Margaret embarked on her journey from the Tilbury Docks, the port on the river Thames, located in Essex, some twenty miles from London city. She was seen off by her mother and sister. She had entrusted the responsibility of running her school to her sister. None of them knew what conditions and future awaited her or when would they get to see her again. Her mother was naturally deeply worried but also remembered that her late husband had once said to her – that someday Margaret will get her call and then she should be allowed to go. But at that time, very possibly, they could have hardly fancied that the nature of the calling and the Teacher at whose behest she would eventually leave home, would be so unusual. Even if it was not a leap in the dark it was clearly a leap into a very uncertain realm. But Margaret had braced herself for that and the die had been cast.
She arrived in Calcutta on 28th January 1898 and was received by her Master at the Kidderpore docks on the river Hooghly (Ganges) in south-west Calcutta, and initially hosted in a European quarter of the city in the Park Street area. Thereafter along with Sara (Mrs Ole Bull) and Josephine Macleod who were American friends and admirers of Vivekananda, she moved to a cottage at the Belur Math lands. The Swami too lived nearby in a different cottage called the Nilambar Mukherjee house. The Belur Math property was purchased around that time only by the financial aid of Mrs Henrietta Muller, an admirer of Vivekananda, who was interested in Vedanta philosophy. Mrs Bull, Ms MacLeod, and Margaret, through their enterprise, soon organised the ordinary cottage by the Ganga into a decent and tidy living quarters, which greatly impressed Vivekananda.
Mrs Bull was the widow of the celebrated Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, and had been a mother-like figure to Vivekananda, who regarded the lady very highly for her wisdom, steadiness of mind and saintly qualities. He addressed her as Mother or ‘Dhira Mata’. She would later become a great benefactor of Vivekananda’s cause in particular and India in general, till her death in 1911, a few months before Nivedita too would pass away.
Josephine Macleod, five years elder to Vivekananda, was fascinated by the ideas and uplifting philosophy that Vivekananda presented from the very day she first heard him in a lecture in New York on 29th January 1895 along with her sister Betty (later married to Francis Leggett), a day she would later always consider as her spiritual birthday. When she asked the Swami what could she do for him, the Swami answered in just two words: “Love India.”
Josephine Macleod, affectionately called Joe by the Swami, remained single and lived a long life and passed away in 1949 and served Vivekananda’s mission in diverse ways through her social contacts throughout the world. Extrovert and sociable by nature, she was chiefly responsible for the spadework for the starting of the Vedanta work in several western countries and the publication of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda literature in many European languages by first-rate scholars. She also brought several world intellectuals to take notice of the tremendous potentiality and worth of this new spiritual movement of which she remained a life-long ambassador.
There they met the Swami on a daily basis over tea, when their host often spoke for hours about India – its hoary history, sacred geography, ways of its people, and never missing to point out that beneath the visible penury and squalor there flowed an undercurrent of a spirituality that characterised the country and its people. The ladies listened to this spellbound and India was first revealed to them though the Swami’s words.
Margaret later stated that “among the brilliant conversationalists the Swami was peculiar in one respect. He was never known to show the slightest impatience at interruption. He was by no means indifferent to the minds he was addressing.”
Margaret also noted that all ideas that Swami forwarded were grounded on the idea of Infinitude and Oneness.
“The religious ideas towards which he naturally gravitated were highly abstract and philosophical, the very reverse of those which are commonly referred to as idolatrous.”
And that “whatever might be the subject of the conversation, it ended at the note of infinite. Indeed I do not know that our master’s realization of the Adwaita Philosophy has been in anything more convincing that in the matter of his interpretation of the world. He might be appeared to take up any subject, Literary, Ethnological, or Scientific, but he always made us feel it as an illustration of the Ultimate Vision. There was, for him, nothing secular.”
She describes the impact these conversations had on the listeners :
“We have learnt something of the mood in which new faiths are born, and the Persons who inspires such faiths. For we have been with one who drew all men to him, listening to all, feeling with all and refusing none. We have known a humility that wiped out all littleness. A renunciation that would die for scorn of oppressions and pity of the oppressed. A love that would bless even the oncoming feet of torture and death.”
