Mother India's Lighthouse: India's spiritual leaders

Gandhi announces: "The votary of non-violence has to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice of the highest type in order to be free from fear. He recks not if he should lose his land, his wealth, his life. He who has not overcome all fear cannot practise non-violence to perfection."

Gandhi proclaims: "Satyagraha is a force that works silently and apparently slowly. In reality, there is no force in the world that is so direct or so swift in working."

Gandhi was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but both of his parents cared nothing for the so-called material wealth. They did care for something else, and it was the inner wealth. His father's indifference to material wealth, his politically oriented brain and his tremendous will; his mother's piety, purity, simplicity, sincerity, inner hunger and conscience of the soul; and his wife's inspiration, dedicated service and constant sacrifice all loomed large in Gandhi's life.

He went to England to study law when he was nineteen years old. Three years later he returned to India and started practising. Alas, in those days, in his legal practice, he received the garland not of victory, but of sad failure. Such being the case, he wanted to be a high school teacher in Bombay. Here too, God denied him this new career. Gandhi's application to be a teacher was not favoured with acceptance. But in 1893, opportunity knocked at his life's door. The heart of this young barrister cried with his fellow-countrymen who were victims of ruthless injustice in South Africa. He left for Africa. He defended their case, their cause. He helped them and served them. There, in Africa, he gradually became a lawyer of the superlative degree. Mahalakshmi, the Goddess of Beauty and Plenty, blessed his heart with Her beauty, and his outer life with plenty. Money, the bird, flew towards him and sweetly sat on his hand. Success, the dog, ran towards him and faithfully sat at his feet.

Behind the bird and the dog, a human being from a far-off land came and inspired his aspiring heart and illumined his searching mind to fulfil his life's ideals. Gandhi's life became the perfect expression of Tolstoy's inspiration. With a view to practising his ideals, he cast aside the crown and throne of his outer achievements. He embraced ahimsa. He embraced satyagraha. He was one of those who awakened the slumbering nation and inspired the oppressed and depressed country to come out of the foreign yoke. He was successful. By this time, his frail body was no longer a stranger to inhuman brutalities. He had to undergo, several times, severe prison sentences. On being imprisoned for the first time, on January 11, 1908, he remarked:

"We shall feel happy and free like a bird even behind the prison walls. We shall never weary of jail-going. When the whole of India has learned this lesson, India shall be free. For, if the alien power turns the whole of India into a vast prison, it will not be able to imprison her soul."

His release from last imprisonment was on May 6, 1944. He spent no less than two thousand three hundred and thirty-eight days in jail.

His outer life suffered. His inner life triumphed. His life and his soul's conviction became indivisible. His country's independence became the object of his soul's concern. His country's "untouchables" became the object of his heart's concern. Bharat Mata placed her hands of Infinite Bounty on the head of her devoted son. His country's untouchables discovered their haven in his boundless heart.

For the redemption of the untold sufferings of the untouchables Gandhi's heart of supreme sacrifice voices forth:

"I do not want to be reborn, but if I have to be reborn I should be reborn an untouchable so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings, and the affronts levelled against them in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them from their miserable condition."

We all know the supreme necessity of humility in a seeker's life. No humility, no realisation of the Infinite Truth. One must needs be as humble as the dust. But Gandhi's humility does not want to stop even at this point. He says: "The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of the truth."

The world, especially the Christian world, is afraid of the consequences of sin. A Christian is more concerned about his sin than is any other man on earth. The Indian heart in Gandhi speaks about sin: "I do not seek redemption from the consequences of sin, I seek to be redeemed from sin itself."

A Vedantin — a student of Vedanta — will proclaim that there is no such thing as sin. It is merely a play of ignorance.

Gandhi throws light on conception and continence:

"I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. The world depends for its existence on the act of generation, and as the world is the playground of God and a reflection of His glory, the act of generation should be controlled for the ordered growth of the world. He who realises this will control his lust at any cost, equip himself with the knowledge necessary for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of his progeny, and give the benefit of that knowledge to posterity."

Mother Earth is truly proud of her son Gandhi's sincerity. He said: "For me the observance of even bodily brahmacharya has been full of difficulties. Today [1929], that is to say, at the age of sixty, I may say that I feel myself fairly safe, but I have yet to achieve complete mastery over thought, which is so essential."

Gandhi married at the age of 13. He was blessed with four sons.

Fasting played a major role in Gandhi's life. His sound advice is "eat only when you are hungry and when you have laboured for food." This reminds me of a Zen story:

The Chinese Zen master, Hyakujo, used to work very hard with his disciples, even at the ripe old age of eighty. He used to prune the trees, clean the grounds, trim the garden, and so forth. His disciples were extremely shocked at these exertions. They knew well that it would be of no use to suggest to him to stop working, for he would turn a deaf ear to them. A brilliant idea flashed through their minds. They hid his tools. The Master played his part. He stopped eating. This went on for several days. The disciples discovered why he was not eating. They returned his tools to him. With a smile, he took the tools and exclaimed, "No work, no food!" He began eating as usual.

Gandhi often fasted to get things done in his own way. Let me tell you two amusing but significant incidents in Gandhi's life. His wife once saved twenty-five rupees to spend for a special purpose. When Gandhi came to know about it, he brought his poor wife's conduct to the attention of the public. He was furious. He exposed her in his weekly Young India under the caption, "My shame, my sorrow," and observed a three-day fast! He had taught his wife that there should be no personal belongings and no hoarding up of money.

On another occasion Gandhi took a vow that he would fast unto death. Tagore immediately said to his countrymen having realised the gravity of Gandhi's vow: "He has come after a thousand years. Shall we send him back empty-handed again?"

Gandhi's Gurudev, Rabindranath Tagore, once remarked:

"I differ with Gandhi in many respects, but admire and revere the man highly." In one aspect of life, at least, we see the difference between these two great souls. In renunciation Mahatma found his deliverance, while Tagore found his deliverance in the fruit of fulfilment. Tagore sings, "Deliverance is not for me in renunciation, I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight." The Upanishadic seers sing through the heart of Mahatma, "Tena tyaktena bhunjita" (Enjoy through Renunciation).

Prime Minister Nehru, during his speech to the Congress of the United States on October 13, 1949, spoke about the Father of the Indian Nation:

"In India there came a man in our own generation who inspired us to great endeavour, ever reminding us that thought and action should never be divorced from moral principle, that the true path of man is the path of truth and peace. Under his guidance we laboured for the freedom of our country, with ill will to none, and achieved that freedom. We called him reverently and affectionately the Father of our Nation. Yet he was too great for the circumscribed borders of any one country, and the message he gave may well help us in considering the wider problems of the world."

Four days later, on October 17, while addressing Columbia University, Nehru again spoke about his mentor, guide and master:

"The great leader of my country, Mahatma Gandhi, under whose inspiration and sheltering care I grew up, always laid stress on moral values and warned us never to subordinate means to ends. We were not worthy of him and yet to the best of our ability we tried to follow his teaching. Even the limited extent to which we could follow his teaching yielded rich results."

Krishnalal Shridharani, the well-known author of My India, My America, has something amusing but striking to share with us:

"Once I was invited by a decidedly liberal minister to address a church group. After my speech on Gandhi and his non-violence, we withdrew to my host's office. He was full of praise for Gandhi's character as a man, his high ideals, his conduct, but he sincerely doubted that Gandhi could ever enter Heaven until the burden of the Hindu saint's sins was delegated to Christ. I answered that according to my way of thinking, Gandhi's life had been the nearest approximation of the "Christ life," and I also expressed some fear about the chances of the rest of us modern mortals if Gandhi were to be denied Heaven!"

Now let us hear from Gandhi what he has to say about his own salvation or about his going to Heaven:

"It was impossible for me to believe that I could go to Heaven or attain salvation only by becoming a Christian. When I frankly said this to some of the good Christian friends, they were shocked. But there was no help for it."

Gandhi says about religion: "After long study and experience I have come to the conclusion that (1) all religions are true; (2) all religions have some error in them; (3) all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism.”

Each individual has the right to have a God of his own. He is competent enough to define God according to his inner receptivity and outer capacity. Gandhi's God is nothing other than truth. He says: "There are innumerable definitions of God, because His manifestations are innumerable. They overwhelm me with wonder and awe, for a moment stun me. But I worship God as Truth only."

Ascetic scientist

Ray's very name awakes an unflagging zeal, an arduous tapasya in the hearts of indolent and ease-loving Bengali youths. His great sacrifice is familiar to Bengalis of all ages. He carried out his self-imposed duties ... propagating the principles of chemistry, he fought like a giant in the atmosphere of bondage in a poverty-stricken country. In him we find a superb scientist, industrialist and educationalist. In the fields of politics and social reform, too, he had a helping hand. But he always wanted to remain behind the silent curtain of anonymity. Many of his pupils have become great in the world of chemistry. As he was the pioneer, he had to fight against stupendous odds. However, his contribution to the history of chemical science is highly original. Among his dear pupils, nay, his intellectual heirs, Meghnad Saha, Nilratan Dhar and Jnanendra Chandra Ghosh have won world-renown.

No doubt, Ray cannot be classed with Newton, Faraday, and such others. But in his case the most striking achievement is this: that he held the banner of science and marched through the stormy night of India's prolonged bondage under foreign yoke.

It is quite interesting to note that J.C. Bose and P.C. Ray were life-long friends. For about thirty years they worked side by side. They inspired and appreciated each other highly. These two eminent personalities — Jagadish Chandra and Prafulla Chandra — were also ardent adorers of Bengali literature.

"The Laboratory of Sir P.C. Ray is the nursery of the young chemists of New India." Such was the tribute paid to him by the well-known French scholar Sylvain Levi.

Prof. Sir William Ramsay, at the end of a lecture by P.C. Ray at the Chemical Society in Burlington House, London, said, "We had the privilege and pleasure of listening tonight to that eminent Indian chemist whose name is already familiar to us for his most interesting researches on nitrates, and who, unaided, has kept the torch burning for years in that ancient land of civilisation and learning."

In 1901 he founded the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works with a sum of Rs. 800. It has now an authorised capital of Rs. 34 lakhs. And we are not to forget his firm conviction that there is no royal road to success. He sowed the seed, we now reap the fruit thereof.

Like Tagore, he too was knighted. On the occasion of his receiving Knighthood, Sir W. J. Pope in his capacity as President of the Chemical Society congratulated him thus:

"It is the sincere hope of the members of the Council that you may long be spared to continue your unique work in connection with the development of chemical research in India."

Dr. P.C. Ray (A.D. Sc. of Edinburgh), when he came to attend a conference in Madras, was asked how many children he had. He took out of his pocket a long list of seventy-three, all of them his eminent pupils. He loved them more dearly than he could ever have loved his own children if he had had any.

Rabindranath said of him that Dr. Ray was a living illustration of ekoham vahusyam (I am alone, I want to be many). Truly has Ray diffused his own being among his intimate disciples — his love of science, his love of free Indian culture, his love of country.

Rishi Rajnarayan Bose

He was a fond child of the Goddess of learning. Not once but twice he successfully proved himself matchless: as a student and as a teacher. "It was my principle," the Rishi said, "as a teacher to guide the boys by means of love." He was thoroughly at home in English literature. He had an easy access to the mines of Sanskrit and Arabic literatures.

Some of his countrymen took him amiss. They took him for an old man who cherished a clinging to the education and culture of ancient India, be it supremely good or abysmally bad. In fact, what he wanted was to draw the attention of his countrymen to the silliness of holding the notions that "the Indian way of eating, the Indian way of dressing, the Indian way of learning" — in a word, whatever India could offer to the world in any sphere of life — is insignificant, while whatever the English offer is worth having for a man in a civilised society. According to him, no other country in the hoary past dared belittle India for anything. And now why should it be otherwise? The Indians must be Indians heart and soul. To ape the English is to ask the presiding Deity of India to quit her own throne. And what, after all, would they get by this mad pursuit? Nothing short of self-perdition. He was a pioneer in the field of giving concrete shape to Indian Nationalism.

His heart would be uncontrollably swayed while he was singing Bande Mataram, careless of the fact that his voice was sadly wanting in the art of singing. In this connection let us remember what he wrote to the author of Anandamath in which shines our national Anthem. He was simply enamoured of the book, and wrote to Bankim, "May your pen be immortal!" The Rishi's prayer was fulfilled.

A character with diverse virtues was he. This moment his face shows a thunderbolt determination. The next moment he becomes the personification of irresistible laughter. This moment he tries to identify himself with the innermost Spirit. The next moment he discharges the duties of a wise householder. This moment he gives advice to alumni and the adorers of Bengali literature on how to serve the country better through their powerful contributions. The next moment he loses himself in the company of impossible fools.

The superiority complex was altogether foreign to his nature. Children had free access to him who was four times as old as they. Tagore was one among those little ones. One will be frankly bewildered as to how such a thing could take place in Bengal, where age is treated with far more reverential awe than in any other part of the world. It was impossible for any one to resist the good humour of the Rishi. Once Sri Aurobindo said to one of his disciples:

"Your question reminds me of the story of my grandmother. She said: 'God has made such a bad world! If I could meet Him I would tell Him what I think of Him.' My grandfather said: 'Yes, it is true; but God has so arranged that you can't get near Him so long as you have such a desire in you!' "

"A prophet is not honoured in his own country." This frequently mouthed proverb proved quite true in the case of Rishi Rajnarayan. His own son-in-law K.D. Ghosh decided to send his children to England to become thoroughly anglicised. As preparation for the fulfilment of his wishes, perhaps, he appointed a European nurse to attend his child, Auro, and later sent him to an English convent at Darjeeling for his primary education. But as a contrast, it is equally strange that the very same father should send to his son Auro in England press-cuttings from India describing the injustices and atrocities of British rule here. Thus unconsciously he supplied fuel to the fire of patriotism with which the son appears to have been born. The father did all this, for he intuitively felt that his son Auro was destined to do something very great. His expectations were more than fulfilled in Sri Aurobindo's becoming a spiritual Leader of mankind, while his immediate expectations were only partly fulfilled. Aurobindo learned what the West could teach him, yet he remained thoroughly Indian in the core of his heart, and was not anglicised, as his father desired. The grandfather's joy and pride knew no bounds to find in his grandson a unique love for his Motherland, for his culture and education, notwithstanding his Western education of the highest order.

