“I have attained Samadhi in grammar, whatever I write becomes the language”, wrote Nivedita once to a friend. She was a prolific author. As narrated earlier in this series,, Nivedita had honed her skills as a writer, primarily as a journalist, while she was still in England. She wrote several articles depicting the hapless conditions in which poor workers in the mining town of Wrexham lived. She also wrote in themes related to children’s education. All this held her in good stead for the work she was to do later in India as it was with her pen that she has left her most potent legacy.
During her first period of stay in India she had started working on ‘Kali the Mother’, based in the two lectures she had delivered in Calcutta on the topic, which had come out while Swami Vivekananda was alive.
A few of her longer articles like ‘Lambs Among Wolves’ – which she wrote in 1901 in England in order to counter the highly negative Christian missionary propaganda about Indian life, which she had encountered herself during her lectures in Edinburgh organised by the Scot polymath, Patrick Geddes, is also included in her five-volume ‘Collected Works.’
The Web of Indian Life
Her next major book was ‘The Web of Indian life’ which created huge impact in the West and had rich details from an insider’s view of Indian life. She had started writing this in 1901 when she was in England and Norway. She acknowledged the help she received from Patrick Geddes and R.C. Dutt in writing the book :
In sending this book out into the world, I desire to record my thanks to Mr. Romesh Chunder Dutt for his constant interest and encouragement, and also to Prof. Patrick Geddes, who by teaching me to understand a little of Europe, indirectly gave me a method by which to read my Indian experiences. She proudly signed herself, as she continued to did for all her future life, as NIVEDITA Of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda.
The book was published in 1904 by William Heinemann, London and was extensively reviewed in the Great Britain, United States of America as well as India. The reviews varied from being profusely eulogising to barely concealed debunking. Some hailed the book as being as important an event as Vivekananda in America – clearly something that Nivedita herself would have been first to reject, while some called out the author as an unsafe guide in social questions and still less to be trusted in matters of Indian History or Literature.
The Detroit Free Press in its review in July 1904 wrote :
The Western world, speaking generally, knows the Indian woman only through the testimonies of the missionaries. For this reason, a book published in London a few days ago, “The Web of Indian Life” by the Sister Nivedita comes as revelation; it is attracting immediate attention; it is being regarded as an epoch-making book. For in the inner life of the Indian woman, the life below the surface, the ideals, the mainsprings of action, the aspirations, hopes and all the mysticism of the East, and the reality of the Unseen, are set forth, as has ever been done before, by a Western woman imbued with a spirit of reverent sympathy.
The Church Times, on the other hand, in its review of the book in August 1904 wrote :
“In “’The Web of Indian Life” the authoress lets herself go, so to say, with entire abandon, to give us a couleur de rose picture of Indian life and though..It is all pure undiluted optimism…It is the suppression of the other side of the picture that we deprecate in the interest, not only of the truth, but of the cause of Indian women themselves, whose lot will never be improved if this sort of sentimental idealism about them is allowed to obtain credence. Potentially, we are fully prepared to believe the Indian woman is what she is here described as being. Actually, the ideas, the sanctions, the customs of the men of India must undergo radical transformation before the ideal can be realised. And only Christianity can effect that transformation.”
Perhaps one could place one’s trust in the sagely judgment of Rabindranath Tagore who wrote the foreword to the fourth edition of the book in 1917, six years after Nivedita had passed away. With his characteristic insight he wrote :
Nivedita has won access to the inmost heart of our society by her supreme gift of sympathy. She did not come to us with the impertinent curiosity of a visitor, nor did she elevate herself on a special high perch with the idea that a bird’s eye view is truer than the human view because of its superior aloofness. She lives our life and became one of ourselves. She became so intimately familiar with our people that she had the rare opportunity of observing us unawares. As a race we have our special limitations and imperfections, and for a foreigner it does not require a high degree of keen-sightedness to detect them. We know for certain that these defects did not escape Nivedita’s observation, but she did not stop there to generalise, as most foreigners do. And because she had a comprehensive mind and extraordinary insight of love she could see the creative ideals at work behind our social forms and discover our soul that has living connexion with its past and is marching towards its fulfilment.
It is truism to say that shadows accompany light. What you feel as the truth of a people, has its numberless contradictions, just as the single fact of roundness of the earth is contradicted by innumerable facts of its hills and hollows. Facts an easily be arranged and heaped up into loads of contradiction; yet men having faith in the reality of ideals hold firmly that the vision of truth does not depend upon its dimension, but upon its vitality. And Sister Nivedita has uttered the vital truths about India life.
