ONLY RAMAKRISHNA-VIVEKANANDA ACCEPTED IT ALL

ONLY RAMAKRISHNA-VIVEKANANDA ACCEPTED IT ALL

It is a pity that other than Ramakrishna and Vivekananda no other great men of modern India accepted Hindu spiritual culture in all its catholicity, 'from the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology' [quote within inverted commas from 'The Paper on Hinduism' read out at the Parliament of Religions on 19th September, 1893 by Swami Vivekananda]. All have had their exclusive views despite claiming to the contrary. Rammohan Roy denounced idol worship and so did Tagore. Vidyasagar turned into an agnostic. Keshab Chandra Sen was a reformed Brahmo and Devendranath Tagore an orthodox one. Dayananda Saraswati was fanatically opposed to idol worship. Perhaps, the only other wholehearted assimilator of the Sanatan Dharma was Sri Aurobindo. Bankimchandra may have been another one. Michael Madhusudan Dutta had converted to Christianity and Gandhi was vehemently opposed to the doctrine of violence being made an instrument for restoring dharma. Subhas Chandra Bose was perhaps yet another Hindu in all its catholicity and I am sure Rash Behari Bose was yet another, and so must have been Bagha Jatin. But Nehru certainly was an agnostic, albeit a universally liberal one of sorts.

So, perhaps, my initial ascription may appear to be erroneous and it may be pointed out that only a handful of notables of the day, namely, Tagore, Rammohan and Dayananda were exclusive in their own ways and picked and chose bits of Hinduism which they could accommodate in their beings. But deeper reflection will show that none but Ramakrishna and Vivekananda accepted the whole gamut of Hindu practices and beliefs as graded necessities for men of varying conception and comprehension. None else so heartily absorbed and assimilated all strands of Hindu culture within their beings that eventually culminated in their acceptance and absorption of all forms of spiritual development anywhere in the world and at any time in history as valid and a historical imperative for a certain section of humanity for the then existing evolutionary conditions. The universality of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda is almost matchless in history and truly representative of the universality of the Sanatan Dharma at its sublimest.

Written by Sugata Bose