One is taken aback to learn that Michael Madhusudan Dutt and Rajnarayan Bose were hand in glove with each other in spite of their having principles poles asunder. Rajnarayan went to the length of tabooing English words in Bengali conversation. For every English word used, he and his friends had to pay the penalty of one pice.

An interesting anecdote: It happened that Vivekananda, during his itinerancy, once paid his homage to the Rishi Rajnarayan at Baidyanath. He was accompanied by his brother disciple Akhandananda. Vivekananda had already advised his gurubhai not to disclose to Rajnarayan that he, Vivekananda, knew English, and he now pretended to have no knowledge of that language. As it seemed to Rajnarayan that Vivekananda knew no English, they spoke in Bengali. Rajnarayan was highly pleased with the Bengali youth who did not use a single word in English during their conversation. But alas, luck went against the old man. By a slip of the tongue he used the word "plus" during their pure Bengali conversation. Thinking that it would be still worse to explain the word in English to the guest, he simply placed one finger across another and thus explained it. At this the present generation may burst into laughter. But to the Rishi, who was dead against the British, it was a matter of supreme importance.

Madhusudan on the other hand could not help saying: "I can speak in English, write in English, think in English, and shall be supremely happy if I can dream in English!”

Yet on the eve of his departure to England he presented his famous poem "Adieu to Bengal!" to Rajnarayan. This can be explained by the fact that no cloud of painful misunderstanding ever cast its sombre shadow upon the light of lucid tenderness and sympathy with which the two mighty souls greeted each other. Needless to say, both had an intense love for the Motherland. In that unique Bengali poem, Madhusudan prayed that even if he breathed his last abroad his Motherland might not forget to retain him in her memory.

Among the mighty minds caught by the spirit of India's renaissance and among the pioneers in the field of national creativity, the Seer of the age, Sri Aurobindo, has seen in only two personalities the true Rishi-vision: Bankim Chandra and Rajnarayan. In his Bankim-Tilak-Dayananda and Bankim Chandra Chatterji he has immortalised Bankim; to Rajnarayan he has given perpetuity in a sonnet: Transiit Non Periit.

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(My grandfather, Rajnarayan Bose, died in September 1899)

Not in annihilation lost, nor given

O strong and sentient spirit; no mere heaven

Received thee; but the omnipresent Thought

Took back its gift. Into that splendour caught

Remains with thee and the old genial force

As when a sacred river in its course

Not less because with vastness wed and works

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"On the one hand he had committed himself and his household affairs entirely to the care of the Divine; on the other hand he would busy himself making innumerable plans feasible or otherwise for the advancement of the country's progress."

It is interesting as well to note the remark made by Devendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath, about Rajnarayan Bose when the latter's famous lectures The Superiority of Hinduism and Past and Present were brought to light: "Whatever falls from the lips of Rajnarayan Babu creates a great sensation in the country."

Rajnarayan's multifarious activities bestowed upon his residence at Baidyanath the most prized title, "Mecca" of the social reformers and the lovers of Bengali literature.

Raja Rammohun: Father of modern India

A versatile genius was he. He was at home in Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, English, French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. No hyperbole, he could pass with the utmost ease from one language to another. As his learning was varied and profound, even so his achievements were vast and wonderful.

It was the Raja who inaugurated the Modern Age in this great subcontinent. His personality was at once many-sided and perfectly balanced. By virtue of his freedom of spirit he dynamised our national being. He was the pioneer path-maker who removed teeming obstacles that impeded our steady progress within and without at every step. It was he who, for the first time, understood the true significance of the Modern Age. He fully realised the truth that an isolated independence can never be the ideal of human civilisation. No sphere of our national existence did he leave untouched. The spirit of self-assertion in the light of the all-pervading Brahman was his slogan. Right from his adolescence he sacrificed his life, his everything, to bring to the fore the true gems of India's civilisation which were scattered, unnoticed and uncared for. He gave the death-blow to the idolatry of our ancestral faith. Also, he clearly observed that blind superstition was reigning supreme in Hindu society.

Naturally this rebel soul became a cause of worry to his venerable father. Soon his father could not help asking the son to quit his house. The proud son did listen to his father. He undertook a fateful journey, crossed the Himalayas, and found himself on Tibetan soil to learn the significance of Buddhism. Strangely enough, here too he had to face the same problem of idolatry. With his indomitable will he criticised it thoroughly. Soon his life fell under the shadow of grave danger.

But for some kind-hearted Tibetan ladies he would have been put to death by the Lama-worshippers. Throwing dust in the eyes of his foes he returned home safe.

Rammohun had three kinds of friends: those who wanted to honour themselves by association with the Raja, so distinguished a personality; those who frequented his residence in season and out of season to have his advice and get their desires fulfilled; and the rare ones who came to sympathise with him and his highly elevating principles.

The Raja had already become an object of contempt in his country for his anti-idolatry attitude. And when he opened the "Brahma Sabha" (The Theistic Association) and brought about the anti-suttee agitation, his antagonists simply let loose a full flood of abuse on him. But history bears witness to the fact that Rammohun, the hero of heroes, with the help of Lord Bentinck successfully abolished the dreadful custom of Hindu widows burning on the funeral pyres of their husbands.

It was quite natural that the misery and degradation of women in Bengal should have appealed strongly to the ever-sympathetic heart of the Raja. Both his genuine sympathy and high admiration for the women of Bengal were striking:

"Women are in general inferior to men in bodily strength and energy; consequently, the male part of the community, taking advantage of their corporeal weakness, have denied to them those merits that they are entitled to by nature, and afterwards they are apt to say that women are naturally incapable of acquiring those merits... You charge them with want of resolution, at which I feel exceedingly surprised; for we constantly perceive, in a country where the name of death makes the male shudder, that the female, from her firmness of mind, offers to burn with the corpse of her deceased husband; and yet you accuse those women of deficiency in point of resolution."

Tagore's admiration for Rammohun is unique. He describes the Raja as "A Universal man." The world-renowned scholar Max Muller addressed Rammohun Roy as the Father of Comparative Religion. Vivekananda calls him "the first man of the new regenerate India." "Rammohun Roy," says Sri Aurobindo, "was a great man in the first rank of active genius who set flowing a stream of tendencies which transformed our national life."

The politician and the philanthropist in the Raja, too, deserve ample praise:

"If religion is from God, is politics from the Devil?"

"The true way of serving God is to do good to man."

The Raja was almost consumed with the desire to visit Europe. After his arrival in England he met William Roscoe, the historian of the Medicis, and Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian philosopher. Roscoe is reported to have observed after seeing him, "Deeply grateful am I to God for keeping me alive to witness this blessed day." Bentham addressed him as his "intimately admired and dearly beloved collaborator in the service of mankind."

The Raja had an intense longing to visit America. America, too, sincerely wanted him. Dr. Kirkland, ex-President of Harvard University, exclaimed, "The Raja was an object of lively interest in America and he was expected there with the greatest anxiety."

Rammohun cherished a great admiration for France. Hence he did not fail to visit that country. According to him, France is a "country favoured by Nature and richly adorned by the cultivation of the arts and sciences and, above all, blessed by the possession of a free constitution." Napoleon had conquered his heart even when he was in his teens. The French King, Louis Phillippe, invited him to dinner several times.

It was at Bristol that he breathed his last on May 27, 1833. His longtime home in Arno's vale has been a hallowed place for both his eastern and western admirers. Rammohun's ideas were far ahead of his age, but by virtue of his tremendous toil in the cause of regenerating India he will live forever.

Finally, let me conclude this homage of mine with the glowing tribute paid to him by Mary Carpenter, the author of The Last Days in England of Raja Rammohun Roy:

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Of pagan gloom was o'er it, — Thou wast born

Yet in thy breast there glowed a heavenly light

Appeared the day-star of approaching morn.

Sarat Chandra

Sarat Chandra's eyes were in his heart. His genius is marked by a splendid grasp of the tragic world in its social conflicts. Sarat Chandra the man and Sarat Chandra the novelist equally shared a revolutionary spirit. He found no difficulty in coming in contact with a large variety of people. His experience of life reinforced his liberal outlook on life. He was perfection itself in describing the agonies of women, the abstruse problems of human life, the conception of love. His novels condemn social injustice, social indifference and opposition. And the teachings of his novels can be summed up in two words: love, frustration. He was deeply stirred by the suffering of the middle-class people.

We live in a world which is poisoned with hatred. The pressure of society, he realised, is the root of all evil, and he could not help railing at the leaders of society. He asked them to observe the value and dignity of those persons whom they had so ruthlessly discarded. Softness and sympathy towards deplorable humanity permeate his works. Society may find it difficult to give shelter to a fallen woman, but to ignore her grace and goodness in life, he declared, is unpardonable foolishness. Never did he look at women as women, but as human beings. If the same opportunity were given them, he was certain that they could walk shoulder to shoulder with men.

Sarat Chandra's works tell us that he had the profoundest respect not for the men of vast learning or wealth, but for the men of virtue. He was terribly hurt by the fact that the present society is under the subjugation of the so-called men of learning, and tortured by the men wallowing in the pleasures of riches. His heart was ready to tolerate everything save and except hypocrisy. His life was an illustration of his teaching.

If comparison has any importance, then he can aptly be compared with de Maupassant, as Tagore can be compared with Balzac. We shall not be far from the truth if we hold that Bankim Chandra is the creator of an epoch and Sarat Chandra is the announcer of an epoch in Bengali literature. With his inquisitive mind, Sarat Chandra went deep into the heart of Bengal to discover both her tremendous sorrow and her stupendous joy.

From the very beginning, the creative spirit blossomed into full splendour in the works of Sarat Chandra. His sudden arrival with his Baradidi (The Eldest Sister) in the field of literary creativity was so strange a fact that it sprang a genuine surprise on the readers and adorers of Bengali literature. He wrote it under a nom de plume. Hence people were certain that it was the mighty product of Tagore. But Tagore, too, was frankly bewildered by the fact that Bengal had such a powerful writer.

The uniqueness of his Mahesh can only be felt and not described. It happened that Dilip Kumar Roy, who is one of the true admirers of Sarat Chandra, once made a fervent request to his Gurudev, Sri Aurobindo, to peruse the book. Sri Aurobindo was then in a whirlwind of work. Notwithstanding, his disciple's request did not go in vain. He read it. His comment on the book was, "A wonderful style and a great and perfect creative artist with a profound emotional power."

Let us not forget that Sarat Chandra was all admiration for Sri Aurobindo. In one of his letters to Dilip Kumar he wrote, "What ever brief messages Sri Aurobindo gives you or answers to your questions I read with every care, ponder over and re-read. Of course, many things are past my understanding, I admit. But that should not lead you to think that I have ever said anything against him to any of your friends and relations not favourably disposed towards you. The whole country holds him in profound respect, am I the only exception?"

His Sri Kanta, according to all, wonderfully satisfies all the conditions to win the adjective "unique." On reading the translation of the first part of Sri Kanta, Romain Rolland, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his Jean-Christophe, remarked:

"Evidently Sri Kanta can claim the Nobel Prize."

The life that passes in penury must necessarily pass in obscurity. Sarat Chandra is no exception. He was born of poor parents. He knew what poverty means. Yet he was a stranger to greed. A striking incident:

Fortune had still to dawn on Sarat Chandra when Deshabandhu Chitta Ranjan Das requested him to contribute something to his journal Narayan. Sarat Chandra complied. He gave his story "Swami" for publication. Chitta Ranjan was immensely impressed by the story. He sent him a blank cheque with a covering letter saying that he was not in a position to put a price on such a wonderful story and Sarat Chandra could fill in his own figure. But Sarat Chandra drew only a hundred rupees.

Sarat Chandra used to say that he was wanting in patience, so he could not apply himself to writing poetry, in spite of the fact that he wanted to be a poet. But we know how at times he used to spend hours together to write only a few lines in prose according to his satisfaction.

Now let us observe how the poet Rabindranath, by way of a joke, compares himself with Sarat Chandra:

"In story-writing many people place Sarat above me, but that does not affect me. For even the greatest censor cannot deny my superiority over him in poetry."

Sarat Chandra's death was an irreparable loss for thousands of his countrymen. They felt it as a personal loss. And Tagore, too, was one of those. But the way he consoled his bereaved countrymen is revelatory, and a fact never to be forgotten.

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In the heart of love,

He who has been taken away

Has been held in the heart of his country.

Finally Sarat Chandra cannot better be described than in the seer-words of Sri Aurobindo:

Lyricism on fire

The world knows her poetry as an inimitable delectation, a magnificence of rhythmic expression. "Some of her [Sarojini's] lyrical work," says Sri Aurobindo, "is likely, I think, to survive among the lasting things in English literature, and by these, even if they are fine rather than great, she may take her rank among the immortals." It is quite interesting to observe when and how she was blessed by the God of poetry to have her first access to the "realm of gold": "One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in Algebra: It wouldn't come right; but instead a whole poem came to me suddenly. I wrote it down. From that day my 'poetic career' began."

Another quite astonishing event in her adolescence was that she passed her Matriculation for Madras University, in her twelfth year.

Right from her adolescence she possessed a cosmopolitan heart. Hence she was a genuine stranger to the caste system. The "Chatterjee" of Bengal and the "Naidu" of Madras (Andhra) have established a happy union between the two great provinces of India.

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Some letter of that after life to spell.

And answered, I myself am Heaven and hell.

— Omar Khayyam (Rubaiyat)

Long before her birth the great Persian poet had depicted the essence of all spiritual doctrines so highly admired by Sarojini. I now venture to draw the attention of my readers to observe how another Persian, K.D. Sethna, an outstanding poet, critic, and philosopher, has compared Sarojini with some Indian leaders when she burst upon the view of her countrymen by virtue of her meteoric rise in the political horizon:

"Gandhi could instil great strength of moral purpose, Pandit Nehru a fine and wide idealism, Sardar Patel a bold and dynamic drive for liberty. But the visionary intoxication which seemed to make all burdens drop was peculiar to Sarojini... Sarojini did not overlook difficulties, but she rendered them transpicuous, as it were, and showed a resplendent future beyond them."

