THE ARMED REVOLUTION FOR FREEDOM ... 2

THE ARMED REVOLUTION FOR FREEDOM ... 2

I am convinced that Swamiji's best followers took to armed revolution to liberate the motherland from colonial shackles and the next order of followers took to monastic vows. This is yet again a personal deep feeling induced over the years by the study of both sets of personalities who followed Swamiji and in their own ways dedicated their lives to doing his bidding. The former category's supreme sacrifice of life and everything it entailed, ever holding on to the high idealism of securing the freedom of the motherland at any personal cost -- torture, torment, privation, imprisonment, deportation or hanging by the noose -- is unmatched by any form of spiritual sacrifice for personal liberty while engaging in service to humanity. 'The earth's bravest and best will eternally have to sacrifice themselves' were the words that had flown out of the molten mass that had become Swamiji's heart in witnessing the depraved condition of his fallen countrymen in bondage to the British. And who fulfilled this aspiration of his better than the revolutionaries who laughingly gave up their lives and endured indescribable torture at the hands of the British police but never for once compromised their cause save for the odd traitor who made common cause with the enemy to make the suffering of the truer ones all the more shining in sacrificial glory?

It is true that Swamiji did keep his spiritual mission explicitly clear of all association with politics which in the then terms was the national struggle for freedom. His was a complex world mission where the balancing act of the national and the global, the temporary and the perennial, the material and the spiritual had to be maintained in a most delicate equilibrium for it to conduce to the highest human good in both the short term and in the long term with contradictory considerations conflicting with the harmony he was enjoined to establish at the behest of his divine Master. Small wonder it is that Romain Rolland has dubbed him, thus, as the highest human harmony in terrestrial existence where the forces are ever pitted against each other in a manner as to prevent such a possibility. And yet it was made manifest in this harmonic being of Vivekananda.

But such a harmony is neither easily come by nor easily translated into action from its potential state in personality. Far more difficult it is for followers to comprehend the drift of the seminal one's being and to adhere to his directives, spoken and left unspoken. It is here that a modicum of genius in the disciple is as well necessary to apprehend the flow of the Master's thoughts even as Swamiji had exhibited in relation to his preceptor and Nivedita, after him, in relation to hers. But to do so is a rarity, for a succession of geniuses is rarely come by in the natural order of things and, more often than not, disciples distort the original import of the message of the Master on account of their mediocre understanding of it and to suit practical considerations in the translation of the message into active service in the social realm. The river, thus, starts meandering right from its glacial source and with the lapse of time is drawn into the desert-sand of lowly materialism for the sheer necessity of organic survival. The ideals are lost, the message misinterpreted and the Master rendered into a statue in marble or bronze with replicas of the original duplicating their image aberrations everywhere as the Mission spreads with diluting spiritual intensity.

This is one element of the discussion. The other is the aspect of sheer valour. At a time when the motherland was in colonial shackles, when her children were en masse being decimated by economic depredation by the British, ceaseless famine consequent on ill-governance and brutal torture inflicted on any protesting voice, 'the earth's bravest and best' would definitely not take to relatively passive renunciation but would plunge into the active struggle to secure independence. Thus have I ventured to call these fairest flowers of humanity the best followers of Swamiji, even ahead of his initiated spiritual disciples who took to the spiritual life of the monastic. The valour they exhibited was nonpareil. Only Nivedita among Swamiji's disciples matched it. None else, none else. She alone stood tall among the apparent ruins of her convent life to embrace India with all her arms even unto its widest grasp. Few understood the full significance of her decision to maintain strong political links with the revolutionaries and few do so even today as the penchant for painting her primarily as an educationist for womenfolk in India continues to downplay her revolutionary attributes and activities.

Nivedita was the interface between Swamiji's spiritual side and his revolutionary element, ever held in a high-strung harmony impossible for lesser mortals. Like her Guru she also synthesised multiple strands of her character in a rare harmony and proved to be Swamiji's best exemplar in seminal activity in the then constrained conditions of colonised India. This brought her into direct conflict with the Mission's stated stand of absolute dissociation from politics. When summoned by the President of the Order, Swami Brahmananda, and exhorted by him to abjure politics, Nivedita explained that her understanding of Swamiji had prompted her to take up her stand for India's political emancipation. The dialogue ended in a deadlock and Nivedita was asked to part with the Order officially by issuing a Press statement to the effect, which she did. Cordial relations at a personal level continued between the Ramakrishna Mission and this Irish disciple of the father of Indian revolution till Nivedita breathed her last in 1911. But the settlement in severance of official association with the Ramakrishna Order was momentous in historic significance and laid the foundations for a future understanding of the cyclonic monk (Vivekananda) in an altered light.

This was the grand departure, the exit of Nivedita from the standard narrative of what would otherwise have been in all probability the toothless figure of Swamiji masquerading as a monk of no consequence in the liberation of India, a narrative that would have perpetuated in public memory and, so, failed to inspire a generation of revolutionaries but for the timely intervention of the Irish disciple whose personal participation in the freedom struggle and interpretation of her Master's message in revolutionary terms much more than mere spiritual terms alone, that set the tone of a grander and more encompassing Vivekananda ideal.

And, so, the revolutionaries came to kiss the hangman's noose, having been baptised into fire by the cyclonic monk and her leonine protege. These were the heroes of the hour, the moths that flew straight to the fire to enter into the life immortal, the bees that not merely buzzed but stung as well, sending in the acid current that corroded the hold of the Crown on the jewel bedecking it. These were, indeed, the best disciples of the Swami at a distance, young men and women who fired at the evil empire to bring about its eventual doom. The others spoke high of spiritual valour, preached from the pulpit the highest principles of divinity which they in austere terms exhibited in their lives to build for posterity the edifice of a civilisation long dormant but now reconstructed on the secure foundations of an ancient order. But none among them so manifestly devoted themselves to shun cowardice of all kinds and embrace the thorny path of revolution which would fulfil the required conditions for the building of such a Vivekananda-Vedanta order of an enlightened, free citizenry. This the revolutionaries inspired by Swamiji did and that is why they deserve the epithet of being the best followers of the volcanic monk.

Written by Sugata Bose