It was also her considered opinion built over a long period of close interactions with her Master that In matters religion, the Swami was a ‘born educator’: “Where others would talk of ways and means, he knew how to light a fire. Where others gave directions, he would show the thing itself.”
Margaret also marked how the Swami in his conversations was, even without realising that, followed the principles of education.
“It seemed as if he knew that the first material of a new consciousness must be a succession of vivid, but isolated experiences, poured without proper sequence. So as to provoke the mind of the learner to work for its own conception of order and relation at any rate, whether he knew it or not. This was the cannon of educational science that he unconsciously fulfilled.”
She also noticed that the Swami never tried to soften for his listeners matters that might at first sight be repellent and in fact he would place “in extreme form, at the beginning of our experience all that it might seem impossible for European minds to enjoy.”
Margaret, who unlike the other two ladies had come as a lifelong worker for the cause, had a slightly different direction of training was formally introduced to Ramakrishna devotee circles and the Calcutta society on 11th March when she spoke on the subject ‘Influence of Indian Thought in England.’
The lecture was impressive and the Swami’s confidence in her abilities and the potential for service of India further increased. In a private conversation he told a confidante that Ms Noble could surpass even Miss Annie Besant as a public speaker on Indian matters. On 16th March he wrote a congratulatory note to Margaret as follows:
MY DEAR MARGARET,
It is needless to let you know, you have fulfilled all my expectations in your last lecture.
It appears that the platform will be the great field where you will be of great help to me, apart from your educational plans. I am glad to learn that Miss Muller is going to have a place on the river. Are you also going to Darjeeling? So you will all the better work after a trip up there? Next season I am a planning a series of lectures for you all over India.
The Swami also organised for her lessons in learning Bengali language and Hindu scriptures under the tutorship of his young disciple Swami Swarupananda, who joined the Order around the same time and was within a few days given Sanyasa vows. Margaret also started serious attempts at meditation with Swarupananda’s guidance.
On 17th March, a day, which Margaret called ‘Day of days’, she met Holy Mother Sarada Devi, who warmly welcomed her along with Josephine and Mrs Bull, and profusely showered her affection and blessings upon them. This was taken as a very auspicious sign by Vivekananda, and boosted his hope that the orthodox Hindu society would accept these western women admirers of India in their midst. Swami Swarupananda, a disciple of Vivekananda, had accompanied the group as an interpreter. When asked her name Margaret replied ‘Margaret Elizabeth Noble’. To this the Holy Mother replied, “My child? I will not be able to pronounce such a long name. I will call you Khuki (meaning baby in Bengali). Margaret was delighted.
Also in one of their later visits Mrs Sara Bull brought along a photographer, Mr Harrington, and requested Mother to let herself photographed. Mrs Bull said they wished to take back the photograph and worship it. Thus through their loving persuasions they prevailed upon the Holy Mother to allow herself to be photographed and the photographs on the occasion are the first such photographs of the Mother.
On 25th March, the Swami initiated Margaret into Brahmacharya vows at the Nilambar Mukherjee house. She taught her to Shiva worship and at the end of the ‘Diksha’ asked her to offer flowers at Buddha’s image, commanding her in a charged voice, “Go thou and follow Him, who was born and gave his life for others five hundred times before He attained the vision of the Buddha.” He gave her the name ‘Nivedita’ (‘the Offered One’) and from that day indeed offered her to the service of India. After the service the Swami put on the ashes and bone – earrings and matted locks of a Shiva – Yogi and played Indian music on Indian instrument for an hour.
Travels with the Swami in North India
On 11th of May this women’s group along with the Swami and a few other monks as companions, took a train from Howrah to Kathgodam, the railroad terminal just below the Kumaon hills. From there went up the hills to the British-established hill-station of Nainital.
