(Here I am presenting the phase of her first meetings with the great Swami in 1895 and 1896 in London that subsequently led to her arrival in India and changed the life of Margaret Elizabeth Noble completely and the ensuing result was ‘Nivedita’, ‘the Offered One.’)
It was in November 1895, a cold Sunday afternoon, when Margaret was invited to a parlour meeting at Lady Isabel Margesson’s Westend home where she was told that a ‘Hindu Yogi’, who had made a significant impact in America in the preceding two years, was to speak. Margaret, interested as she always was in matters of the spiritual and mystical thought, and always in quest of greater clarity, accepted the invitation. She sat like others, about fifteen or twenty listeners, in a semi-circle facing Vivekananda. Later she mentioned that to the Swami the setting would hardly have been different from how simple village folk would gather around an Indian Sadhu in the evening to hear of higher things.
She vividly described her first impressions of seeing this teacher from India who was on the mission to scatter India’s highest gems of philosophy and spirituality in the western world.
“A majestic personage, clad in saffron gown and wearing a red-waist band, sat there on the floor, cross-legged as he spoke to the company he recited Sanskrit verses in his deep sonorous voice. His serene face, his dignified bearing and his divine voice cast a spell upon listener, who felt electrified by his frequent utterances of the name of ‘Shiva Shiva!’”
When at the end of the talk the host asked the invitees’ feedback, Margaret too voiced in line with the general reaction that while it was good it was not something new. But in subsequent days she felt that it was probably due to their deeply ingrained conservativeness and insularity that most of them, and she too, had said that.
With some reflection in the following days she felt that she had probably never heard in such a short time of an hour so many high and elevating ideas. In these initial talks, Vivekananda elucidated several ideas that captured the attention of his listeners. He believed that time had come when nations were to exchange their ideals, as they were already exchanging the commodities from the market. He declared that the one message of all religions lay in the call to renunciation. With his characteristic plain talk he pointed out that the desire to reach Heaven in his country was regarded by the most religious people, as a little “vulgar”.
To a western audience steeped in the idea of social good and progress he decoupled the spiritual ideal from their limited idea of social good. “You will say,” he said, “that this does not benefit society. But before this objection can be admitted you will first have to prove that the maintenance of society is an object in itself.” There were many points in the Swami’s teachings of which one could see the truth at once. When he said that God, really Impersonal, seen through the mist of sense became Personal, one was awed and touched by the beauty of the thought.
Margaret attended many more talks and lectures and felt the influence of the Swami’s teachings, which like great music grew and deepened with its repetition.
Vivekananda, after spending a few weeks in England, returned to America but by that time Margaret found herself addressing him as ‘Master’. She was most impressed by three characteristics in Swami’s teachings : the breadth of his religious culture; second, the great intellectual novelty and interest of the thought he had brought; and third, that his call was sounded in name of that which was strongest and finest, and was not in any way dependent on the meaner elements in man. She looked forward eagerly to his return to England.
1896 – Vivekananda returns to London
When the Swami returned to England in the following summer, Margaret was not merely his pupil but also a volunteer in organizing classes, and spreading the word among other interested people. He was deeply convinced of the need for Indian thought, in order to enable the religious consciousness of the West to welcome and assimilate the discoveries of modern science and enable it also to survive the destruction of local mythologies which was an inevitable result of world-consolidations. He felt that what was wanted was a formulation of faith which could hold its adherents fearless of truth.
The Swami made some statements in simple language that stunned many among his audience. While talking of materialism that holds matter to be the only truth, he declared, “The materialist is right! There is but One. Only he calls that One matter and I call it God!”
Nivedita later revisited these impressions: “Gifted to an extraordinary degree with a living utterance of metaphysics, drawing always upon a classical literature of wonderful depth and profundity, he stood in our midst as, before all, the apostle of the inner life, the prophet of subordination of the objective to the subjective.
‘Subordination of the objective to the subective’ – how brilliantly did Nivedita.later capture Vivekananda’s key theme. She was enanoured hearing lofty truths.