To the patriots she was an irresistible enthusiasm. Her life proved a surge that laughed at the impossible. It was often that her advice gained ready acceptance. One of the qualities that she had in the fullest manner was the art of humour. The humorous words flung from her tongue would make people rollick in laughter. Also she was endowed with intellectual faculties of a high order, and an imperial ease in English language. To the poet she was a never-failing fountain of beauty in earthly and Heavenly expressions. The staunch patriot in her cried out through her immortal poetical voice:

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To crescent honours, splendours, victories vast;

Who once wert empress of the sovereign past.

Sarojini Devi's multifarious activities might have considerably disturbed her spiritual thirst. Nevertheless, hers was the heart of a true aspirant. Her devotional attitude is so striking that even those who are solely devoted to spirituality cannot help admiring, nay, imitating her self-surrendering prayer:

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Water your garden-trees with my blood if you will,

Am I not yours, O Love, to cherish or kill?

As ill-luck would have it, men are deluded into the belief that they are infinitely superior to women. Not in defence of women, but as a bare truth she thundered against this great folly of men. She voiced forth the most important role that women play in the uplifting of humanity:

"It is we, and not you, who are the real nation-builders, and without our active co-operation at all points of progress, all your Congresses and Conferences are in vain. Educate your women and the nation will take care of itself, for it is true today as it was yesterday and will be to the end of human life that the hand that rocks the cradle is the power that rules the world."

Bharati, awakener of Tamil Nad

When his political life fell under the shadow of danger, he fled in 1908 to Pondicherry, then a French settlement. For some time he was lost to the public eye, and his life was poverty stricken.

In 1910 occurred a stroke of Providence. Aurobindo Ghosh of Bengal was no more in the vortex of politics. The presiding Deity of Pondicherry housed the fiery apostle of Indian Nationalism not only peacefully but also cheerfully.

The opportunity was too good to be missed. For years, when the sun would go down, Bharati would go to Sri Aurobindo's place to bask in the sunshine of his affection. Under that great influence, his head began to teem with national songs which brought him, in after years, transcendental praise. Sri Aurobindo taught him how to vision the country as the Mother personified. Bharati saw that, while mankind was engrossed in the immediate, Sri Aurobindo was devoted to the Ultimate. It was Sri Aurobindo who so very kindly helped him to launch into the Vedic mysteries, and made him at home in ancient literatures. Let us listen to Prema Nandakumar, an authority on Bharati and a student of Sri Aurobindo, describe the relation between the two: "... a spell-binder, an inspiration, a veritable Krishna to the neophyte Arjuna."

Soon Bharati became a man of great comprehension and was able to animate his mass of fresh knowledge by an active and lucid imagination. Now gradually Sri Aurobindo began to dive within to unveil all the mysteries of life. Bharati found the time ripe to cross the frontier of Pondicherry. In 1918 he left Pondicherry, only to be arrested at a place near Cuddalore. But only for a fleeting month did he have to undergo imprisonment.

On his return to Madras he found Mahatma Gandhi in the vanguard of the fight for freedom. He soon became one of his ardent admirers. And by this time his own admirers, too, were more than sufficient. A unique thrill they felt when he would break into his national songs. He was highly inspired by Bankim's Bande Mataram. He in his own way composed national songs to arouse the slumbering people of Tamil Nad. His songs were not only slogans of liberty but also slogans for social emancipation.

Poet Sarojini Naidu's appreciation of and admiration for Bharati is at once inspiring and significant:

"People like Bharati cannot be counted as the treasure of any province. He is entitled, by his genius and his work, to rank among those who have transcended all limitation of race, language and continent, and have become the universal possession of mankind."

It was from Sister Nivedita that he came to learn that women are not to be looked down upon. They deserve to walk shoulder to shoulder with men. That he was profoundly inspired by Nivedita's lofty teachings can easily be observed from these lines of his:

Gone are they who said to woman: "Thou shalt not open the Book of Knowledge." Nor shall it be said that woman lags behind man in the knowledge that he attains.

Also, Nivedita inspired him to be above the caste system. In accordance with her momentous advice the poet in Bharati sings:

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We are children of Bharat all;

And everyone is Bharat's King!

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As Lokamanya Tilak made bold to say that "Home rule is my birthright," even so Bharati's fearless heart voiced forth:

> Freedom is our universal speech,

Bharati's cosmopolitan heart cried out to see a lucid interrelation among his Indian brothers.

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Division can only spell ruin.

What more should we need?

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Vidyasagar

A citadel of strength and a lighthouse of simplicity was Ishwar Chandra. To the poor he was Dayar Sagar (the Ocean of Kindness), to the learned he was Vidyasagar (the Ocean of Knowledge), to the humble he was the most humble-minded of men, though he never admitted the fact, and to the proud and the arbitrary he was the lion-hearted rival.

Ishwar was born when his parents were in the grip of poverty. His life clearly proves that one can win unbounded fame even after being born of the poorest parents.

It is quite interesting to observe that Napoleon and Vidyasagar, who were both surcharged with an indomitable will, were deprived of even an average height. Also, unbelievable was their love for their mothers. The Indian conquered the heart of his countrymen with a heroic spirit, boundless learning, kindness, and charity, while by the strength of his volcanic will Bonaparte conquered the heart of France and left behind a name to blaze in the history of the world.

In his boyhood Ishwar was most notorious for playing pranks. He was also equally outstanding in the merit of displaying his studies. Not to listen to his father's instructions was his bold determination. He would always do the diametrical opposite of his father's wishes. The wise father at last discovered a plan. He would ask his son Ishwar to do the reverse of what he intended him to do. That is to say, when he wanted Ishwar to have his bath he would ask him not to take a bath in such cold weather. In no time Ishwar would hurry to the pond and finish his bath. One day when the Inspector was to visit the school he wanted Ishwar to put on his best attire. So he told Ishwar that as he was not the son of a rich man he was not expected to put on fine clothes. Soon the son put on his best clothes and hurried to school.

Fear was unknown to him. According to him a man does not deserve to be called a man unless and until he fights for his self-respect. "It is better," said he, "to open a grocer's shop than to hold a high position wanting in prestige."

Vidyasagar once visited Mr. Kar, then Principal of Presidency College. During their conversation he found Kar's legs spread wide on his table. What an insult! Now let us observe how Vidyasagar paid Kar back in his own coin.

One day Kar called on Vidyasagar for some work. Vidyasagar placed not only his legs but also his sandals on the table and thus enjoyed his talk with the Principal. The Englishman was more than angry with Vidyasagar. He lodged a complaint with the higher authorities against him. The matchless Pundit was summoned. He justified his conduct by saying that he had learnt the selfsame etiquette from Mr. Kar himself when he had visited him a few months before. He further added that our Indian etiquette could by no means be the same.

Vidyasagar had no other God save man. He had no other religion but to serve humanity. His parents were his living deities and he considered his mother a paragon of virtue. He was ever ready to fight with the impossible at his mother's behest. If he was at home he would bow to his parents first and then begin his daily activities. If he was away from home he would bow to their portraits first and then launch into his daily programme.

One day he said to his mother, "Mother, I have now become a stranger to poverty. I wish you to buy some jewels." At this his mother said, "Yes, my son, I too have been cherishing the same desire for a few months. I wish to buy only three jewels: (1) The village boys are absolutely addle-headed; you are to open a free school for them. (2) See, my son, poor people are dying without any treatment; you must open a charitable dispensary for them. (3) My poor villagers have no houses to live in; you must make such an arrangement that they may properly live." In no time the son burst into tears and touched his mother's feet with his devoted head and promised that he would fulfil her desires. And within a few years he did fulfil them — to the joy of his beloved mother.

It was Vidyasagar who introduced into Bengali society the remarriage of widows of tender age. At this a multitude of people let loose a flood of abuse upon him. He stoically braved all calumny; nay, he, as it were, pounded his foes to atoms. Under his auspices no less than sixty remarriages took place, and these entailed a cost of eighty-two thousand rupees.

A surprising anecdote: We all know that Chief Justice Sir Gurudas Banerjee was one of the illustrious sons of Bengal. He was well known for his devotion to his mother, who was orthodox to her very marrow. Every day Sir Gurudas himself used to bring the sacred water from the Ganga for his mother. Indeed, God's ways are always strange. This venerable lady on her deathbed enjoined her son to invite Vidyasagar to her obsequies. By this time Vidyasagar had become an object of contempt in the orthodox community of Bengal on account of his introducing widow remarriage into Hindu society. Strangely enough, she further added that Vidyasagar should be the foremost guest at her obsequies. The son carried out the command of his dear mother, defying the bitter abuses of the orthodox Brahmins. This event clearly indicates how even a purely orthodox woman had heartily supported the just cause of widow remarriage undertaken by Vidyasagar.

In his book Bodhodaya (The Awakening of Knowledge), meant for children, he has defined God thus:

"God is the formless self-form of Consciousness." It is interesting to note how he chose to impart the highest notion of God to the budding learners. Clearly he stood far above the anthropomorphic conception of God, and he was conversant with the Vedantic idea of the Brahman.

Let us not forget Sri Ramakrishna's genuine admiration for Vidyasagar. The spiritual Giant once called on the Pundit and said: "At long last I have reached the ocean." Vidyasagar's immediate and humble reply is equally worth remembering: "If it pleases you, you may take some quantity of saline water from the ocean." The Lighthouse of spirituality retorted: "Why should it be saline water? Verily, you are the ocean of Vidya (Knowledge), and not of Avidya (Ignorance)."

"There is none in Bengal," says Vivekananda, "who has not in some way or other derived benefit from the multifarious activities of Vidyasagar."

The relation between Vidyasagar and the great poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt was that of a father and a son. It is well known how Vidyasagar, nay, Dayarsagar saved Madhusudan's life from imminent peril at Versailles, France. After his return from the foreign shore, he still took money in season and out from Vidyasagar. It happened that Vidyasagar was once counting some currency notes at home. His Madhu hurried into the room and placed his hand forward. Vidyasagar fondly said: "Wait a bit, let me finish my counting." But Madhu was in a tearing hurry. He took some currency notes and sprinted off. The father's affectionate heart voiced forth: "Madhu, O Madhu, you are so impossible!" Madhusudan lived in the heart of Vidyasagar on such a footing of affection.

Rabindranath's unique love and admiration for Vidyasagar can be gauged from the glowing tribute paid to him through his remark: "Perhaps it is by oversight that God has sent a real man among seventy million of so-called men inhabiting Bengal."

Part II — Rabindranath: the myriad-minded

Adorer of nature

Art

The mysterious slogan "Art for Art's sake" expressed by Victor Cousin is, however, only partially true. To quote Sri Aurobindo: "Art for Art's sake certainly — Art as a perfect form of and discovery of Beauty; but also Art for the soul's sake, the spirit's sake and the expression of all that the soul, the spirit wants to seize through the medium of beauty.”

In the words of Tagore, "Art, like life itself, has grown by its own impulse, and man has taken his pleasure in it without definitely knowing what it is." — Personality

There is a considerable difference between the Art of the East and that of the West. Tagore has lucidly defined the object of Oriental Art and Occidental Art:

"The greatness and beauty of Oriental art, especially in Japan and China, consists in this, that there the artists have seen the soul of things and they believe in it. The West may believe in the soul of Man, but she does not really believe that the universe has a soul. Yet this belief of the East and the whole mental contribution of the East to mankind is filled with this idea. So, we, in the East, need not go into details and emphasise them; for the most important thing is this universal soul, for which the Eastern sages have sat in meditation, and the Eastern artists have joined them in artistic realisation."

Beauty

Beauty and Tagore were inseparable friends — one soul in two bodies.

> The world being nothing but Spirit made visible, is, according to Tagore, fundamentally a thing of beauty. The scars and spots that are on the surface have to be removed and mankind has to repossess and clothe itself with that mantle of beauty. The world is beautiful because it is the image of the Beautiful, because it harbours, expresses and embodies the Divine who is Beauty supreme.

Beauty is always sweet. But why is it so? Here is the answer given by Tagore:

Bengal and Bengali literature

Rabindranath's love and sacrifice for Bengal were one and the same. In 1905, at the time of the partition of Bengal, the patriot in Rabindranath suffered more than the poet. His immortal prayer ran:

> Let all brothers and sisters of Bengal be one, be one, be one, O God.

Brahman

No mind, no form, I only exist;

The final end of Nature's dance,

— Sri Chinmoy The Absolute

Tagore says:

Buddha

Childhood

> As morning shows the day.

As every canon admits of exception, even so this truth does not always hold. But in the life of Rabindranath it is absolutely true.

The more we make a child happy, the more we can expect good of him. It is but a child's cheerful face that can frighten away the teeming ills of the world.

To serve a unique purpose Tagore invites a child to appear on the world-scene.

> They [men] are cruel in their greed and their envy, their words are like hidden knives thirsting for blood.

> Let them see your face, my child, and thus know the meaning of all things; let them love you and thus love each other.

Cosmopolitan

Creation

Christ

The child of Mary came to preach Love and Surrender to God and establish on earth the Kingdom of Heaven. He brought our soul to the fore and declared: "I and my Father are one."

Death

"Death," says Tagore, "lays its hand upon the ego in all its forms. The world is not deprived of anything. All losses are incurred by the ego alone." — Shantiniketan 7

Education

Ego

Fortune

> — Tagore, Personality

Freedom

> — Lenin Speech, 1917

Dignity is the brave son of freedom and the true father of joy.

Tagore asks women not to try to tie down their husbands, but to allow them full freedom. The imposition of bondage is sure to recoil on them, and, at the same time, it is apt to deprive the male of his manliness.

Gitanjali

Better to explore it.

Before Gitanjali won him world-renown, Tagore was not even a triumphant poet in Bengal, much less a victorious one. Such were then the teeming clouds over the firmament of Bengal.

Tagore became the conqueror,

God

> — Nietzsche

We know that neither man nor God is in fault. Voltaire helps us to assert the existence of God in a unique manner.

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and I cannot dream

no watchmaker."