Studies from an Eastern Home
Thematically not dissimilar, but more personal in narrative tone, was her another major work ‘Studies from an Eastern Home’ which was a compilation of articles she wrote in the leading Calcutta paper ‘The Statesman’ in her column ‘Indian Studies’ and was published posthumously, in 1913 by Longmans, Green and Co Ltd of London and presented with a long preface and personal remembrance of Nivedita by S.K. Ratcliffe, who had been instrumental in bringing these out in the first place when he was working in The Statesman. This compilation is based on serveral experiences which she had from living in her house in ‘Bagh Bazaar’ as well as her close obdervation and study of the lives, customs, and routines of women who lives in the households of Holy Mother Sarada Devi. She also covered a host of other themes with her characteristic detail and evocative style like festivals such as Durga Puja, Saraswati Puja, Dol Yatra (Holi), Janmashtami, the Ras Festival of the Vaishnavs, Shivaratri. She also wrote on themes like traditional Indian sari, Kashmir shawl that combined the technical and aesthetic aspects as well as the finer cultural hallmarks they were representative of, in the broader context in which they were located.
An Indian Study of Love and Death
This small booklet first came out in a pocket-size form in 1905 and another slightly enlarged version was published by Longmans, Green and Co Ltd of London in 1908. Pravrajika Atmaprana, who beside being a biographer of Nivedita had also been the editor of the five-volume ‘Complete Works of Sister Nivedita’, and without whose extensive efforts we would have lost many of Nivedita’s writings, described this work as a “beautiful small book written in poetic prose and interspersed by free translations of Sanskrit prayers, hymns and litanies keeps up the grave tone of the matter. It shows clearly that in her attempt to understand the life and thought of the people of her love, Nivedita did not leave out the study of the finer emotion of love or the abstruse idea of death and beyond. The book was dedicated to Madame Wallerstein, a close friend of Josephine Macleod, who lived in France, and who was considerably interested in the Rk-V-Vedanta Movement.
While the main subject of the book is death rituals in India, which Nivedita presented with remarkable precision of details and sensitivity, while, at the same time, ensuring that they remain shorn of any melodrama, which the subject, in the ganda of a lesser writer, might have lent itself to. One can see whole scenes playing before one’s eyes. In Nivedita’s writings about death, this great phenomenon of a moving to ‘that unknown country from whose bourne where no traveller returns’ became as sublime as it could have got.
Introduction to the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda
A short contribution of Nivedita but of tremendous historical significance (even though of a few pages only) is her masterly introduction to the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. One gets a feeling that scarcely anyone was better suited to put Vivekananda’s whole mission’s work in a perspective as Nivedita does.
She says that in the presented volumes,
“..we have what is not only a gospel to the world at large, but also to its own children, the Charter of the Hindu Faith. What Hinduism needed, amidst the general disintegration of the modern era, was a rock where she could lie at anchor, an authoritative utterance in which she might recognise her self. And this was given to her, in these words and writings of the Swami Vivekananda the first time in history, as has been said elsewhere, Hinduism itself forms here the subject of generalisation of a Hindu mind of the highest order. For ages to come the Hindu man who would verify, the Hindu mother who would teach her children, what was the faith of their ancestors, will turn to the pages of these books for assurance and light. Long after the English language has disappeared from India, the gift that has here been made, through that language, to the world will remain and bear its fruit in East and West alike.
Again, she says that :
He stands merely as the Revealer, the Interpreter to India of the treasures that she herself possesses in herself. The truths he preaches would have been as true, had he never been born. Nay more, they would have been equally authentic. The difference would have lain in their difficulty of access, in their want of modern clearness and incisiveness of statement, and in their loss of mutual coherence and unity. Had he not lived, texts that today will carry the bread of life to thousands might have remained the obscure disputes of scholars. He taught with authority, and not as one of the Pandits. For he himself had plunged to the depths of the realisation which he preached, and he came back like Ramanuja only to tell its secrets to the pariah, the outcast, and the foreigner.
And yet this statement that his teaching holds nothing new is not absolutely true. It must never be forgotten that it was the Swami Vivekananda who, while proclaiming the sovereignty of the Advaita Philosophy, as including that experience in which all is one, without a second, also added to Hinduism the doctrine that Dvaita, Vishishtadva, and Advaita are but three phases or stages in a single development, of which the last-named constitutes the goal.