Nivedita recalled the stay at Nainital as being “made beautiful by three things – The masters pleasure in introducing to us his disciples the Raja of Khetri : the dancing girls who met us and asked us where to find him, and were received by him in spite of the remonstrance’s of others : and by the mohammedan gentlemen who said, “ Swamiji, if in after times any claim you as an avatar, remember that I, a Mohammedan am the first ! ”
After Nainital, the group spent quite a lot of time at Almora, the cultural capital of the Kumaon region, a place the Swami had got great fondness for. At Almora Nivedita faced a very testing time as a number of her notions were being challenged, even attacked, by her Master. Vivekananda pointed to her that she needed to control her effervescent nature and habit of expressing emotions in carefree ways. He impressed upon her the way of restraining emotions, absorbing them.
By that time Nivedita was not knowing about the attrocities that the British colonial rule had brought about on Indians. Even while being of Scottish-Irish ancestry and sympathetic to Irish sentiments, a votary of the Home Rule Movement in Ireland, and indignation against the then present system of governance in Ireland through the British Parliament, she was, nevertheless, a loyal subject of the Crown and thought the British rule as having a more or less benevolent impact on India.
Vivekananda questioned the sort of patriotism she had at that time and called it a crime. He remarked:
“Really, patriotism like yours is sin! “ “All that I want you to see is that most people’s action are the expression of the self – interest and you constantly oppose to this the idea that a certain race are all angels. Ignorance so determined is wickedness!”
In due course Nivedita’s notions about the British Raj underwent a complete change. From her Master she heard heart-rending stories of poor Indians hitherto used to the personal rule of sovereigns and never having exposure to the maze of bureaucracy that was a concomitant of the British Raj.
“We realised sometimes, as we listened to him, how hard it had been for the Indian poor, to understand the transition from the personal rule of sovereigns, always accessible to appeals, always open to the impulse of mercy, and able to exercise a supreme discretion, to the cold bureaucratic methods of a series of departments. For we heard from him the personal histories of innumerable simple folk, who in the early years of British rule, had spent their all in the vain hope of reaching the Queen and gaining her ear, at Windsor.”
These morning talks at Almora then, took the form of assaults upon deep rooted conceptions, social, literary and artistic, or of long comparison of India and European history and sentiments, often containing extended observation of very great value. One characteristic of the Swami was the habit of attacking the abuses of a country or society openly and vigorously when he was in its midst, whereas after he had left it. It would often seem as if nothing but its virtues were remembered by him.
When others in the group hinted to Swami that he was being a bit too fierce he struck a note of moderation and on the new moon night at Almora said, “The Mohammedans think much of the new moon. Let us also, with the new moon, begin a new life! ”
Some of these occasions surely would have been very trying for her disciple, but, the upshot of this was that the Swami ensured that Nivedita began to see things in an impersonal way, and not mix the self in it. Later Nivedita wrote that she then “understood for the first time that the greatest leaders may destroy in us a personal relation only in order to bestow an impersonal vision in its place.”
In Punjab and Kashmir
How inspiringly the Swami opened the magical world of India to them is a story told brilliantly in Nivedita’s ‘Notes on Some Wanderings with Swami Vivekananda’ and also in her most important work ‘The Master As I Saw Him.’
Everything they saw had a meaning, evoked a train of thought within Swami’s brilliant mind, and the result was his companions were treated to an inexhaustible stream of religious traditions, history, geography, ethnology, of India that poured “with the manifestly powerful feeling that Swami had for his country.”
Nivedita specially observed that when the group passed through the Punjab, they caught “the deepest glimpse of the Master’s love of his own land. Anyone who had seen him here, would have supposed him to have been born in this province, so intensely had he identified himself with it. It would seem that he had deeply bound to the people there by many ties of love and reverence; had received much and given much; for there were some amongst them who urged that they found in him a rare mixture of Guru Nanak and Guru Govind.”
On entering Punjab, he called a Mussalman vendor of sweetmeats, and bought and ate from his hand Mohammedan food, an act the radical nature of which can be barely imagined in the present age. He later did the same at Benaras, the nerve-centre of Hindu orthodoxy, just a few months before he passed away.