“The message of India, the Swami declared, was “not the soul for nature, but nature for the soul!”
Once in an exalted mood he declared to a group of listeners in a class: “ What the world needs 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?” by this time, the Swami had risen to his feet and looked around as if waiting for an answer. “Why should one fear?” he said, and then with a thunderous conviction he remarked, with his words piercing into the very being of his listeners, “If this is true, what else could matter? If it is not true, what do our lives matter?”
Margaret always got a feeling that the Swami was profoundly conscious of the historical significance of his preaching. He always had the Buddha-like calm and bearing which were ‘the expression of his far outlook and serene conviction that there would be a great army of Indian preachers in the West, reaping the harvest that he had sown so well, and making ready in their turn a new harvest, for the more distant reaping of the future.
Margaret had asked him about the ideals that drove his mission. And to this the Swami responded in a letter dated 7th of June 1896 having lines that are famous in Vivekananda literature as they provide a great insight into this extraordinary man’s mind.
“My ideal indeed can be put into a few words and that is: to preach unto mankind their divinity, and how to make it manifest in every movement of life. This world is in chain of superstition. I pity the oppressed, whether man or woman, and I pity more the oppressors.
One idea that I see clear as daylight is that misery is caused by ignorance and nothing else. Who will give the world light?
Sacrifice in the past has been the Law, it will be, alas, for ages to come. The earths bravest and best will have to sacrifice themselves for the good of many, for the welfare of all. Buddha’s by the hundred are necessary with eternal love and pity.
Religions of the world have become lifeless mockeries. What the world wants is character. The world is in need of those whose life is one burning love, selfless. That love will make every word tell like thunderbolt.
It is no superstition with you, I am sure, you have the making in you of a world-mover, and others will also come.
Bold words and bolder deeds are what we want. Awake, awake, great ones! The world is burning with misery. Can you sleep? Let us call and call till the sleeping gods awake, till the god within answers to the call. What more is in life? What greater work?
The details come to me as I go. I never make plans. Plans grow and work themselves. I only say, awake, awake!”
During this time Vivekananda delivered several lectures at the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours located in the Piccadilly area in the metropolis. Several of these lectures are now classics in Vivekannada literature and part of the ‘Jnana Yoga’ compilation.
Margaret felt that in the Swami’s classes what they all really entered upon was not so much of an intellectual exposition, as a life of new and lofty emotions, or, as they would be called in India, ‘realisations”.
Once Margaret took Vivekananda to her school in Wimbledon. The Swami was delighted to see her work but was also in tears thinking about the fate of millions of poor children in his own country who could never have access to transformative power of education – never given a chance to fulfil the immense potentiality that remained latent in them, and just passed away after spending a life largely in misery. It was during these weeks that the Swami, in a casual conversation, said to her that he had plans for the women of his country in which he thought she could be of help.
For all her life Margaret had a feeling that someday she would hear the call that will change her life. It was then she felt she had finally received it.
On a later occasion at a friend’s place when Margaret expressed her willingness to join the Swami in his work in India he said, “For my own part, I will be incarnated two hundred times, if that is necessary, to do this work amongst my people, that I have undertaken.” She later said, “I had recognized the heroic fibre of the man and desired to make myself the servant of his love for his people. But it was to his character to which I had thus done obeisance.”
Vivekananda returned to India in January 1897 and was given a hero’s welcome across the land. He formally founded the Ramakrishna Mission in May 1897 with the aims of spiritual rejuvenation not just in his own country but throughout the world with devoted selfless service as a keynote.
In Britain, Margaret, continued to contribute to the work of propagation of Vedanta in England through the study-groups of the Swami’s pupils there. She was mentally preparing and also waiting for a final green signal from Swami to move to India.
In their correspondence of the period the Swami had also tried to caution her by speaking of the difficulties she would face in India. But sensing the firmness of her mind he finally asked her to come.
On the eve of her departure, the Swami wrote to Margaret “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.”
Steeled by immense inner faith, the leap into the uncertain had been taken.