Gratitude

Great

> — Emerson, Self-Reliance

Himalayan blunder

History and literature

Humility and inspiration

Humour

(1) "If I look with my eyes open, my wife suspects that I am on the lookout for her sister. If I sit with my eyes closed, she thinks that my mind is occupied with her sister. If I cough, she ascribes some motive to it. And if I check it with my utmost efforts, she sees into it something more serious." — Vaikunther Khata

(2) "The Ayurvedic physicians (Kaviraj) hold that the heart organ stands on the organ of digestion, though the poets do not admit that the emotion of love is based on the power of forbearance and self-control." — Sesh Raksha

(3) "The thermometer of love shows three degrees of temperature. When a man asserts that he has not fallen in love, it indicates the subnormal temperature of 95°. When he admits that he loves, then he runs the temperature of 98.4, which is, according to the doctors, quite normal and entirely free from any danger. But when the fever of love exceeds 105°, the patient ceases to use all endearing terms and begins to call his beloved names; in the absence of such behaviour, his heart would burst by the pressure of the steam of love, and it may lead to an accident of the worst type. It is only an M.D. in the medical science of love who can estimate how delirious becomes the language of a patient stricken with the fever of love."

Now let us place Tagore's own view as regards humour:

"Humour is a dangerous thing. It is well if it surrenders itself willingly with a smiling face, but a catastrophe may result if you try to take it by storm." — (From his letters)

Ideal

Imagination

> Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Anatole France comes one step ahead and makes bold to say:

> To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything.

Imitation

Impossibility

Japan

"The cause of Japan's strength lies in the fact that she does not fritter away her energy in fruitless hustle-bustle and exchanges of hot words. As there is no waste of energy, the Japanese do not run short of it at the hour of their need. The mental and vital peace and endurance form a characteristic feature in their national character. They know how to control themselves when they are confronted with grief, sorrow, shock and causes for indignation. That is why the foreigners fail to understand the Japanese mind." — Japané-Parasyé

J.C. Bose on Tagore

Knighthood

Knowledge

> Knowledge is precious to us, because we shall never have time to complete it.

Letters

> Professional critics have a habit of bearing false witness against themselves — even when they are pleased they labour to prove the reverse.

> One individual and the infinite are on equal terms, worthy of looking upon one another, each from his own throne.

> The world is ever new to me, like a loved old friend of this and former births, the acquaintance between us being both long and deep.

> Success in Life is an unmeaning phrase, — Nature's commandment being simply to live.

Life

"A life of nothing's nothing worth,

To that last nothing under earth.

— Tennyson, Two Voices

But let us sing just the opposite with regard to the life of Tagore:

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From that first fulness ere his birth,

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He writes elsewhere something about life which is very significant.

Literature

Love

> Love in France is a comedy; in England a tragedy; in Italy an opera seria; and in Germany a melodrama.

And love in India is self-dedication.

Love is all-where. It is the common messenger of God and man. Tagore writes: "We know that we are born of love — our relationship is of love, and we feel that our father and mother are the true symbols of our eternal relationship with God." To quote one of his most beautiful lines:

> One word keep for me in thy silence, O World, when I am dead: ‘I have loved.’

Man

> Man! Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.

We know, man is not what he seems. He is something more than his present appearance and achievements. We may say that man is that very thing which must be surpassed. Tagore writes:

Marriage

His mission

Mother

"For the hand that rocks the cradle

— Montgomery

Equal love and equal blessing when they go together are called mother. Rabindranath's mother breathed her last when he was but a child. What an emotional thrill flashes across our mind when we read Tagore's recollection of his mother's love filled with blessing.

> When in later life, I wandered about like a madcap, at the first coming of spring, with a handful of half-blown jessamines tied in a corner of my muslin scarf, and as I stroked my forehead with the soft, rounded tapering buds, the touch of my mother's fingers would come back to me; and I clearly realised that the tenderness which dwelt in the tips of those lovely fingers was the same as that which blossoms every day in the purity of these jessamine buds; and that whether we know it or not, this tenderness is on the earth in boundless measure.

Music

Mysticism

Nationalism

Now let us observe what Jawaharlal Nehru writes about the contribution of Rabindranath to Nationalism:

Nature

> — Voltaire Life of Moliere

News

Newspapers

Oath

An occasion

Painting

Plays

Prakritir Pratishodh (Nature's Revenge): In this play we find an ascetic of the first water coming back to ordinary human life through his commiseration with poor humanity. The play teaches us that Nature is bound to take revenge on us if we despise her.

Chitrangada (Chitra) was the daughter of the king of Manipur. Her physical beauty compelled Arjuna, the third Pandava, to accept her as the partner of his life. But as satisfaction was not to be found in physical beauty, he sought for the Beauty that lies beyond the body.

Raja (The King of the Dark Chamber) is, according to some critics, nothing more than an allegory. But Tagore writes: "Critics and detectives are naturally suspicious. They scent allegories and bombs where there are no such abominations. It is difficult to convince them of our innocence. With regard to the criticism of my play '/The King of the Dark Chamber"... the human soul has its inner drama, which is just the same as anything else that concerns man. Sudarshana is not more allegory than Lady Macbeth, who might be described as an allegory representing the criminal ambition in man's nature. However, it does not matter what things are according to the rules of the critics. They are what they are and therefore difficult of classification."

The moment Sudarshana realised that in enjoying the outer beauty alone the true fulfilment of life can never be attained, she utterly surrendered herself to the king and in no time she discovered the secret that in the offering of oneself there lies the key of true fulfilment.

An interesting event. One day while Tagore was residing at Maitreyi Devi's place at Mangpu, which is near Kalimpong, a French lady, Mademoiselle Boshenec, came before the Poet and said, "Gurudeva, to-day Post Office will be staged in France." After observing silence for a few minutes, Tagore said that in Russia The King of the Dark Chamber was staged repeatedly. Again after a long silence: "This is called reward," said he.

Poetry

> The poetry of Tagore owes its sudden and universal success to this advantage — that he gives us more of this discovery and fusion for which the mind of our age is in quest than any other creative writer of the time. His work is a constant music of the overpassing of the borders, a chant-filled realm in which the subtle sounds and lights of the truth of the spirit give new meanings to the finer subtleties of life.

In this connection let me cite Amal Kiran, the beautiful name given by Sri Aurobindo to his poet-disciple who has had the rare good fortune to discuss with his Master matters of high poetry through series of correspondence.

> In the East two names have stood high in our own day, one in Urdu and Persian by a dynamic colourful passion of religious thought, the other in Bengali by a deeply and exquisitely imaged devotionalism, and both by an intonation inspired and measured: Iqbal and Tagore." — Mother India

There are critics who say that Tagore cannot be classed with the poets of the highest magnitude, for he did not try an epic. O wiseacre! his lyrics have sufficient power to lift you up into the realm of poetic delight where his pen reigns supreme over almost all branches of Art.

To many of us it is but an insoluble mystery whether Tagore moulded his life according to the growth of his poetical works or whether it was his gradual poetical flow that brought about successive vicissitudes in his outer life. However, his poetical genius and his life marched side by side in a perfect harmony.

It was his wonderful Nirjharer Swapnabhanga, (The Awakening of the Fountain) that took him for the first time into the realm of Intuition. A new life dawned within him, and he looked at the creation with a new vision.

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I shall sweep from mount to mount,

I shall clap to tune and rhythm.

Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat): this unique poem was mercilessly criticised by many uncomprehending critics. Some called it sheer mysticism, others claimed that the poem was nothing but barren mist. To me at least, it is nothing inferior to a lucid touch of Revelation, however small in quantity it might be. Here the finite wants to taste the Infinite; further, the finite wants to be one with the all-pervading Infinite.

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It seems to be an old familiar face.

Looks neither right nor left.

It seems to be an old familiar face.

The birth of the philosopher we notice in Rabindranath the day he brought to light one of his earliest works, Sandhya Sangit (Evening Songs). And this philosopher expressed himself through Tagore's innumerable writings, until the latter breathed his last.

In Naivedya (Offering) we find the poet Rabindranath declaring that he does not belong to the school of Renunciation. The world is not illusionary. Its joy and sorrow, its beauty and ugliness have a veritable value. He wanted to view and acquire Truth and Beauty in and from all the objects of the world. He sings:

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Behind the doors of senses shut."

In height and depth, in grandeur and sublimity, no other poem of Tagore's can equal Balaka. Here the doors of the world beyond are, as it were, thrown wide open to him. Not only did he bring down the truths of that world, but also he bestowed these achievements on all Bengali literature. Ceaselessly and dauntlessly the world shall march towards its final goal. The surge of beauty that pervades the earth is never a chimera's mist. This beauty is a self-fulfilling truth.

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In the depth of silence, in the air, on land and sea.

Who can say, what is there in the tenebrous womb of the earth?

Even like flights of cranes.

Moving with outspread wings from isle to isle,

With the flutter of starry wings

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When thou dancest before the assembly of the gods,

Waves upon waves swirl rhythmically in the

The undulating tips of the shivering corn

From the necklace hung upon thy breast

And all at once man loses his masculine heart

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From his exquisite poem, Swarga Hate Viday (To Bid Adieu to Heaven), we can easily grasp the idea that earthly love and beauty are more intense and delightful than those of Heaven precisely because they are transient. For love and beauty exist in Heaven for good.

It is said that the poet's poem and the prophet's word fly higher than a high-pinioned bird. No wonder, then, that Tagore became at once a poet and a prophet of the highest magnitude when his pen produced Namaskar (Salutation).

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O Friend, my country's friend,

Of India's soul!..."

Prose

Needless to say, in the field of prose, too, he is undoubtedly a treasure-house of penetrating wisdom, sublime and beautiful thoughts. His sparkling prose-works are both great and delightfully helpful to the present-day need of humanity. Many of his prose books guide us rightly and purposely through the thick and thin of life. And it is, as it were, an imperative need for an adorer of Bengali literature to quote Tagore's prose to justify the author's own genius.

Let me reproduce here a pleasantly readable remark made by Tagore on prose.

"I wonder why the writing of pages of prose does not give one anything like the joy of completing a single poem. One's emotions take such perfection of form in a poem, they can be taken up by the fingers, so to speak. While prose is like a sackful of loose material, incapable of being lifted as you please." — (From his letters)

Truth had a peculiar dream. In the dream he saw Tagore's prose and Tagore's poetry exchanging hot words.

Prose: "Poetry, you must admit that I gave Rabindranath perfection long before you. And when? When he was but in his teens."

Poetry: "True, you gave him perfection before me. But the real sense of it came only after I had been recognised. It is the Nobel Prize given to me that illumined your own depths to the world."

Prose: "Sufficient. Tagore is not all he is on the strength of your gift alone."

Quality

Queries

> When I take up father's pen or pencil and write upon his book just as he does, — a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, — why do you get cross with me, then, mother?

> When my father wastes such heaps of paper, mother, you don't seem to mind at all.

> What do you think of father's spoiling sheets and sheets of paper with black marks all over on both sides?

Quotation

Rabindranath

In Rabindranath's works Bengali literature rightly deserves to shake hands with world literature.

A day shall dawn when Rabindranath's soul-stirring songs will go a long way to the formation of character of the Indians.

His was a Spirit that was ever open to the new Light.

His was the politics that could never be separated from the core of spirituality.

Rabindranath's Viswabharati is a glorious idea seeking a perfect Form.

A marvel indeed, Rabindranath had the rare capacity to mingle the strains of human sorrow and joy, human sweetness and bitterness into one song.

Reformer

Relatives and dear ones

A memorable event: we all know that Tagore breathed his last on August 7, 1941. In that very year, on May 6, 1941, his 80th birthday had been celebrated all over the world. On this occasion Mahatma Gandhi's greeting ran:

"Four-score is not enough. May you finish five! Love."

Religion

"Religion," Tagore says, "is not a fractional thing that can be doled out in fixed weekly or daily measures as one among various subjects in the school syllabus. It is the truth of our complete being, the consciousness of our personal relationship with the infinite; it is the true centre of gravity of our life." — Personality

Let me cite one of his acute observations on religion from the Modern Review, December 1917. He writes: "If religion, instead of being the manifestation of a spiritual ideal, gives prominence to scriptures and external rites, then does it disturb the peace more than anything else."

Royalty

> — Bismarck

Russia

Shantiniketan

Although many have worked and many will continue to work for Shantiniketan, we can safely say that Shantiniketan is a one-man University. Viswabharati is surely an invitation to the remotest corner of the world. It is a cheerful sacrifice to attain to the all-fulfilling truth of mankind. Now let us quote Tagore: “It has been my steadfast endeavour, that the boys of my Shantiniketan school should acquire a true vision of the history of humanity as a whole, broad and untainted with our race-hatred.”

Science

> — Bernard

Seer and poet

Song

But Rabindranath once said that, when he was capable of singing, his own compositions were very few, but when he became a prolific composer of songs his voice failed him.

And here is a prophetic utterance of Tagore about his own songs:

"With the march of time everything changes. But I can definitely say that my songs will have a considerably greater stability. Especially the Bengalis will have no other alternative but to sing my songs in the hours of their sorrow, grief, joy and delight. They needs must sing these songs epoch after epoch.” — Translated from Alapchari Rabindranath by Rani Chandra

Tagore burst into fame with more than two thousand songs. In the West Schubert comes second with six hundred or so.

Finally, I cannot help reproducing here a few momentous words from Tagore's Fruit Gathering:

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You gave me only voice, yet asked for more, and I sing."

Solitude

Sorrow

"To Sorrow I bade good-morrow,

But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly:

— Keats Endymion

Sorrow helps us immensely. It is apt to humble our pride. It chastens us. It opens our hearts to magnanimity and sympathy. To check our innumerable errors and make us watch ourselves and put us on the road to perfection, sorrow must necessarily exist in the world.

How beautiful and penetrating are the following lines of Tagore:

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The stars have wrought their anklets of light to deck thy feet, but mine will hang upon thy breast.

— Gitanjali

Story

Socrates and Tagore

Sympathy

Synthesis of extremes

Tagore

His was the heart that gave no shelter to the doctrine of the unreality of the finite. His was the genius that had the quality of universality in a striking degree.

Glory to Tagore, for through him even the most insignificant and the humblest Bengali villagers can speak to the world at large.

Tagore and Gandhi

"I differ with Gandhi in many respects, but I admire and revere the man highly...," so says Tagore.

