THE PARAMAHAMSA AND HIS PROTÉGÉ ... 1

THE PARAMAHAMSA AND HIS PROTÉGÉ ... 1

Tomorrow is one of the holiest days in the calendar. On this day 161 years ago Swami Vivekananda was born. At the very outset let us pay our prostrations at the hallowed feet of mother Bhuvaneshwari Devi and father Vishwanath Datta.

12 January, 1863. Just over four years after the bloody conclusion of the Indian Revolt of 1857-58. India in colonial chains, the world in material bondage. Macaulay's Anglicisation of India was in full sway. Darwinian and Marxian materialism had caught the imagination of the western world and spirituality was on the wane everywhere. A tremendous civilisational churn was in evidence all over as the European Enlightenment was in its climactic phase of development that left man questioning the philosophical foundations of faith and its concomitant cultural connotations.

In India the revolution in thought had also begun. The tremors of the French Revolution had not only rocked Euro-America but had reached Indian shores as well through contact with the European colonists, most especially the British. 

Rammohan Roy was born in 1772, the man who would mightily mould the socioreligious destiny of India in the decades to come. Vidyasagar, the indefatigable social reformer, Devendranath Tagore, Dayananda Saraswati, Keshav Chandra Sen, Ranade and a host of luminaries, a veritable galaxy of them appeared on the social scene to help rejuvenate India and usher her into the modern age. But the crowning glory was the appearance of the divine duo, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, who would revitalise India along the grain of her age-old Sanatan culture, that of dharma, that of Vedic spirituality in all its multifarious manifestation that had animated hoary India down the ages.

Written by Sugata Bose