Dateline London: Circa 1895,
a cold Sunday afternoon in November.
It’s the drawing room of a fashionable woman, Lady Isabel Margesson. About
fifteen well educated people, mostly friends, some highly skeptical about
religion, some atheists are clustered around an Indian monk. Margaret Noble is
the last to arrive. Her mental state is fragile. The man she was deeply in love with and about
to marry had dumped her and gone off with another woman. This was the second
time she’d known heart break. A few years prior to this she’d been engaged to a
young man who died of tuberculosis. Her first impression of Swami Vivekananda
is unique. His gentleness and serenity
remind her of a look which ‘Raphael has perhaps painted on the brow of the
Sistine child.’[1] He seemed a Plato in thought and a Savonarola
in his fearless way of speaking. She said later: “Suppose he had not come to
London that time… If he had meditated, on the Himalayan peaks! I, for one, had
never been here.”[2]
The rest, as they is history.
I need to back track a bit.
Margaret was born in 1867 to a Scottish family settled in Ireland. Her
grandmother, Mrs. Hamilton was a front ranking member of the Irish freedom
movement. Her father and grandfather were both Protestant ministers. Her father
died when he was just 34. He had a premonition of her future greatness. He is
reported to have told his wife: ‘When God calls her, ’he said’ let her go. She
will spread her wings. She will do great things.’[3] And Margaret waited for a call which she knew
would come. She took to teaching and community work fairly early, working in a
mining town, looking after orphans and so on. She was just eighteen when she
opened ‘The Ruskin School’ in Wimbledon. She was also the secretary of the
‘Sesame Club’ which had savants like Shaw and T.H. Huxley among its members.
Like many intellectuals of
her age, Margaret was going through a crisis of faith. It was difficult for her
to believe in the doctrinal shell of Christianity. Ideas like creation, heaven,
hell and an afterlife were untenable in the light of Darwinism. The
‘weltanschauung’ of the west had changed. At a time when people had turned
their backs on God, here was a monk who said: ‘I am God and so are you and so
is everything else in universe.’ We have two themes here: The divinity of man
and the oneness of man, regardless of color, creed or nationality. From this it
follows that all religions are expressions of one God. The ideas from Vedanta
which Swami Vivekananda presented were consistent with science. She was awed by
his gift for picking up the finest qualities of each religion and unifying them
into one unbroken stream of thought: Brotherhood from Islam, service of
humanity and compassion from Christianity, freedom of the soul from Hinduism
and so on. In the age of Darwin, Swami Vivekananda traced the evolution of the
idea of God from the God of heaven (dualism) through the God in Nature
(Immanence) to the God in the temple of the body and finally the temple itself,
the soul of man.[4]
(Advaita). In Sister Nivedita’s words:
‘Thus it reaches the last words it can teach.
He, whom the sages have sought in all these places, is in our own hearts. Thou
art He, O Man! Thou art He!’[5]
Swami
Vivekananda’s ideas revolved around God as the core of our being. To the
question whether God exists or not, his answer was; “If this is true what else
could matter? If it is not true, what do
our lives matter?”[6]
‘What the world wants today, is twenty men and
women who can dare to stand in the street yonder and say that they possess
nothing but God. Who will go?’[7]
By the time Swami Vivekananda left London,
Margaret was committed to his cause, i.e. the education and intellectual
emancipation of Indian women. He felt that this work could only be done by a
foreigner because India could not produce great women just yet. He had gone to
the west with a mission: To help the illiterate, poverty stricken masses of
India. In 1890, while he was in Almora, the favorite sister of his childhood
had committed suicide under tragic circumstances. It shook him and he vowed to
do whatever he could for transforming the lives of Indian women. When he went to North America, he was charmed
by the purity, independence, self reliance and kindness of American women. He
found them educated, cultured and socially free. They were highly respected in
American society. He couldn’t help comparing this with the miserable state of
Indian women, suppressed, unlettered and socially bound.
In March 1898, Swami
Vivekananda made Margaret take the vow of brahmacharya. He named her ‘Nivedita,’
i.e. the dedicated. During the initiation, he taught her how to worship Siva
and then ended the ceremony with an offering to the Buddha:
“Go thou,” he said, as if addressing in one
person each separate soul that would ever come to him for guidance, “and follow
Him, who was born and gave His life for others FIVE HUNDRED TIMES, before He
attained the vision of the Buddha.”[8]
Thus Sister Nivedita became, in a sense, the
bridge between Swami Vivekananda and the west. Before she sailed for India, he
explained all the difficulties that she would face and said:
‘You must think well before
you plunge in, and after words if you fail in this or get disgusted, on my part
I promise you, 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 never go back “– so are
the words of a man never retracted. I promise you that.’[9]
On the wings of this commitment,
a young nun sailed for a much maligned native land. Sister Nivedita left for
India on January 28, 1898 with Miss Muller. Swami Vivekananda had been terribly
worried about how Sri Sarada Devi would receive his foreign devotees. But with
her characteristic simplicity and wisdom, she opened her arms wide and took the
ladies under her wing.