In his conversations there, he fascinated them by speaking of the distant history as if he saw that before his eyes. He spoke of Attock, the place near the Indus, where Alexander’s advance was halted, told to them about Chanakya and Chandragupta. He told them about the rise of Buddhism which he always considered as the rebel child of Hinduism and never separate from it. He talked of the Gandhara sculptures and rejected the European claim that Indian art owed its development to the Hellenic influence.
In Punjab, the Swami came to the conclusion, that any effort which he might make to induce the orthodox to accept a European as a fellow disciple, or in the direction of woman’s education, had better be made in Bengal. The distrust of the foreigner was too strong in Punjab, to admit of work succeeding there. He was much occupied by this question, from time to time, and would sometime remark on the paradox presented by the Bengali combination of political antagonism to the English, and readiness to love and trust.
But the keynote of his conversations was the deep adoration of India. Nivedita described this:
“There was one thing, however, deep in the Master’s nature which he himself never knew how to adjust. This was his love of his country and his resentment her suffering. Throughout the years in which I saw him almost daily, the thought of India was to him like the air he breathed. True, he was a worker at foundations. He neither used the word ‘nationality’, nor proclaimed an era of ‘nation-making’. Man-making, he said was his own task.
“But he was born a lover, and the queen of his adoration was his motherland. Like some delicately poised bell, thrilled and vibrated by every sound that falls upon it, was his heart to all that concerned her. Not a sob was heard within her shores that did not find in him a responsive echo. There was no cry of fear, no tremor of weakness, no shrinking from mortification,that he had known and understood. He was hard on her sins, unsparing of her want of worldly wisdom, but only because he felt these faults to be his own. And none to the contrary, was ever so possessed by the vision of her greatness.”
Nivedita also noted that the Swami’s fascination was with all phases of its history and with all the diverse elements which were inter-woven in its tapestry:
“In these talks of his, the heroism of the Rajput, the faith of the Sikh, the courage of the Mahratta, the devotion of the saints, and purity and steadfastness of noble women, all lived again. Nor would he permit that the Mohammedan be passed over. Humayoon, Sher Shah, Akbar, Shah Jehan, each of these and a hundred more found a day and a place in his bead-roll of glistening names. Now it was that coronation song of Akbar which is still sung about the streets of Delhi, that he would give us in the very tone and rhythm of Tanasena. Again, he would explain how the widows of the Mogul House never remarried, but lived like Hindu women, absorbed in worship or study, through the lonely years.”
During these talks very often, the Swami contrasted the life in the West to that in the India. “Social life in the West is a peal of laughter, but underneath it is a wail. It ends in a sob. The fun and frivolity are all on the surface: really it is full of tragic intensity. Now here, it is sad and gloomy on the outside, but underneath are carelessness and merriment.”
He had found the prime Western ideal is to be “doing’.i.e. action while the that in the Orient to be ‘suffering’ i.e. acceptance of one’s circumstances. He thought that the perfect life would be a wonderful harmony between ‘doing’ and ‘suffering’ but wondered whether that was at all possible. Of English race in particular he thought that their crowning achievement was that they knew to combine obedience with self-respect.
Nivedita recorded that Vivekananda would sit for hours telling them stories, “those cradle tales of Hinduism whose function is not at all that of our nursery fictions but much more, like the man – making myths of the old Hellenic world. To Nivedita it seemed that “the Swami lived and moved and had his very being in the sense of the country’s past. His historic consciousness was extraordinarily developed.” She understood and later mentioned that this first-hand exposure gained through years of wandering throughout the country had equipped the Swami with a knowledge that could not have been gained to such an extent through any other way. Referring to this she wrote:
“The power behind all these utterances lay in those Indian wanderings of which the tale can probably never be complete. It was of this first-hand knowledge then and not of a vague sentiment or wilful blindness, that his reverence for his own people and their land was born. It was a robust and cumulative induction, moreover, be it said, ever hungry for new facts and dauntless in face of hostile criticism.”