This is part and parcel of the still greater and more simple doctrine that the many and the One are the same Reality, perceived by the mind at different times and in different attitudes; or as Sri Ramakrishna expressed the same thing, “God is both with form and without form. And He is that which includes both form and formlessness.”
This is the realisation which makes Vivekananda the great preacher of Karma, not as divorced from, but as expressing Jnâna and Bhakti. To him, the workshop, the study, the farmyard, and the field are as true and fit scenes for the meeting of God with man as the cell of the monk or the door of the temple. To him, there is no difference between service of man and worship of God, between manliness and faith, between true righteousness and spirituality.
Nivedita claimed that “the Shâstras, the Guru, and the Mother¬land — are the three notes that mingle themselves to form the music of the works of Vivekananda. These are the treasure which it is his to offer. These furnish him with the ingredients whereof he compounds the world’s heal-all of his spiritual bounty. These are the three lights burning within that single lamp which India by his hand lighted and set up, for the guidance of her own children and of the world in the few years of work between September 19, 1893 and July 4, 1902.”
She concludes by saying :
And some of us there are, who, for the sake of that lighting, and of this record that he has left behind him, bless the land that bore him and the hands of those who sent him forth, and believe that not even yet has it been given to us to understand the vastness and significance of the message that he spoke.
Religion and Dharma
This volume was published in 1915, a few years later after Nivedita’s death by Longmans and Green of London with a preface by S.K. Ratcliffe. It consisted of selected articles she wrote in the Occasional Notes column of the Prabuddha Bharata and other short notes and articles written for the Modern Review. It is eminently readable and deals with a variety of themes like Work, Realisation, notion of Progress, Cooperation, social organisation, national righteousness etc.
These pieces would surely rank among some of the highly inspiring pieces ever written by Nivedita. Even in subjects which on first appearance seem to be pertaining to civic virtues and ethics, like her Master, she firmly rooted them in the idea of supreme Vedantic truth, of infinitude, divinity, and majesty of the soul. In these pages at very many places it looks as if the spirit of Vivekananda speaks through her.
One may sample some of her striking insights:
“Christianity was not strong enough to include science. Is Hinduism string enough to include the modern civilisation? We answer yes! For towering behind the habits and practices of Hinduism lies that great generalised philosophy of the Vedanta, to which any religious ritual, any social scheme would serve equally well as an area of illustration and experimental school. And from amidst the Vedanta itself, again rises the Adwaita of Shankaracharya as the peak of Gowri-Shankar crowns the long range of the Himalayas.”
“Does it matter that instead of ringing temple his at evening we turn now ro a dying industry? Does it matter that instead of “Slaves of the Brahmins” we are in future to write ourselves as “slaves of the motherland”? Does it matter that instead of offering worship, we are to turn henceforth with gifts of patient service, of food, of training, of knowledge, to those who are in sore need? If “All that exists is One,” then all paths alike are path to that Oneness. Fighting is worship as good as praying. Labour is offering as acceptable as Ganges water. Study is an austerity more costly and more precious than a fast. Mutual aid is better than Puja. For concentration is the only means of vision – The One, the only goal.”
“O man, whosoever thou art who goes to work, in this hour of nation’s need, clasp to thy heart the weapon of thy service. Let mind and body be one in the act of labour, every muscle hard-knit, every sinew tense. Let all thy faculties converge on embracing the task. Let thy thought, say and night, be on that which thou has taken in hand to do.”
“Let character by thy supreme guide, perfection of service thy one dream. So shall come an hour of knowledge. And the new age shall have added to the children of the Motherland the race of the saints of the market-place and the field, the heroes of the civic and the national life.”
“It is a grand gospel – this doctrine of fearlessness, of courage, of self-conquest. Arise, thou great divinity that lies hidden within us! In Thy name all things are possible to us! Making victory and defeat the same plunge us into the battle.”
And like her Master she was at her inspiring best in glorifying purposive and selfless work :
“But how are we to fight? Most of us, by work. The world’s work is the great Sadhana, wherein we accumulate character, by which when the time comes, we can rise to Nirvikalpa Samadhi itself. Character is self-restraint. Self-restraint.. is self-direction. Self-direction is concentration. Concentration when perfect is Samadhi. From perfect work Mukti. This is the swing of the soul. Let us then be perfect in work!”