Mahatma's deliverance is nothing other than the fruit of renunciation.

Tagore's deliverance is precisely the fruit of fulfilment. Tagore sings:

Tagore and Goethe

Teaching

> — Galileo

And what Tagore says about the teacher is also quite striking: "A teacher can never truly teach unless he is still learning himself. A lamp can never light another lamp unless it continues to burn its own flame."

Tears

Thirst

Translation

Truth

Union

> — Motto of the State of Kentucky, U.S.A

Our National Song is an expression of our National Soul, Mother India's prayer to the Divine voiced by her Poet of Dawn.

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Thou Dispenser of India's Destiny.

Of the Punjab, Sind, Gujarat and Maratha,

It echoes in the hills of the Vindhyas and Himalayas,

And is chanted by the waves of the India Sea.

Thou Dispenser of India's destiny.

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University

The world knows that Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913. And it was in the same year, during the Vice-Chancellorship of Sir Ashutosh Mukherji, that Calcutta University had the good fortune to honour him with the degree of D.Litt., honoris causa. Again, in 1937 he got the honour of giving its Convocation Address. It was a great surprise, unprecedented in the history of the University, that the Address was given in Bengali and not in English.

August, 1940, was a memorable month in the Poet's life. The University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Literature. It obviously signified a growing friendship between the East and the West.

U.S.A. and America's spiritual idealism

"... when we say that America is materialistic, we speak of a fact that is too apparent to be completely true... there is a strong current of spiritual idealism flowing beneath the surface soil of the American mind."

Further, what he said to the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a cablegram from Kalimpong, India, June 1940, shows the significant role he expected America to play on the world-stage.

Vedanta and Vaishnavism

> O Thou, make my head bow down at the dust of Thy Feet.

The Vedantin with absolute monism through him declares:

> As far as my ken can go

Violence

Vivekananda and Tagore

Tagore was a sea of beauty and delight.

Tagore was a soul-stirring Flute.

Both Narendranath (Vivekananda) and Rabindranath loved humanity much, the former speedily and the latter steadily.

Vivekananda says, in effect, "No time to linger. Awake, O India! and measure the loftiest Height with your dauntless head."

Voyager

Whole

Woman

To quote a still higher praise — rather, the highest: "Had man's mind not been energised by the inner working of woman's vital charm, he would never have attained his success. Of all the higher achievements of civilisation — the devotion of the toiler, the valour of the brave, the creations of the artist, — the secret spring is to be found in woman's influence."

Again he throws considerable light on woman in one of his conversations with Sri Dilip Kumar Roy:

Works

World-poet and world-figure

Xanthippe and Mrinalini

Now Xanthippe. What a contrast! Poor Socrates, the unparalleled philosopher of the time, suffered grievously at his wife's hands. In other words, should we not rather say in the words of Xenophon, an intimate friend of Socrates as well as a military Commander, that Socrates' wife had a “shrewish temper, which Socrates bore patiently.”

Yet

Thy gifts to us mortals fulfil all our needs and yet run back to Thee undiminished.

The flower sweetens the air with its perfume; yet its last service is to offer itself to Thee.

— Tagore

Youth

Zeal

Now let us focus our attention on Rabindranath's zeal. During his earlier days he had to face very bitter criticism of his writings in season and out of season. Kaliprasanna Kabyabisharad, the well-known editor of the Bengali weekly Hitavadi, probably stood as the bitterest and most impossible critic of Tagore's works. His merciless pen runs:

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Stay where you are, in your hole.

That too you have published as a work of Art.

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Part III — The disciple and the Master

Vivekananda the wonder-warrior

“... the Master marked out Vivekananda as the heroic soul destined to take the world between his two hands and change it.”

Vivekananda came into the world in an age seething with rank materialism. Spiritual values were at a discount. He held the mighty torch of spirituality high. Exceptional was his clarion call to lead the life of the Spirit. The soul-stirring message of Sri Ramakrishna was embodied in him, in this lion amongst men. And as regards the message of India to the world, “Remember,” declares Vivekananda, “not the Soul for Nature, but Nature for the Soul.”

But there is the amusing story that Vivekananda in his childhood, in reply to his father’s query, said that his ambition in life was to become a coachman like the one who loved him much and whose love he reciprocated.

Another anecdote: once in his adolescence he asked his father what he had done for his son. “Go and look into the mirror,” came the prompt reply. Naren obeyed. He looked at his own reflection in the mirror and walked away quietly. Evidently he became convinced that he owed his magnificent personality solely to his father.

Now let us move on to a more significant topic. Tagore was an adorer of beauty, while the dominant trait of Vivekananda was the expression of power. But Vivekananda, too, possessed a deep sense of appreciation of subtle beauty. “Beauty,” says he, “is not external, but already in the mind.” Here we are reminded of what his spiritual daughter Nivedita wrote about her Master. “It was dark when we approached Sicily, and against the sunset sky, Etna was in slight eruption. As we entered the straits of Messina, the moon rose, and I walked up and down the deck beside the Swami, while he dwelt on the fact that beauty is not external, but already in the mind. On one side frowned the dark crags of the Italian coast, on the other, the island was touched with silver light. ‘Messina must thank me,’ he said; ‘it is I who give her all her beauty.’ ”

Truly, in the absence of appreciation, beauty is not beauty at all. And beauty is worthy of its name only when it has been appreciated. Further, they are not many in number who really have the power of appreciating it.

> My tastes are aristocratic; my actions are democratic.

In the realm of spirituality this truth got full manifestation in Vivekananda’s life. His was the heart that pined to realise the lofty Truth. And he did it. But about his actions, we can say that they were democratic; that is, his actions were for the good of humanity at large.

Vivekananda looked upon the world as his dear Motherland, and upon mankind as his true brothers and sisters. Come what may, to serve them was his cherished religion. Religion is a unique thirst for the One and the many. Assimilation and tolerance are the true signs of the greatest religion. Let us not forget Colton: “Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it; do anything but live it.” Religions are like the lines of a poem. As each line is helpful — rather, responsible for the completion of the poem — even so every religion is responsible for the entire fulfilment of the others. And according to Vivekananda religion is never a mere creed, but an ever-living and enlightening experience. How beautifully he unites the two antagonists, the materialist and the spiritualist: “The materialist is right. There is but One. Only he calls that Matter and I call it God.”

It is an undeniable fact that the Western mind has a liking for making plans before it takes up anything. Is it at all advisable? Not in the least, in the opinion of Vivekananda. The Eternal Will is sure to carry out its work at its chosen hour. Once he had to reprove Nivedita. “Plans! Plans! That is why you Western people can never create a religion! If any of you ever did, it was only a few Catholic saints, who had no plans. Religion was never preached by planners.”

Again, it was Vivekananda who spoke to his Indian brothers about the greatest achievement of the English: “They have known how to combine obedience with self-respect.”

Neither are we to obliterate from our minds his solemn warning to the Westerners that they must never attempt to force upon others that which they have found good for themselves. But his consolation too is very cogent. He elsewhere says, “Never forget that a man is made great and perfect as much by his faults as by his virtues. So we must not seek to rob a nation of its character even if it could be proved that that character was all faults.”

God and men are as inseparable as one’s head and hair. It is our blind stupidity that fails to find the indivisibility of man and God. The gods who are not one of us, who ignore us and look down upon us, can never be our cherished gods. “I would not worship,” Vivekananda boldly exclaims, “even the Greek gods, for they were separate from humanity! Only those should be worshipped who are like ourselves, but greater. The difference between the gods and me must be a difference only of degree.”

“Better to wear out than to rust out.” Vivekananda’s whole body — rather, his earthly life — vibrated with this unique Idea. Mother Earth lost him when he was on the right side of forty. But his work? No hyperbole, it can easily be rated as the eighth wonder of the world. Let us cite here his firm conviction with regard to work. “By work alone,” he writes, “men may get to where Buddha got largely by meditation or Christ by prayer. Buddha was a working Jnani, Christ was a Bhakta, but the same goal was reached by both of them.”

His was a life of unimaginable sacrifice. And how can India, his Motherland, dare to forget his message of stupendous sacrifice? “For my own part I will be incarnated two hundred times, if that is necessary to do what I have undertaken amongst my people.” At this Sri Ramakrishna, if he had heard his disciple, could have done nothing but clap and dance in supreme ecstasy. For it was this very Naren whose heart ached to remain always in samadhi and whom he had to scold fondly by saying, “I thought you had been born for something greater, my boy!”

> Veni, Vidi, Vici.” (“I came, I saw, I conquered.”)

Vivekananda and his Master⁴

The reciprocal appreciation of the greatness of the disciple and the Master found an exceedingly interesting expression in their lives. The former was firmly convinced that millions of Vivekanandas could come into existence at the fiat of his Master, while the latter declared that his Naren was the incarnation of Narayan himself to uplift humanity.

Without Arjuna would the victory of Kurukshetra have been possible? Sri Krishna had to preach the whole Gita to train his disciple, over and above infusing into him his divine force.

Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda appeared in an age more advanced. Hence the Master could much more easily make of Naren what he intended him to be.

In the life of Narendranath we notice two instances in which Matter submitted to Spirit. The young Narendranath, steeped in agnosticism, accepting matter and doubting the existence of the supreme Spirit, would question people who seemed to be advanced in spirituality as to whether they had direct vision of God. Maharshi Devendranath, father of Tagore, attempted thrice in vain to answer the query of the bold young man, and at last said, “You possess the eyes of a Yogi.”

This very Narendranath fell at the hallowed feet of Sri Ramakrishna, who was a veritable embodiment of Spirit, and who saw Spirit permeating Matter.

As a contrast, the supremely materialistic America practically bowed down before Vivekananda, who stood there as the spiritual representative of the East.

His was a life of numerous miracles. At the age of eight he entered into trance for the first time! He was only thirty years old when America — nay, the West — found the spiritual giant in him! In his childhood and boyhood he condemned women terribly. But in his later years he fought like a giant for the progress of Indian womanhood! We may, however, hold that in his earlier days Vivekananda was afraid not of woman but of temptation. It took six long years for him to make his proud head bow to the Mother Kali. And when his surrender was complete he opened his devoted lips: “All my patriotism is gone. Everything is gone. Now it’s only Mother, Mother!”

I am sure my purpose will be best served if I just reproduce his own words about Kali. “How I used to hate Kali!” Vivekananda said, “and all Her ways. That was the ground of my six years’ fight — that I would not accept Her. But I had to accept Her at last. Ramakrishna Paramahansa dedicated me to Her, and now I believe that She guides me in every little thing I do, and does with me what She wills.”

Vivekananda ruthlessly looked down upon the so-called miracles that create a commotion in the minds of people. “I look upon miracles as the greatest stumbling block in the way of truth. When the disciples of Buddha told him of a man who had performed a so-called miracle — and showed him the bowl, he took it and crushed it under his feet and told them never to build their faith on miracles, but to look for truth in everlasting principles. He showed them the inner light — the Light of the Spirit, which is the only safe light to go by. Miracles are only stumbling blocks. Let us brush them aside.

To show surprise at anything amounts to a tacit expression of ignorance, and hence of weakness. “Never show surprise,” such was the command of Viswanath Dutta to his son Naren when he was in his teens. The son acted according to his father’s instructions from that very day until the end of his life. He spent years at the foot of the silence-hushed and snow-capped Himalayas during his itinerancy. He met people drawn from all sections of society — from the lowest to the highest. He came in close contact with the poorest and the richest of the world. In spite of striking differences in the world, surprise could never take shelter in his all-conceiving eyes.

Perfection is the only choice for a man treading the path of spirituality. Perfection and infinite bliss run abreast. True happiness lies nowhere else except in perfection. But how to achieve this perfection? Vivekananda shows us a unique way to achieve the impossible. He writes: “If we can distinguish well between quality and substance, we may become perfect men.”

Sweetness and happiness are rarely found in carrying out earthly duties. No human being must be judged by the nature of his duties, but by the manner and the spirit in which he discharges them. What is our duty and what is not our duty has been the most puzzling, the most intricate problem to solve since the dawn of civilisation. But the bold statement made by Vivekananda solves it in a very easy manner: “Any action that makes us go Godward is a good action, and that is our duty; any action that makes us go downward is evil, and that is not our duty.” And we may further add to it that in order to advance in life, it is our duty to have faith in ourselves first and then in the Divine. Everybody must remember the undeniable truth that without having faith in oneself one can never have faith in God.

Ramakrishna: Soul of the East⁵

Looked at with human eyes, his appearance was so helpless — a storm-tossed raft seemed more dependable than the frail frame of this prophet. But going deep within, one could discover his true personality. To one’s surprise, one could find in his teachings a colossal Will that could shake the world.

Here was a man whose authoritative voice declared that he not only had seen the Omnipotent, but also could show Him to his beloved disciple Naren (Vivekananda). He further claimed that he saw God more clearly than he saw the disciple standing before him.

As Ramakrishna’s life was replete with wonderful visions, so was his beloved Naren’s life surcharged with the power to fulfil those visions here on earth. Awakened India must ever remain beholden to Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, for it is they who were the most outstanding spiritual figures to appear on Indian soil during the last century. The Master and the disciple were hardly two distinct individuals. Each helped to shape the other. To our deeper vision, they formed an integral whole.

Sri Ramakrishna’s precepts were couched in the simplest language, in words that flew straight into the hearts of the people. The blessings that India — nay, the world — received from him, his unique universal sympathy, stand matchless. “I do not care,” he said; “I will give up a thousand such bodies to help one man. It is glorious to help even one man.”

To live the truths that one has preached is often an impossibility. Glory to Sri Ramakrishna that he was a triumphant living example of the truths that he preached. To him, religion was nothing short of realisation. He synthesised most of the major world religions by his direct and immediate realisation of each of them. One by one, he pierced the core of each religion, extracted its essence, and became the perfect embodiment of that path to the Supreme. Sri Ramakrishna firmly believed, too, that a time would come when an aspirant would be able to attain to God-realisation by three days’ practice.

“Ramakrishna was God manifested in a human being... Vivekananda was a radiant glance from the eye of Shiva,” so said Sri Aurobindo, the founder of the Integral Yoga. Vivekananda looked upon his Master as the embodiment of perfection. “In the presence of my Master, I found out that man could be perfect even in this body.”