Nivedita also noticed that within the Swami was a deep sense of struggle to achieve the burden of the mission he had been given by his Master. In her eloquent manner Nivedita captured this as few have:
“What was the struggle actually due? Was it the terrible effort of translating what he called the ‘super-conscious’ into the common life? Undoubtedly he had been born to a task which was in this respect of heroic difficulty. Nothing in the world is so terrible as to abandon the safe paths of accepted ideals, in order to work out some new realisation, by methods apparently in conflict with the old.”
That Nivedita with her insightful mind could comprehend and also convey what went on in her Master’s mind makes her an unparalleled interpreter of the great personality she had come in close touch with. At one place, in a time of great empathy, she writes:
“Has anyone realised the pain endured by the sculptor of a new ideal? The very sensitiveness and delicacy of perception that are necessary to his task, that very moral exaltation which is as the chisel in his hand, are turned on himself in passive moments, to become doubt, and terror of responsibility. What a heaven of ease seems then, to such a soul, even the hardest and sternest of those lives that are understood and authenticated by the imitative moral sense of the crowd!”
They entered Kashmir through Rawalpindi and Murree and stayed at Srinagar in a houseboat. A very notable part of the stay there was when Vivekananda took Nivedita on the traditional foot pilgrimage to the shrine of Amarnath amidst thousands of pilgrims from different parts of India. The pilgrims spent nights in temporary tents and made this highly arduous journey daily performing all the mandatory rituals that were considered necessary constituent parts of this pilgrimage. Upon reaching the shrine-cave the Swami entered and prostrated before ‘Mahadeva’ in a loin cloth, smearing his body with ashes, and had one of the most intense spiritual experiences of his life. Nivedita reported that the Swami’s body shook with great spiritual fervour.
When Nivedita felt that she was left bereft of a similar profound spirirual experience the Swami told her:
“You do not now understand. But you have made the pilgrimage and it will go on working. Causes must bring their effects. You will understand better afterwards the effects will come.”
In Kashmir Vivekananda also visited the shrine of Kshir Bhavani, from where he returned with a profound experience. Upon first feeling deeply livid at the condition of the temples defiled by the assailants, he heard the Divine Mother – the presiding deity of the place – speak to him, “what even if an unbeliever enters ‘My temples and defiles My images, what is that to you? Do you protect me or do I protect you? He remarked on his return that all his patriotism was gone.
During this time the Swami composed his famous poem, ‘Kali the Mother’, written in a state of spiritual vision, and Nivedita recorded that after completing the poem, the Swami dropped down from the floor, totally consumed by the experience.
Thereafter he spoke much more about Kali and worshipping the terrible aspects of the Divine, and considered the religion conceiving of a benign God as a mere shop-keeping religion. “I worship the terrible,” the Swami said. “is a mistake to hold that with all men pleasure is the motive. Quite as many are born to seek after pain. Let us worship the terror for its own sake.” And again in the same streak, “I love terror for its own sake, despair for its own sake, misery for its own sake. Fight always. Fight and fight on, though always in defeat. That’s the ideal. That’s the ideal.”
His teaching was always rooted in the majesty of the soul which he was convinced was gloriously manifested in face of the greatest adversities.
Never forget those lines, the Swami declared:
“The lion when stricken to the heart, gives out his mightiest roar. When smitten on the head, the cobra lifts its hood. And the majesty of the soul comes forth only when a man is wounded to his depths.”
There was a piece of land in Kashmir which the Maharaja of Kashmir wanted to gift to the Swami for his work. The party visited this place and pictured what a wonderful place it would make for future work. However, the British Resident of the state overruled the Maharaja’s wish and hence the project did not see the light of the day. This one of the first instances which greatly embittered Nivedita with regard to her view of the British presence in India.
Vivekananda, after the Kashmir sojourn returned early to Calcutta, he arranged for his western companions to visit a few other places like the Rajputana. The group returned to Calcutta in October, after a five month travel, just at the time of the Durga Puja.