Sister Nivedita, though just four years
younger than Swami Vivekananda became his spiritual daughter. Under his
guidance, she soon learnt to adopt the language, dress, customs, values and
manners of her adopted country. Her grasp of Vedanta as interpreted by Swami
Vivekananda was phenomenal. Here is Sister Nivedita summing up the essence of
the Upanishads in a few words:
‘If the many and the one be indeed the same Reality, then it is not
all modes of worship alone, but equally all modes of work, all modes of
struggle, all modes of creation, which are paths of realization. No distinction,
henceforth, between sacred and secular. To labor is to pray. To conquer is to
renounce. Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as stern a trust as
to quit and to avoid.’[10]
He was a very hard task master and she reached
a breaking point. Among other things he mercilessly destroyed her passionate
adoration of her guru. Swami Vivekananda had taken a group of his western
disciples to North India. Joe McLeod, an American devotee, couldn’t bear to see
Sister Nivedita’s anguish and she spoke to Swami Vivekananda about his harsh
treatment of her. He went away for a bit and when he came back, his mood had
changed. It was the night of the new moon and he blessed his rebellious
disciple and spoke of new beginnings. That night, during deep meditation,
Sister Nivedita had her first vision of an infinite God. An impersonal presence
replaced her personal relationship with her guru.
Sister Nivedita soon got busy
with her plans to start a school for girls in Calcutta. She decided to start
slowly, first understanding the needs and priorities of her pupils and then
putting a syllabus together. The Nivedita Girls’ School was opened in Calcutta
on Kali puja day, November 13, 1898. Sri Sarada Devi came for the inauguration
and gave her blessings. In matters of education, Swami Vivekananda gave her
complete freedom.
On July 4, 1902 at 9:10 pm,
Swami Vivekananda entered into maha Samadhi. That night Sister Nivedita dreamt
that Sri Ramakrishna had given up his body for the second time. A week prior to this, on Ekadeshi day, Swami
Vivekananda had insisted on serving her the morning meal. After it was over, he
poured water over her hands. When she protested, he said: ‘Jesus washed the feet of his disciples!’[11]
A messenger from the Math brought the
news of his death in the early morning. She reached the Ramakrishna Math at 7
a.m. and sat fanning the body until it was taken out for cremation at 2 p.m.
Swami Vivekananda had already told his brother monks where he wanted to be
cremated. During the cremation, Sister Nivedita wept like a child and rolled on
the ground. Suddenly a wisp of Swami Vivekananda’s ochre robe drifted to her.
She took it as a benediction.
After Swami Vivekananda’s
death, Sister Nivedita got involved in the Indian freedom movement along with
her educational and social work. Like her Guru, the funds for her work in India
came through the money generated by her lectures in England and North America.
She was friendly with people like Dr. Jagadish Chandra Bose, Sri Aurobindo and
Rabindra nath Tagore and Indians fighting for independence. This finally led to
her dissociation from the Ramakrishna Math which is completely nonpolitical
though she maintained close ties with some of the senior sadhus like Swami
Brahmananda. She went to the extent of introducing the singing of ‘Vande
Mataram’ during assembly in her schools. She died in Darjeeling in 1911 at the
age of 43. Her house in Darjeeling was handed over to the West Bengal
government on May 18, 2013. The Ramakrishna Math has been given the
responsibility for managing its educational and cultural activities.
Let me close my homage to
Sister Nivedita with a poem that Swami Vivekananda dedicated to her:
“The mother’s heart, the hero’s will.
The sweetness of the southern breeze
The sacred charm and strength that dwell
On Aryan altars, flaming, free.
All these be yours and many more
No ancient soul could dream before –
Be thou to India’s future son,
The mistress, servant, friend in one.”
[1]
Swami Nikhilananda (2010), Swami Vivekananda-A Biography,(Kolkata:
Advaita Ashrama) p. 99.
[2]
Ibid.
[3]
Ibid. p.98
[4]
Sister Nivedita (1983), The Master As I Saw Him,(Calcutta: Udbodhan
Office), p.15.
[5]
Ibid, p.16.
[6]
Ibid., p. 21
[7]
Ibid., p.21
[8]
Ibid., p.133.
[9]
Swami Nikhilanana, op.cit. p. 143.
[10]
Sister Nivedita, op.cit., p.193
[11]
Sister Nivedita,op.cit p.331.
