrible tyranny of the privileged over the poor and the dispossessed and the consequent weakness of the polity that it entailed. The result was the conquest of India by rising Islamic power and their horrendous tyranny of the sword to convert India to their new-found faith. By the time Narendranath was born in 1863 a quarter of the Hindus had been converted to the Arabic faith. India was groaning under Islamic tyranny when the Europeans unleashed their savage colonial-imperial power. India, choking under alien cultural dominance, needed to yet survive and see an effloscent dawn.

But the genesis of the problem had started earlier in Buddhist decadence. Buddha's denunciation of the ritualistic section (Karma Kanda) of the Vedas and his upholding of its knowledge section (Jnana Kanda) was misconstrued by his followers as a total repudiation of the Vedas which began the great schism in the Indian polity. Buddha's reticence in making his philosophical position absolutely clear rather than letting it be merely a pragmatic approach to Truth allowed for future misinterpretation by his followers. This was inevitable and gradually widened the rift between the orthodox Sanatan Dharma and the Buddhist Dharma. Moreover, Buddhism, being the first proselytising world religion, converted two-thirds of the Hindu population to its fold, never by force but by royal patronage, persuasion and personality.

Yes, there was truly no force in proselytising save that of noble precepts, noble practice and noble life that attracted masses of downtrodden Hindus to its fold to escape Brahmanical tyranny and live a life of equality, fair play and justice. But the tensions were developing between Buddhism and Hinduism as two out of every three erstwhile Hindus had been weaned away from the Mother-faith unto its rebel all-conquering offspring. Hinduism had to survive and the decadence that had set in the body of Buddhism following hideous body-bound practices of Buddhist Vamachar offered just the opportunity needed for Hinduism to strike back. And to the south of the Vindhyas rose the wonder boy, Shankaracharya.

Shankaracharya had a two-fold task at hand. One was to defeat the Buddhists in philosophic disputation and the other was to uphold the primacy of the knowledge section (Jnana Kanda) of the Vedas over that of its ritualistic section (Karma Kanda). Thus, a double-pronged disputation ensued with the Buddhists on one hand and the adherents of the Karma Kanda on the other which eventually saw the triumph of Shankara's philosophical position and the re-emergence of orthodox Hinduism in all its pristine purity.

End of Part 1

To be serialised and continued...

Written by Sugata Bose

18Sharmistha Chatterjee, Subhrajyoti Bhowmick and 16 others

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