UNDERSTANDING SWAMIJI ... 1

UNDERSTANDING SWAMIJI ... 1

Organisation has consolidated Swamiji, true, but organisation has limited him as well. The vastness of his contribution to the prospective future development of the human species from the time of his advent has been scarce understood by his devoted disciples and followers thereon in all its comprehensiveness.

Passive and truncated emphasis on his spiritual self in the main on account of intellectual innocence has led to the seer being sidelined largely by his devotees from the mainstream of socioeconomic and sociopolitical developments and he being relegated as one more in the long line of India's spiritual seers, albeit with a slight difference of course.

But this difference truly is not slight but monumental. Swamiji's political side has been kept largely in the shadow barring publication of pertinent material in books, but the essential content of his volcanic message which shook India from her stupor and galvanised her into revolutionary action for freedom has been largely lost on the public owing to a general avoidance of public mention of such revolutionary stuff from the pulpit to keep Ramakrishna Mission clear of entanglement in politics as was the expresss wish of Swamiji, and also because of an overstatement of certain passages from Swamiji's works which when deliberately or inadvertently wrongly interpreted makes Swamiji appear as a seer concerned about his country's redemption only through the type of activities which the Mission more or less engages in, although, to be fair to the Mission it must be said that the Mission does take a lot of care to extend the boundaries of influence of Swamiji in the wide world along its own line of work following its own limited understanding of the mind and mission of the seminal sage. 

Bhupendranath Datta, Swamiji's youngest brother, took a radically different view from the above-stated view of the Mission regarding Swamiji's philosophy and aspirations and reading him (refer 'Swami Vivekananda Patriot-Prophet') does bring into sharp focus this lacuna in the Mission's one-sided emphasis on Swamiji and almost an unconscious or perhaps a conscious watering down of his revolutionary ideals on the basis of his cautioning men, "Let no undue political significance be given to my statements..." Well, such a warning, taken out of its historical context and passed on as a perennial dictum does injustice to the interpretation of the man and his message. 

It is time to rediscover Swamiji in all his layered aspirations and attributes, in all his catholic complexity of character and in all his endeavours and actions, sometimes failed attempts on account of the unripeness of the times and the immaturity of his people. Let us study Swamiji deep and understand him true, beyond the limitations set forth by our own selfish cravings and the compromise made by specific individuals and organisations with the powers that be, the status quo that serves them so well. May Swamiji emerge from the forests and the groves as well, much like the masses he had envisaged would do one day, to give direction to a nation gone wrong gradually after his demise !

Written by Sugata Bose