BENGAL, GO BACK TO VIVEKANANDA AS YOUR PREDECESSORS ONCE DID

BENGAL, GO BACK TO VIVEKANANDA AS YOUR PREDECESSORS ONCE DID 

Bengalis with the best of brains are the worst off today on account of their cowardice. Muscles, Swamiji said, was lacking in this race which induces perhaps this cowardice and encourages effeminacy, now masquerading as gender issues and all the rest. But the fact remains that in the event of an armed aggression by immoderate mobs, this song and dance culture, this soft sentimental poetry and pandering to puerile pleasure will not be of much use. Then they will suffer persecution meekly and become sacrificial lambs (read goats) like they have historically been which is why today you find every two out of three Bengalis as Muslims which is queer for a race that prides itself on culture and superior civilisation. This is why Swamiji was so irked by the soft sentimental, even erotic poetry of Tagore and never spared a word of praise for him although he lavished his praise on Michael Madhususan Dutt and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's vigorous writings that stirred the soul and awakened one's manhood. Swamiji even showed his frustration by saying that Chaitanyadev had made the whole of Bengal and Odisha effeminate with his devotional music and dance, although he reserved the highest regard for the saint for his renunciation and spiritual attainment. Swamiji wanted to awaken manhood among this effeminate race of Bengal and had famously said, "My life's work may be summed up in one word---manhood." It was to this end that he tirelessly worked and 'died in harness' and it was to this end that he wrote vigorous Bengali prose, exhorted the popularisation of dhrupad music and the training of the muscles of the youth in gymnasiums, not the modern ones where the youth flock to increase their physical appeal but in the classical ones where the Bengal revolutionaries assembled to train their muscles and mind to overthrow the British colonists. Swamiji was very much against effeminacy and this Bengali propensity to paralysing soft culture, holding it as the death-dealing dose that would make Bengal extinct in three generations. He was not much off the mark as Bengal perished in Partition in the third generation from his times and thereafter has been dragging on its wretched existence towards total Islamic, communist and sensual annihilation. Even some of the monks of the mission he founded have taken to this soft singing culture while some others exhibit at the podium an utter effeminacy of manners. Swamiji had in sheer frustration asked Bal Gangadhar Tilak who was visiting him at Belur Math in 1901 that if would be better if the latter were to settle in Bengal and preach his revolutionary political message among the sleeping Bengalis and if he himself were to relocate habitat in manly Maharashtra which would more vigorously respond to his virile Vedantic message. As it turned out, the duo did not change residence but within a year of Swamiji's death, Bengal started secret society revolutionary work on a massive scale and soon transformed into the active volcano of armed revolution. The manhood which Swamiji had awakened and which had fired up hundreds to embrace the hangman's noose in order to free the motherland died decades after Partition as Bengal gradually slid into soft poetry, silly music and debilitating dance culture till it has freshly degenerated into an emasculate existence. Now devotion is dance and dance is devotion and men increasingly becoming a queer hybrid of the two genders. Enough unto the day is the evil thereof. Return to Swamiji!

Written by Sugata Bose