THE MESSAGE READ AND THE MESSAGE UNREAD

THE MESSAGE READ AND THE MESSAGE UNREAD

When Swamiji said, "We shall unhinge the universe," the revolutionaries read into it a different meaning that was implicit. They understood it to be Swamiji's exhortation unto them to overturn the colonial world order, to overthrow the tyrannical Crown from the country, to free India and the colonised world. In this way they read deeper into Swamiji than his pious spiritual followers and gave a truer turn to his message than the professed votaries of his mission. No wonder revolutionary Hemchandra Ghosh of reverent memory had made his epic statement, "What have the monks of the Ramakrishna Mission understood Swamiji? His real followers were the revolutionaries of Bengal." And, indeed, it was so, for these latter ones shed cowardice and braved death to dislodge the British from India.

But, alas, they could not anticipate the internal enemy who broke India into three when the motherland, dismembered and bleeding, murdered and mutilated, betrayed and butchered, came out of her labour room into the murky atmosphere of Partition that could hardly be hailed as freedom. I have heard old revolutionaries regret this partitioned freedom which they could never accept from their hearts but which they endured through the lingering years of their lonesome lives with a pain that I have not seen in any of the younger generations who have blissfully taken to emasculate sensory rejoicing in the name of a least understood freedom.

Swamiji was understood by the revolutionaries and none else. His volcanic words gave birth to Jatindrandranath Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin), Rash Behari Bose, Sister Nivedita, Aurobindo Ghosh, Hemchandra Ghosh, Masterda Surjya Sen, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and a host of others. The galvanic shocks that he gave to the sleeping leviathan which a race suffering a thousand year old slavery had been reduced to, quickened pulsations of life in it and stirred it into life and motion. Thereafter, his best disciples, the revolutionaries of Bengal, took it upon themselves to give shape to his ideas of freedom in the widest sense. While one half of his followers took to revitalising the spiritual side of the benighted nation, the other half took up arms against the enemy to free India. They succeeded against the external one but the internal one they failed to overcome.

And the struggle is still on. Vivekananda seeks fruition in future activity based on renunciation of self-interest and engagement in selfless service, never passive, never hypocritical as we see today but bold, aggressive, fiery and fearless, the cyclonic monk's (epithet given to Swamiji by Hemchandra Ghosh) message lived in original terms and not suited to a compromised convenience. May a million martyrs yet arise in the name of Vivekananda to free Mother India from her external and internal enemies! 

Written by Sugata Bose