In the following lines produced from the penetrating pen of K.D. Sethna, we shall observe how, in the march of evolution, one Avatar paves the way for the next one:

“Ramakrishna, the illiterate man from the temple of conventional worship, was a veritable colossus of mystical experience; in him direct and immediate realisation of the Divine Being reached an intensity and variety which made him a marvellous summing-up of the whole spiritual history of India, with a face carrying the first gleam of a new age of the human soul — the age that will be known as the Aurobindonian.”

And do we not remember the supremely prophetic utterance of Sri Aurobindo? “We do not belong to past dawns, but to the noons of the future.”

“East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” The famous statement by Kipling was proved false when Vivekananda, with the flood of Sri Ramakrishna’s inspiration, gloriously united the East and the West with his unique message on religion.

India wants “to be.” The West wants “to do.” Is it not at once safe and advisable “to be” first, and then to offer one’s contribution to the wide world? Atmanam viddhi, “Know thyself”, says the Upanishad. First know thyself, and then do thou proclaim thyself. This was Ramakrishna’s secret.

There are different paths leading to the Divine. But the shortest and most sunlit path is the Mother Cult. This Mother Cult was most powerfully shown to the Indians by Sri Ramakrishna. The never-ceasing injunction of his teachings was, “Approach the Divine as a child approaches his mother, with the same purity, sincerity, ardent love, and faith, and the Mother will come to you! Call ‘Ma, Ma’; call again and again. The Mother is bound to come.”

When the influence of Western culture had almost caused the real “self” of India to die, and the children of India were running amuck to imitate Western culture, Ramakrishna Paramahansa knew that the time was ripe for him to revive the lost tradition of India.

“Sri Ramakrishna,” said Nolini Kanta Gupta, the celebrated Bengali author, “represents spirituality at its absolute, its pristine fount and power. In him we find the pure gold of spirituality at a time when duplicity, perplexity, deceit and falsehood on the one hand, and atheism, disbelief and irreverence on the other reigned supreme... When spirituality had almost disappeared from the world and even in India, it existed, as it were, merely in name, there was the advent of Sri Ramakrishna bringing with him spirituality in its sheer plenitude and investing it with eternal certitude and infallibility.”

It was Ramakrishna, too, who showed the greatest reverence for women that the world has known. He felt that women were the embodiments of the Divine Mother and he treated them as divinities. His own consort, Sarada Devi, he worshipped as the Divine Mother Herself.

Far and wide travelled the renown of Ramakrishna’s spiritual teachings, influencing, among others, the French savant Romain Rolland. So deeply was he touched that in the evening of his life he wrote the memorable book, The Life of Sri Ramakrishna. Two lines of significant insight I quote from that book.

“The man whose image I here invoke was the consummation of two thousand years of the spiritual life of three million people... His inner life embraced the whole multiplicity of men and God.”

Professor Max Muller, another famous European, was also an ardent admirer of Ramakrishna. Max Muller had devoted the major portion of his life to the study of the Hindu scriptures, had translated the Rig Veda into English, and was the author of History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature and Sacred Books of the East. Among his later works was Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings.

Once Swami Vivekananda went to Oxford to pay homage to Professor Max Muller, whom he looked upon as a sage and a “Vedantist of Vedantists and kindness itself.” On Vivekananda’s departure, the Professor, who had seen seventy winters, accompanied the Swami to the railway station, justifying his coming by saying, “It is not every day that one meets a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahansa.”

Sri Ramakrishna, to thee we offer our deepest homage. Our hearts feel that what you possessed was the Infinite, and that the Infinite was your heart’s Eternal Home.

The child of Kali

Ramakrishna will appear to one as a man of overflowing emotion, to a second as an ardent aspirant, to a third as a man of philosophical wisdom, to a fourth as a man of unique sincerity. It is obvious that different persons should possess different opinions regarding his personality. For in a matter like this, a flawless analysis on an intellectual basis is next to impossible, and all our human judgement must sadly fail to yield any useful result. But nobody will ever hesitate to call him the most beloved child of Kali, the Mother. His sole aim in life was to have nothing save and except a constant union with the Mother Kali. His aim he did fulfil. And in one word we can sum up the message of his life: Ma.

A wonderful swimmer in the sea of Brahman’s Silence, a unique clarion in the world-atmosphere of the Spirit’s expression was Sri Ramakrishna. Although he had attained to the transcendental plane, he preferred to be the flute to be played by his Mother Kali. To cite him: “I do not want to be sugar, but I want to taste sugar.”

Ramakrishna was, as it were, the seed sown in the world-soil and Vivekananda the bumper crop of which humanity is the reaper. Ramakrishna was the Inspiration, Vivekananda was its Expression, and humanity now has both Inspiration and Expression as its peerless possessions.

Every word that fell from his divine lips carried weight. Sharp humour, too, was not wanting when the occasion demanded it, but those who had to suffer his humorous blows did feel later on that those blows were meant only to awake their slumbering soul. His trance-bound countenance, the simplicity of his expression, his unassuming and genial manner, the lucid cordiality of his relationship with all, coupled with his magnificently hallowed life and divine love, won for him a universal attraction and devotion.

It was Ramakrishna who peacefully housed in himself the Cosmic and Trans-cosmic Consciousness with all possible inclusiveness of outlook. What he felt was spontaneous. What he said was spontaneous. What he did was spontaneous. He had no purpose of his own, and whatever we apparently hold to have been his purpose, that too, to our astonishment, was never influenced by the stream of desire. He had no will save that of his Mother Kali. Consequently, an occasion never arose in his self-dedicated life to the Mother on which he had to hold himself responsible for any of his activities.

We can easily come to the conclusion that the descent of Avatars like Sri Ramakrishna with a human body is intended simply to uplift and further the progress of mankind in the evolutionary process. They go on doing good to mankind in their earthly bodies so long as such continuance is necessary in the interest of humanity, in spite of their being immune from any action, good or bad, big or small.

Naturally, we do not and cannot know all the phases of Sri Ramakrishna’s mystic life. But what we dare understand is this: that he taught us how to call to the Mother. No doubt we are her children, but it is absolutely necessary to feel that She is our real Mother, and that we are her real children, and that we have every right to demand of her all our needs, which She will never fail to fulfil for us.

Ramakrishna ranks high among the greatest mystics and spiritual figures of the world. His very life was in itself the most effective refutation of the half-believer and unbeliever of the Divine. Reason, whether erring or unerring, was altogether foreign to his nature. Who was Ramakrishna, if not a unique revelation of intuition? This supreme Mystic showed to the world that there is something divine beyond and behind terrestrial appearances, and that it is no mere inference of the hesitating understanding that the world is real. His teachings were surcharged with conviction. They sprang from the innermost depth of this heart. His simple and candid language has touched the heart of mankind as clearly as the sense-organs apprehend the physical objects of the world.

Apparently we do notice that the true and higher life is less contagious than the evil and the lower life. But the higher consciousness that constantly and puissantly flooded the mind and the heart of Ramakrishna exerted a unique attraction on all persons around him, whether they were his disciples or not, and finally lifted them above the ordinary plane to partake of the divine sweetness. They found that a supremely calm and serene atmosphere was not to be had from the eloquent discussions of the intellectuals, but only from Ramakrishna, the eternal child of the eternal Mother Kali.

It is quite surprising that Naren, the dearest disciple of Ramakrishna, had in the beginning no faith in Mother Kali. Days ran into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years, yet the proud head of Naren would not surrender to Kali. In season and out he would argue with his Master about the authenticity of divinity in the Mother. At times the Master was hurt. But the Mother used to brush off his qualms. Once She told Her child that in due time Naren would have faith in Her and stop arguing with him. With a heart full of certitude the Master said to his hesitating disciple that a time would come when at the mere mention of Mother Kali his eyes would shed tears. Infallible was his prophecy. In after years Vivekananda says: “How I used to hate Kali! and all Her ways. That was the ground of my six years’ fight — that I would not accept Her. But I had to accept Her at last. Ramakrishna Paramahansa dedicated me to Her, and now I believe that She guides me in every little thing I do, and does with me what She wills.”

Vivekananda’s invocation to Kali the Mother is unique.

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For Terror is Thy name,

And every shaking step

Thou “Time,” the All-Destroyer!

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And hug the form of Death,

To him the Mother comes.”

The great Messenger of Nazareth declared to the world:

> I and my Father are one.”

Two mothers and a son: Bhuvaneshwari, Sarada Devi, and Naren

If there be anything never-to-be forgotten, it is the reminiscences of one’s own mother. “Wife and children may desert a man, but his mother never,” so says Vivekananda. In his childhood and boyhood Vivekananda found his confidante in nobody else save his mother; and from her he inherited not only moral purity and aesthetic sense, but also many intellectual faculties and a unique memory. His mother’s commanding personality could easily win the respect and veneration of all who came in contact with her. Her son’s influence shook the world, and her influence moulded his life considerably.

The young Naren was subject to fits of restlessness. His temper was of the quickest and he was possessed of dauntless spirit and childish pranks, but even so, with no difficulty he could make a clean breast of the misdeeds of his restlessness to his mother.

“Should the worst come to the worst, never swerve from the path of truth.” One day the schoolboy Naren got this bold and precious advice from his mother after his return from school. A sad incident had taken place in the class. The geography teacher had said, “Naren, what you say is wrong.” “No, Sir, it is right.” “I say, it is not in the book.” “No, Sir, it is.” “No argument, I shall beat you black and blue.” Smack went the cane repeatedly. Yet Naren’s sincere and bold heart would not acquiesce in what he knew to be wrong. After a while the teacher opened the book. To his extreme sorrow and shame he found Naren to be perfectly right.

As Naren was wont to disclose everything to his dear mother, this sad incident too he related to her. A tender smile played upon her lips. She fondly caressed and blessed her son, saying, “I am really happy and proud of you, my son. Should the worst come to the worst never swerve from the path of truth.”

Another piece of advice he got from his mother in his boyhood. “Bileh [Naren], as you will try your utmost not to lose your prestige, even so never indulge in hurting or lowering others’ prestige.”

True, poverty is no sin. But this truth too we cannot altogether ignore — that poverty often doubts the existence of the merciful God. Within a few months after the death of Viswanath Dutta, the family members found themselves in the jaws of poverty. Friends and relatives began deceiving them terribly. The eldest, Naren, was simply unfit to make both ends meet. Alas, one morning while he was rising from bed and repeating the name of God, his attention was distracted by the sudden outburst of his mother, who cried out, “Fool, be quiet! you have made yourself hoarse with praying to God from your childhood up. And what has He done for you?” His mother’s words cut him to the quick. Such an occurrence, however, was very rare.

In after years, many times Vivekananda spoke of his mother with a deep sense of gratitude. “It is my mother who has been the constant inspiration of my life and work.”

In 1894 Vivekananda was a guest of Mrs. Ole Bull in America. To comply with her request he gave a lecture on “The ideals of Indian Women” to the women of Cambridge, suburb of Boston. They were so charmed by it that they could not help writing a letter to his mother in India.

> To The Mother of Swami Vivekananda,

> ..we, who have your son in our midst, send you greetings. His generous service to men, women and children in our midst was laid at your feet by him in an address he gave us the other day on ‘The Ideals of Indian Women.’ The worship of his mother will be to all who heard him an inspiration and an uplift... Accept, dear Madam, our grateful recognition of your life and work in and through your son. And may it be accepted by you as a slight token of remembrance to serve in its use as a tangible reminder that the world is coming to its true inheritance from God, Brotherhood and Unity.”

Two arresting incidents will form a significant contrast between the mother and the son with respect to mundane love for each other. One night during his lonely itinerancy, while he was in Madras, Vivekananda dreamed that his mother had died. He was utterly upset, for he firmly believed that his mother was actually dead — so much so that he was preparing himself to perform her obsequies in Madras. His disciple Alasingha Perumal pointed out that as a sannyasin, a renouncer, he had no right to perform the last rites of his mother. “Nonsense, how could Shankara do all that? I am not going to abide by such silly and obligatory rules which preclude me from making my last offerings of gratitude to the memory of my dearest mother,” came the prompt reply from the Swami. Subsequently he consulted an occultist who assured him that his mother was alive and hale and hearty. And this occultist’s word proved to be quite correct. On the other hand, when the news of her son’s entering the state of Final Illumination reached his mother’s ears, her brave heart voiced forth, “Giving birth to a son having such an exceptional genius I am ever prepared to receive such blows.”

Now let us turn to his spiritual mother, Sarada Devi. However great the earthly mother may be, her love is no match for the disinterested love of the spiritual Mother. Vivekananda’s deepest conviction about the spiritual Mother runs:

> Eternal, unquestioning self-surrender to the Mother alone can give us peace. Love her for herself, without fear... Love her because you are her child. See her in all, good and bad alike. Then alone will come ‘Sameness’ and Bliss Eternal that is Mother herself...”

Once Vivekananda’s physical mother went to the Belur Math with one of her woman friends. She showed her friend the newly constructed buildings and the beautiful surroundings and remarked, “My Naren has done all this.” Sarada Devi and Naren also happened to be near by. Vivekananda in no time corrected his mother, saying, “Not your Naren,” and pointing to Sarada Devi, “but hers. Your Naren is by no means capable of such achievements.”

On the eve of his departure for America he decided that he would cross the seas only after having some concrete indications from his Master. He waited and waited, but in vain. At last he argued that his spiritual Mother and the Master were one and the same, and that he would seek her permission to go abroad. Accordingly he wrote a letter to Sarada Devi from Madras. By the time he received a letter from her he had had a dream in which he saw his Master Sri Ramakrishna proceed to the West over the waves and waters. This he took for approval of his plan. Presently he received whole-hearted permission from his spiritual Mother. With redoubled faith he was able to undertake his historic voyage.

When the Swadeshi movement was in full swing, Sarada Devi once remarked, “Had my Naren been alive, he could not have remained quiet and would have surely been put in jail.” This indicates how constantly she cherished the memory of her darling Naren, whom she would not allow to go anywhere alone after his triumphant return from the West. We will not be far from the truth if we dare say that behind the fiery political activities of Nivedita her Master Vivekananda’s mighty influence loomed large. We are apt to lose sight of Swami Vivekananda’s great contribution to the reawakening of the Indian Nation. His spiritual genius has, so to speak, eclipsed his patriotism. To cite Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna):

“We who live in this day of India’s reawakening to the Yogic secrets of her own past cannot but pay homage to the mighty figure of Vivekananda. Together with his Guru, Ramakrishna, he was the most potent early shaper of the resurgence of our national genius.”

