During all those years Nivedita had always been aware of a heavy responsibility upon her shoulders – to leave for posterity what she had received from her Master. She also had a strong feeling that her Master had specially chosen her as the broadcaster of his deepest thoughts :
“And how short was the time that He gave me for training! … I can see now that He was longing for someone to pour His own mind and thought into. Oh that I may never harden my nature so as to lose one atom of it!”
This came from her own special gift of comprehending Swami’s highest and often very abstruse thoughts on an array of themes. She reckoned that her “own part throughout the years of my discipleship, appears to have been something like that of a thought reader. The only claim that I can make is that I was able to enter sufficiently into the circuit of my Master’s energy to be able to give evidence regarding it from direct perception.”
In the beginning she had thought she should attempt writing the Swami’s biography. But she struggled to make a beginning, often thinking that to capture the mind and thoughts of such a towering life and its historical significance for the whole world was a task well beyond her :
“Should I tell the story of your life, beloved Master? Alas, I cannot. Who am I, that I should understand it all? In what form do you appeal most deeply to the heart of India? To the Orthodox? To the Modern?..Or in what form does your western world most love you? How did the Americans see you? How did you show yourself to the Englishman? Only one whose hands ranged over a wide keyboard, could interpret adequately the music that you made.”
Again in a letter to Josephine MacLeod she wrote :
“You asked me last week about His Life. It is my one longing. But sometimes I feel I am not yet fit – and I shall not be allowed to do it, till I am. I have begun more than once. So far it is a failure. Pray to Him that He will love me and approve of me, and tell me what to do and how. One thing that I know is that He will not give me up – for He did that to none. But I wanted to do His work for Him – to bear his burden – to stand relief-guard at His outpost – and my brain is so incapable!”
But slowly Nivedita arrived at the right form – it was going to be a subjective view of her Master. Even while the Swami was living, Nivedita always had the feeling of being a transmitter of the grand life and mission she had closely witnessed. She knew this will be the work of her life.
Sometime in early 1906 Nivedita actually began the work on what she thought was the greatest project she had to undertake. On 21st February, which was also the most auspicious occasion of Shivaratri she wrote to Josephine :
“..the Life of Swamiji is afoot. I am at work!….Last Friday I sat down to work, and then when I had finished a chapter I turned to the old diary for something, and suddenly it flashed upon me that in those old diaries lay the germs at any rate of the most wonderful book!’”
She then sent the first chapter she wrote to Josephine whose response was decidedly favourable and encouraging. Nivedita was overjoyed and wrote back: joyfully replied :
“I know that if I succeed, it will be the work of my life. The one thing, in fact, that I have to give. And I feel more and more that all that training was not really given to me—but to all the Indian generations through me, in some way. I am trusting, trusting, trusting that He will guide my hand line by line.”
Even earlier, Nivedita had felt that a change of environment might provide a fresh stimulus to her on this project. Around 1907, because of various reasons she undertook the visit to the West, something shr had delayed for long, to renew her western contacts, meet her family and ailing mother, receive a fresh intellectual vigour and concentrate on working on this book. And thus did much of her work on the book during her western sojourn of around two years between 1907.and 1909.
She had been serialising individual chapters as articles in the journal ‘Prabuddha Bharata’. The entire work had been completed by the time she returned in late 1909.
On 1st February 1910, which also happened to be Vivekananda’s Janma-Tithi as per the Hindu calendar, she went to her Master’s room in Belur Math and offered the first copy, a bound volume, of her labour of love and devotion – ‘The Master as I saw Him’, to her Guru by placing it on the sofa.
As soon as it was published, the book was hailed as a monumental work in the field of spiritual biography and, at the same time, possessing profound intellectual rigour that carried the stamp of brilliance of the subject-personality as well as the author.
One such reviewer was Thomas Kelly Cheyne, an Oxford Professor and editor of the prestigious Hibbert Journal who was a formidable scholar himself having written 20 books on his interpretation on Old Testament which were considwred to be significant works in Biblical scholarship. He had also served as the co-editor of the four-volume work Encyclopaedia Biblica.
Nivedita had first met Cheyne in 1907 during her visit to the West – the time she was writing the ‘The Master as I saw Him’ and wrote 22 letters to him in the following four years until her death. Cheyne was also a great admirer of Nivedita’s first major work ‘The Web of Indian Life’. He was interested to study the Hindu traditions too and Nivedita advising him as the best and noblest sources of information on the subject suggested him to study the ‘Srimad Bhagwat-Gita’ and the works of Swami Vivekananda. Later, Cheyne acknowledged that reading these texts revolutionised his view of the capacity of the Hindu religion for self adaptation.
In his review of ‘The Master as I saw Him’ Cheyne wrote :
“This book may be placed among the choicest religious classics, on the same shelf with the Confessions of Saint Augustine and Sabatier’s Life of Saint Francis.” As a formidable scholar in field of religious and spiritual texts he knew what he was saying.
This book perhaps is the greatest intellectual biography of Swami Vivekananda, as the subject is not so much the person or the events about him, but his mind and his profound ideas which flew towards the abstract, but always sought a ground of Unity. One feels certain that only a person as brilliant as Sister Nivedita could have authored it.