Vivekananda’s heart pined for the removal of the untold poverty and suffering of the masses — not through alms and charity, but by awakening the Spirit in their hearts, so that they could make their own way and stand up with their heads erect, as men amongst other men.

On the day of Sri Ramakrishna’s passing his disciples and consort were standing by him. An excruciating pain was in their hearts. Sarada Devi’s eyes were full of tears, for soon her Kali (Ramakrishna) would pass behind the curtain of eternity. Naren was confused — almost baffled. Suddenly to their surprise Sri Ramakrishna, to whose life remained a few fleeting hours, said to Sarada Devi: “Why do you weep so bitterly? I leave your Naren with you.”

We have dealt with the two mothers, physical and spiritual. Now let us focus our attention on their son. It will not be sufficient to say that Vivekananda was the son or brother or friend of so and so. Who, then, was Vivekananda? Or was there any need for any one to ask him for his credentials? Let us leave J.H. Wright<sup>6</sup> to answer it. “To ask you, Swami, for your credentials is like asking the Sun to state its right to shine.”

“The very fact that Ramakrishna’s chosen instrument for world-work was Vivekananda, a complex passionate analytic mind, a highly cultured master of system and organisation, a richly endowed physical nature, shows that India moves instinctively to grip earth no less than Heaven. At least the intention of Ramakrishna was to reshape through Vivekananda the whole of the country’s life in the light of God-realisation.” With these most significant words K.D. Sethna has depicted with unsurpassed mastery Vivekananda’s life-long mission.

Verily, Vivekananda once boldly declared that his personality was ushered upon the earth to bring down into the day-to-day practical life the precepts of Vedanta which Shankara wanted to reserve only for the ascetics dwelling in caves and forests.

> We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.”

These words of Longfellow are absolutely correct, but some more we may add to them: a genius can be judged only by another genius.

When Vivekananda’s days were numbered, he once said in a very low voice, “If there had been another Vivekananda, then he would have understood what this Vivekananda has done. But in years to come hundreds of Vivekanandas will come into the world.”

It is left to history alone to bear witness to these profoundly pathetic and supremely prophetic words of Vivekananda, an Olympian leader of mankind.

Vivekananda speaks about Christ

It is easier to have faith in the Personal God than in the impersonal. God dons the earthly cloak. He bodies forth the creation of His own time, and casts a far-flung glance into the yet unborn to bring it into existence. He reveals Himself to each individual according to his power of receptivity.

To the beginner, Christ would immediately speak of the Personal God: “Pray to your Father in Heaven.” To the one a little more advanced, he would say, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” But to the one who was fully advanced and his dear disciple, he would proclaim: “I and my Father are One.” We find the same truth echoed in Sri Ramakrishna’s words. He disclosed to his beloved Naren (Vivekananda), “He who is Rama, He who is Krishna, dwells at once in this body as Ramakrishna.”

It is a sad fact that often the disciples of various paths misinterpret the teachings of their masters to the extent of claiming theirs as the only Master. In doing so, they bring their teachers down to the level of ordinary men. An aspirant, they claim, in spite of high achievements, counts for nothing unless and until he is prepared to give all credit to their master. What blind ignorance! If the master were an ear-witness of his disciple’s utterance, he would burn with shame. On this Vivekananda says:

“Suppose Jesus of Nazareth was teaching, and a man came and told him, ‘What you teach is beautiful. I believe that it is the way to perfection, and I am ready to follow it; but I do not want to worship you as the only begotten Son of God.’ What would be the answer of Jesus of Nazareth?

“‘Very well, brother, follow the ideal and advance in your own way. I do not care whether you give me the credit for the teaching or not... I only teach truth, and truth is nobody’s property, nobody’s patent truth. Truth is God Himself. Go forward.’ But what the disciples say nowadays is, ‘No matter whether you practise the teachings or not, do you give credit to the Man? If you credit the Master, you will be saved; if not there is no salvation for you.’”

An interesting event took place when Vivekananda was staying at Thousand Island Park. It was a dark and rainy night. A few ladies from Detroit had travelled hundreds of miles to find him there. Having met him, one of them humbly spoke out, “We have come to you just as we would go to Jesus if he were still on the earth and ask him to teach us.” Vivekananda, deeply moved and overwhelmed with humility, replied, “If only I possessed the power of Christ to set you free now!”

Christ unveiled the truth, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” A heroic echo is heard in Vivekananda: “It is already yours... It is yours by right.” We are drawn to the famous lines of the Gita: “He who seeth Me everywhere and seeth everything in Me, of him will I never lose hold, nor shall he ever lose hold of Me.” Almost parallel to this are the divine words of Christ: “He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.”

The Nazarene was a product of the East, although the people of the West have managed to forget this bare truth. “An Oriental of Orientals,” said Vivekananda of the son of Mary. It is quite natural that in the Bible we come across many images, symbols, natural scenes and simple ways of living common to the oriental countries. But what is more important, the oriental view is that this material life falls short of true satisfaction. So when Christ says, “Not this life, but something higher,” Vivekananda cannot help remarking, “Like a true son of the Orient, he is practical in that.”

Vivekananda meant that our earthly achievements, however grandiose, are in no way enough to quench the ever-pinching thirst of human souls to attain to higher life.

Christ’s body is Christianity. Christianity embodies humility. Vivekananda’s humility the entire world treasures. He once said:

Vivekananda and America

It is foolish to think that he sailed for America to satisfy his mental curiosity. It is also an absurdity to believe that his feet touched foreign shores to make a noise in the world. No. It was Sri Ramakrishna’s silent blessing that kindled the inspiration-fire of the beloved disciple to share his light with the soil and soul of America.

No country is superior to others in all spheres of life. Vivekananda, with his deeply penetrating insight, says: “As regards spirituality, the Americans are far inferior to us, but their society is far superior to ours.” He showed how a happy and true union could be effected between the other-world-loving Indians and this-world-loving Americans: “We will teach them our spirituality and assimilate what is best in their society.”

Asia, Europe and America — each continent made a contribution of its own to the world at large. With the help of his spirit’s vision, Vivekananda revealed the truth: “Asia laid the germs of civilisation, Europe developed man, and America is developing woman and the masses.”

It is an established fact that the women in America are the most advanced in the world, especially in the cultivation of knowledge. Vivekananda made a surprising observation:

“The average American woman is far more cultivated than the average American man.” He further added: “The men slave all their life for money and the women snatch every opportunity to improve themselves.” His highest compliment to women came when he said: “I have seen thousands of women here whose hearts are as pure and stainless as snow.” And again: “American women! A hundred lives would not be sufficient to pay my deep debt of gratitude to you! I have not words enough to express my gratitude to you.”

However, he was also deeply indebted to American men. For it was J.H. Wright, Professor of Greek at Harvard University, who was first in realising what Vivekananda was when the Indian monk was found, prior to becoming a delegate to the Parliament of Religions, almost destitute, no better than a street-beggar. Verily, Professor Wright, that blessed son of America, was a man of action. He introduced Vivekananda to the President of the “Parliament” in Chicago. The professor’s flaming and instructive words have echoed and re-echoed in the hearts of both East and West: “To ask you, Swami, for your credentials is like asking the Sun to state its right to shine.”

Vivekananda’s soul-stirring addresses inspired the audience to have faith in all the religions of the world, to hug the best in each religion. There was a magic spell of throbbing delight woven around his very name at the Parliament of Religions. He was the figure that dominated the world’s gaze there. A report appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript of September 30th, 1893, about the great triumph of the Indian spiritual giant: “If he merely crosses the Platform, he is applauded, and this marked approval of thousands he accepts in a childlike spirit of gratification, without a trace of conceit.”

The same paper on April 5th, 1894, had an irresistible recollection:

“At the Parliament of Religions, they used to keep Vivekananda until the end of the programme, to make people stay until the end of the session. On a warm day, when a prosy speaker talked too long and people began going home by hundreds, the Chairman would get up and announce that Swami Vivekananda would make a short address just before the benediction. Then he would have the peaceful hundreds perfectly in tether. The four thousand fanning people in the Hall of Columbus would sit smiling and expectant, waiting for an hour or two of other men’s speeches, to listen to Vivekananda for fifteen minutes.”

In no time America realised that Vivekananda was no isolated dreamer, nor, unlike most spiritual figures of the East, did he care primarily for his own personal salvation. They discovered in him a lofty spiritual realist and a universal lover of humanity. It was his vast personality and his spiritual inspiration that achieved for him such acclaim in America. Vivekananda’s credo was characterised by its freedom; thus the freedom-loving Americans responded enthusiastically to his message. They accepted his teaching that material prosperity and spiritual aspiration must run abreast and help each other if man is to see the full face of Divine Knowledge.

Vivekananda and England

“... Vivekananda has forged from it [the English language] a thrilling clarion of the Vedanta calling both the East and the West...,” so writes K.D. Sethna in his The Indian Spirit and the World’s Future.

I hope it will not be out of place to cite a few momentous lines from that book just to make my readers intimate with the significance and necessity of the English language in India:

“We shall be underestimating the significance of the English language in India if we think that it is only a valuable means of promoting our political, economic and technological interests in the democratic world. English is, above all, an immensely cultural asset. And it is such an asset not simply because it renders available to us magnificent countries of the mind, but also because it renders possible to us the most magnificent expression of our soul.”

It will be no exaggeration to say that by virtue of the English language alone India stands in the vanguard of the political history of mankind.

As each individual has a distinct place to fill in the world, even so every language has an important role. And it has been an established fact that no other European tongue has so much power of assimilating elements from foreign languages as does the English language.

The English language was brought into Britain by Teutonic invaders. These invaders were of three types: Jutes, Saxons and Angles. Modern English has undergone a considerable change. It is no more the language brought into Britain by the Saxons and the Angles.

Grimm, a German linguist, writes in his famous book On the Origin of Languages that “English possesses a veritable power of expression such as perhaps never stood at the command of any other language of men. Its highly spiritual genius and wonderfully happy development and condition have resulted from a surprisingly intimate union of the two noblest languages in modern Europe, the Teutonic and the Roman.”

Not only in his boyhood, but also in the prime of his youth, while his feet were touching the alien shores, Vivekananda’s ruthless contempt for England was almost unbelievable. As regards the English national life, a strong suspicion was then haunting his mind.

To quote him: “No one ever landed on English soil with more hatred in his heart for a race than I did for the English.” But with what result? He had to revise his feeling overnight. In the following lines we shall observe his excessive love for England disclosed by himself before a multitude of people at Calcutta:

“There is none among you here present, my brothers, who loves the English people more that I do now.” We may as well ask him why and how could the English have won his heart? His immediate reply is: “The more I lived among them, saw how the machine was working — the English national life — and mixed with them, I found where the heartbeat of the nation was, and the more I love them.”

> I am not ashamed to confess that I am ignorant of what I do not know. ”

Had we been able to share this lofty truth of Cicero’s, there would not have existed the giant wall of misunderstanding between England and India. The arrow of England is Matter. The arrow of India is Spirit. The victory of either can never be the true fulfilment of human birth. Both the arrows must be united to pierce the veil of Ignorance. Lo, the victory of victories, the fulfilment of fulfilments is at our disposal. Vivekananda’s supremely pathetic voice speaks:

> The difficulties that arise between us and the English people are mostly due to ignorance; we do not know them, they do not know us.”

Obedience and self-respect are the two divine qualities in a human being. If one can combine these two unique virtues, then truly one has achieved something invaluable. Of the greatest achievement of the English, Vivekananda’s lofty appreciation is this: “They have known how to combine obedience with self-respect.”

I am sure I will lose much in this humble attempt of mine if the ever-inspiring memory of Nivedita does not echo in my heart. In sending his spiritual daughter Nivedita’s supreme sacrifice into the world, Swami Vivekananda declared: “Nivedita is the fairest flower of my work in England.”

The presiding Deity of England not only claps her hands with delight, but also burns herself, as it were, in the flames of ecstasy to hear from a spiritual Giant of the East, “My work in England has been more satisfactory than anywhere else. I firmly believe that if I should die tomorrow, the work in England would not die, but would go on expanding all the time.”

Vivekananda in Pondicherry

In Agastya’s time it was Vedapuri, the seat of Vedic knowledge. The truths of the Veda are at once eternal and ever-new. Coming down to our own days, we find Vivekananda visiting Pondicherry in 1893, just a few months before embarking on his historic voyage to America, where the multitudes of people heard in him the voice of eternity ringing across the ages, and saw in him the ineffable vision of God.

Vivekananda, the dearest disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, Tilak, the fearless Champion of India’s swaraj, Bharathi, the patriot Bard of India’s nationalism and independence, Sri Aurobindo, the Heaven-born Prophet of India’s independence and of the Life Divine — all hallowed the town with the dust of their feet. Sri Aurobindo’s fixing on Pondicherry as the divinely ordained seat of his world-transforming Sadhana led to visits by a number of distinguished leaders of the national movement — Lala Lajpat Rai, C.R. Das, Moonje Purushottandas Tandon and Rabindranath Tagore, to name only a few. In 1914 there occurred an epoch-making event in the history of the world. From Paris came a remarkable spiritual figure, Madame M. Alfassa, now known as the Mother of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. It is she who by her divine Personality and far-seeing powers of organisation has changed the face of Pondicherry to a great extent, and is continuing to build a New Life in this ever new town. The Vedapuri of old is again going to be the Vedapuri of the modern times — the meeting-place of East and West, the place of pilgrimage of the whole world.

During his six-year itinerary, Vivekananda toured India from end to end. From the Himalayan heights down to the plains he came, to the farthest point of Cape Comorin, the confluence of the three waters, the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea. The appalling poverty, malignant wretchedness, and untold degradation of India tortured his athletic heart. Furthermore, the caste system was for him an unspeakable abomination.

Equally, to set foot on foreign shores was, in those days, a counter-abomination for the orthodox. Hence Vivekananda’s position in the orthodox circles of Pondicherry could easily be imagined. There was a hot exchange of words over his sea voyage between Vivekananda and an orthodox pandit of the town. The pandit had a musty load of crystallised superstitions of by-gone days in his head. He gloried in spending all his energy discussing the touchableness and untouchableness of this man and that man, of this food and that food, of this country and that country. We shall leave Vivekananda himself to relate to us that curious incident:

“Balaji and G.G. may remember one evening at Pondicherry — we were discussing the matter of sea-voyage with a Pandit, and I shall always remember his brutal gestures and his kadapi na (Never)! They do not know that India is a very small part of the world, the whole world looks down with contempt upon the three hundred millions of earth-worms crawling upon the fair soil of India and trying to oppress each other. This state of things must be removed.” This was the Pondicherry of 1893!

A spiritual giant and a seer-poet

Vivekananda says in effect: “No time to linger! Awake, O India, and with your dauntless strength achieve the loftiest height of your Spirit.” Tagore says in effect: “Look everywhere and see God’s beauty, and then, O Ind, raise your proud head towards the Highest.”

With his spirit’s height, Vivekananda was the most nourishing, life-giving fruit. With his creative genius, Rabindranath was the most beautiful flower. The Goddess Mahakali shone in the eyes of Vivekananda. The Goddess Mahalakshmi smiled through the eyes of Rabindranath.

Yet it was only after their recognition by the West that the East would claim them, the spiritual giant by the impact of his Chicago address, the mystic poet by virtue of his Gitanjali. In both cases, the divine singer expressed himself in divine measure. Through his spiritual emotion and his soul-stirring voice, Narendra pleased his divine Master, Ramakrishna, and through him, the world. By his soul-awakening songs of transcendental beauty, Rabindranath charmed the world and seized the All-Blissful.

Both Narendranath and Rabindranath came into the world from the Unknown. They were, as it were, two tireless voyagers. Rabindranath touched the earth-sphere in 1861, just two fleeting years before Narendranath. Narendranath left earth and entered the upper-sphere in 1902, thirty-nine long years before Rabindranath.

The spiritual daughter of Swami Vivekananda

The sincerity of Nivedita’s devotion to her Master expressed itself more in her life than in anything else. She lived the truths which she heard from the Swami’s soul-awakening lips. And in this connection, it will be quite apposite on our part to remember the fiery and intoxicating words that she received from Vivekananda on the eve of her departure for India: “I will stand by you unto death, whether you work for India or not, whether you give up Vedanta or remain in it. The tusks of the elephant come out, but they never go back. Even so are the words of a man.” Needless to say, her Master’s words echoed and re-echoed in the innermost recesses of her heart during her historic voyage — nay, to the end of her life.

Margaret’s father was quite aware of her bright future even in her childhood. He found that his daughter was not of the common run. Therefore, before breathing his last, Samuel, who was a parson, spoke to his wife in a low tone, almost a whisper, about Margaret:

“When God calls her, let her go. She will spread her wings... She will do great things.”

On January 28, 1898, Margaret landed in India. She was one of the most precious jewels that the West could offer to India. It may also be said that she was an unknown schoolteacher who would later stand in the glare of wide publicity.

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The sweetness of the southern breeze,

On Aryan altars, flaming free

No ancient soul could dream before,

The mistress, servant, friend in one.”

The chief disciple received from her Master this unique benediction while she was being initiated into the vow of Brahmacharya (celibacy) and the name Nivedita was given to her. A man treading the path of spirituality must never forget that, as opportunity never knocks at one’s door twice, even so benediction, a true benediction, rarely repeats itself. But the power of that benediction can easily fight out the stupendous odds of centuries that eclipse the Knowledge-Sun of the disciple.

It will be worth while to pay more attention to the word “benediction”, the touchstone in the life of Nivedita. It happened that during their stay at Almora, Vivekananda for some time assumed altogether a different aspect in his relation to Nivedita. He was unbelievably severe to her. He neglected her much more than one could believe possible. “My relation,” says the disciple, “to our Master at this time can only be described as one of clash and conflict.” But the red-letter day at last dawned to save her life from the deepest pangs. To cite her once again: “And then a time came when one of the older ladies of our party, thinking perhaps that such intensity of pain inflicted might easily go too far, interceded kindly and gravely with the Swami. He listened silently and went away. At evening, however, he returned and finding us together in the verandah, he turned to her and said with the simplicity of a child, ‘You are right. There must be a change. I am going into the forests to be alone and when I come back I shall bring peace.’ Then he turned and saw that above us the moon was new and a sudden exaltation came into his voice as he said, ‘See! the Mohammedans think much of the new moon. Let us also with the new moon begin a new life!’ As the words ended he lifted his hands and blessed with silent depths of blessing his most rebellious disciple, by this time kneeling before him... I was assuredly a moment of wonderful sweetness of reconciliation... Long, long ago Sri Ramakrishna had told his disciples that the day would come when his beloved ‘Naren’ would manifest his own great gift of bestowing knowledge with a touch. That evening at Almora I proved the truth of his prophecy.”

A rare combination of sweet devotion and lofty intellect was Nivedita. No Indian will ever deny the important role that she played after entering into the Indian political fray. With a fearless heart she associated herself with the activities of Sri Aurobindo, Tilak, and other political leaders of the front rank. In those days she was surcharged within and without with her Master’s indomitable spirit. She had fully learned the meaning of suffering. To our joy her mighty sacrifice was crowned with success.

“Nivedita,” says Tagore, “was the universal mother. We have seldom come across such motherly love which can embrace the whole of a country outside the bounds of its family circle... When Nivedita used to say ‘our people', one could easily detect the tone of intense familiarity in that; it was so sincere and yet so spontaneous!... Nivedita had the natural power to endear herself to the people of India, irrespective of caste, creed and religion. She could mix with them intimately and freely. She looked at them with respect and not with compassion.”

In this connection let us cite here an incident that actually took place in her life. The milk-man who would daily supply her with milk asked her one day to give him some advice on religion. On hearing it her eyes widened with surprise. “You! you are an Indian. You need to have a piece of advice from me? Is there anything that you people do not know? You are the descendant of Sri Krishna. Accept my salutation.”

The following lines appeared in the Karmayogin, edited by Nivedita in the absence of Sri Aurobindo, who had then retired to Chandernagore on receiving a divine Command from above. We shall observe here how Nivedita identified herself with India and expressed her high hopes that India would occupy the highest rank of leadership in the domain of intellectual activities:

“The whole history of the world shows that the Indian intellect is second to none. This must be proved by the performance of a task beyond the power of others, the seizing of the first place in the intellectual advance of the world. Is there any inherent weakness that would make it impossible for us to do this? Are the countrymen of Bhaskaracharya and Shankaracharya inferior to the countrymen of Newton and Darwin? We trust not. It is for us, by the power of our thought, to break down the iron walls of opposition that confront us, and to seize and enjoy the intellectual sovereignty of the world.”

> Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some to be chewed and digested. ”

The Master as I saw him, by Nivedita, inevitably has its place with those books that are to be ‘chewed and digested.’ According to Sri Aurobindo this book was written with the blood of her heart. Also it was Sri Aurobindo who, many years ago, addressed her as the flame-spirit.

The life and teaching of Sister Nivedita can easily claim to form an imperishable part of the recent history of Indian womanhood. Her wonderful sacrifice lives in spirit in spite of her departure from human existence, through the ever-expanding activities of the followers and admirers of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda. Nivedita’s was a heart of supreme selflessness. Her devotion pined to dive into the sea of Hindu Religion to discover “full many a gem of purest ray serene.” And she got them. She, with her superb intellect, ceaselessly helped Indian education, art, science, and politics. Her multifarious activities transcend human understanding, culminating in direct contact with the Olympian spirit of her Guru/. Her humility remained throughout as an innate characteristic, notwithstanding the ceaseless outpouring of respect and veneration she received from the hearts of those who knew her and closely studied her life.

Part IV — World-poets

World-poets

"Love seeketh not itself to please,

But for another gives its ease

— Blake

Love so beautifully idealised can be materialised if it springs from its Highest Source and has no link with anything inferior here below.

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I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

— Blake

Wrath is a weakness worth getting over. Again it cannot disturb the inner equilibrium, which is worth everything.

> Good to forgive. Best to forget.

Better than best is to remain unaffected by the shocks of the world.

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The torture of that inward hell!"

— Byron

To nurse an inward hell and escape the penalty is to ask for too much.

> I awoke one morning and found myself famous.

All the greater glory to the Source which has given the fame!

> We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

May the world realise this truth!

> Light — more light.

Infinite is the thirst for the Infinite.

> A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Because it is the reflection of the All-Beautiful.

> Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

Because our great origin is both Truth and Beauty.

> We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Hence says the Seer-Poet:

> And belief shall not be till the thing is done.

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Life is but an empty dream.

— Longfellow

Rather, life, the great gift of God, is a splendid field for self-realisation.

> Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.

That is the sign of a great spirit perverted.

> To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering.

Weakness is an implied denial of one's true self.

> What is done can't be undone.

True in a limited context, never an absolute truth.

> Brevity is the soul of wit.

And silence can tell even more than brevity.

> Our sweetest songs are those that tell us of sweetest thought.

The Shelleys of the future will hear sweetest songs inspired by all-blissful thoughts.

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Of the night for the morrow,

From the sphere of our sorrow.

— Shelley

Our Shelleys of the New Age will be singing of the transformation of the sphere of our sorrow into the sphere of our Delight!

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Because my heart is pure.

— Tennyson

Let us look forward to the New World that is manifesting in the old — to the New World that will be full of Sir Galahads but with their hearts absolutely true to none and nothing else than the Divine and His Influence.

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Than never to have loved at all.

— Tennyson

True, perhaps on the human plane. But true love is Love divine that knows no loss.

> I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion's sake.

The true seer-eye of the poet foresaw the possibility that is now on the point of realising itself.

> If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.

Because the human body is the very temple of God.

> Minds that have nothing to confer find little to receive.

And it may well be added: Minds that have little to perceive have nothing to confer.

> The gods approve the depth, and not the tumult of the soul.

As a portion of the Infinite, the soul can have depth, height and breadth without measure, but tumult can never belong to the soul. It is a play of the inferior vital.

Part IV — World-philosophers

World-philosophers

> — Aristotle

Or of frustration and palsy of the spirit.

> A healthy body is the guest-chamber of the soul; a sick body is a prison.

And a body self-dedicated to the Divine's work is the lovely Palace for the soul.

> Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

And self-subordination to the Self makes a perfect man.

> I take all knowledge to be my province.

No knowledge is knowledge that does not reveal the source of all knowledge. And knowledge will fulfill itself when the world takes all knowledge, including that of the Most High, for its province.

> The things taught in schools and colleges are not education, but the means of education.

Oh that our education system could live up to this minimum!

> Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

And what is needed to have ideas worked out through those brains and arms is a one-pointed will which is affirmation itself and an eternal stranger to negation.

> It is not possible to live pleasantly without living wisely and justly and generously.

Alas, pleasant living is all that the world cares for, and not the qualities associated with difficult living: hard work, discipline and self-control.

> The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom.

We may read into this noble truth the upward march of the human soul from its prison-house of ignorance to its Home of Freedom, Light and Knowledge; and its downward march to the Here-below with the riches gained in the upper sphere, which march makes the two ends meet and become one.

> Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Yes, and why worth living? Because life was given to man to manifest the Divine Reality in its every aspect.

> Our minds are not made as large as truth nor suited to the whole extent of things.

How very true! And this recognition posits the question of the greater sources of Knowledge such as the Supermind.

> What is evil? Whatever springs from weakness.

And where from does weakness spring? It springs from man's self-chosen separation from his true self, the divine Reality within him.

> Self-conquest is the greatest of victories.

Our lower self is the formidable wall of separation from our higher or divine Self. This wall pulled down, man becomes his true self.

> We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell.

The simile implies that our consciousness is hardly a whit better than that of the dumb oyster. But true it is that man's frail body can pinion his mighty soul!

> Let us dispense with the emptiness of existence. The great man is not the conqueror, but he who denies the will to live.

The great man is really the one who conquers that emptiness, filling it with the dynamic Truth of existence. His will to live is his will to fulfil the why of his existence.

> As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.

When our humility becomes its genuine self, it becomes an open vessel for the gifts of the Omniscient.

> Survival of the fittest.

Spencer referred to the struggle to survive in the material life. But how to be the fittest in the spiritual life? By making oneself a conscious instrument of God's Vision and Will.

> Nature abhors a vacuum.

The Creation, as a manifestation of the Omnipresence, can nowhere have a vacuum.

> Man is a social animal.

Man transformed will be a divinised godhead.

> Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

An architect who shapes his own life hangs not on his pedigree. His descendants will number their ancestors and count their lineage from him, the seed.

> All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

Hence the necessity of more and more revealing books — books that can reveal the yet-unknown truths of man and nations.

Editor's introduction to the first edition

As a spiritual Master, Sri Chinmoy is full of admiration for the spiritual giants who have preceded him. But his gratitude extends likewise to those who have enriched earth with aesthetic, scientific, intellectual and political achievements. With his inner eye, Sri Chinmoy can enter into the soul of any past or present being. In this book, written in India before he came to the West in 1964, Sri Chinmoy records the soul's qualities as well as the inner and outer achievements of various Indian leaders.

Mother India's Lighthouse is a collection of essays on eminent Indian figures. These leaders, some of whom are perhaps little known in the West, are all beloved throughout their Motherland. The study of their lives gives us Western readers valuable insights into a cross-section of Indian achievements.

Rabindranath, The Myriad-Minded and The Disciple And The Master are in-depth studies of Indians well known even in the West. The poetry of Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore is surcharged with his spiritual vision. Sri Chinmoy's own poetic genius shines through every page of this commentary on his illustrious fellow Bengali.

The Disciple And The Master tells of Sri Ramakrishna, the greatest spiritual Master of the nineteenth century, and Vivekananda, his beloved disciple. Coming directly from Sri Chinmoy's most intimate inner connection with both of these towering spiritual figures, these delightful and illumining glimpses provide revealing new insights into the souls of the Master and the Disciple.