Swami Vivekananda had just finished speaking at the Parliament of Religions, in Chicago, when in the midst of the great applause that followed, several young women, elegantly dressed, jumped over the benches to crowd around him. An elderly lady, Mrs Roxie Blodgett, watched that extraordinary scene from the rear of the hall. As if sending a message to him, she said: ‘Well, my lad, if you can withstand that onslaught, you are indeed a God.’
That was in September 1893; and Vivekananda was just twenty-nine years of age.
Far from being an onslaught, several women in America would, from their very first meeting with him, recognise what Vivekananda was; uphold him; protect him; and would give him their selfless love. That is what some English women would do during his first visit to England in 1895. The woman in whom he would find rest and peace was born of German parentage. A French woman singer of great repute would bestow upon him her highest emotions.
In 1894, Vivekananda wrote to the Maharaja of Khetri, saying: ‘Last year I came to this country in summer, a wandering preacher from a far distant country, without name, fame, wealth of learning to recommend me—friendless, helpless, almost in a state of destitution’. ‘American women befriended me, gave me shelter and food and treated me as their own son, their own brother.’
Pravrajika Atmaprana edited in 1995 a book called Western Women in the Footsteps of Swami Vivekananda. The truth is that those footsteps were made possible in the first place by Western women. It is to them that I dedicate these two lectures and it is to them that I offer my first salutations.
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It is commonplace that in order to understand anybody’s life, we have first to understand the substance of the historical context in which he, or she, came to be and lived the story of his, or her, life. This is true even to a much greater extent about those men and women who made a profound impact upon their times,
Swami Vivekananda, born Narendranath Datta, began his life’s journey on 12 January 1863, in a rich lawyer’s family of Calcutta. The India of those times was characterised by four situations in the main. First of all, in search of a moral justification for British rule in India, there was a resolute endeavour to show it as a mission of civilisation to Indian barbarians; who, it was being argued, had no political philosophy; had never had any self-governing institutions; had no idea of civic liberty and freedom; steeped in darkness, they had only one long history of one tyranny replacing another tyranny.
Connected with the first, there was, secondly, the abusive evangelicalism of western missionaries. Because India was non-Christian, they had assumed that it was, for that reason, also uncivilised. On that view, Christianity was the answer to a false religion as well as the means to civilising an innately depraved people. The abusive tradition of the nineteenth-century missionaries had reached its apotheosis, in 1839, in the perceptions of Alexander Duff. To him, ‘of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse ingenuity of fallen man, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous.’ British missionaries had no idea that Christianity had flourished in the south-west of India for at least four centuries before Europe and England were Christianised. The Syrian Christians of Kerala are among the most ancient and aristocratic Christians of the world.
Missionaries were angry also with the government of the East India Company. Not only had it, until 1813, closed India to them, but it had become the patron of the Hindu Shastras, and was making donations to Hindu temples. The worst was the ceremony that took place soon after Wellesley had vanquished Tipu Sultan, in 1799. A deputation was sent by the Government to the Temple of Kali, at Kali Ghat, in Calcutta, to make offerings to Mother Kali for the victory obtained. Money was offered, and a military salute was fired in her honour—thousands of spectators watching that extraordinary scene, among them William Ward, a British Baptist missionary at Serampore.
There were, thirdly, the numerous disorders, adharma, of Hindu society itself. Above all, there was the grinding poverty of the masses which, combined with the other three features, had robbed them of their individuality and its dignity.
It was in this historical situation that Narendranath Datta was born.
Before we meet him, as Swami Vivekananda, and meet the Western women who formed a central part of his life, and he theirs, we must recognise also the other truth. While it is true that persons like him are to be understood in historical terms and not just in terms of some abstract philosophy: it is equally true that they transcend the limits of history, and create fields of energy that enhance and ennoble human life everywhere, at all times. Playing the drama of their interwoven lives, Vivekananda and these women were of universal appeal in their times, as they are today. Keeping the interplay of history and its transcending in full view, what that means is that we can feel them today only if we feel them contemporaneously.
That has been made possible for us by Marie Louise Burke through her immense six-volume work Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries. There is not, as far as I know, any other person in the history of modern India whose life, work and relationships have been documented in such great detail as that of Swami Vivekananda. It is in those details of his life and relationships, and not merely in his lectures, that we see the living Vedanta. No one can narrate its ennobling story without walking with Marie Louise Burke on the trail of Vivekananda in the West.
I maintain that Vivekananda deepened the meaning of the Vedanta, and brought to the people of the world its essence, in a way never done before him, nor ever since. In that story, a great many Western women play a most central part, so that it is a story not of Vivekananda also but theirs as well.
Who were those women? And what were they?
Kate Sanborn was a well-known author; had taught at Smith College and lived in a farmhouse some twenty-five miles away from Boston. She met Swami Vivekananda, travelling in a train, not long after he had reached America in the July of 1893. She talked with him for a long while, was greatly impressed, and, as they parted, told him that should he ever come to Boston, she would introduce him to men and women of learning. Here is, perhaps, the very first account of the man himself. ‘A magnificent specimen of manhood’, Kate wrote, ‘as handsome as Salivini at his best, with a lordly, imposing stride, as if he ruled the universe, and soft dark eyes that could flash fire if roused or dance with merriment if the conversation amused him.’ ‘He wore a bright yellow turban many yards in length, a red ochre robe, the badge of his calling; this was tied with a pink sash, broad and heavily befringed. Snuff-brown trousers and russet shoes completed the outfit.’ ‘He spoke better English than I did, was conversant with ancient and modern literature’; ‘could repeat pages of our Bible’. ‘He was an education, an illumination, a revelation!’
When he visited her and was her guest at her farmhouse called ‘Breezy Meadows’, a name that certainly reflected her own personality, it was she who introduced him to Professor John Henry Wright of Harvard University. That introduction was of the greatest moment to the Swami, for he was distressed to learn meanwhile, that in order to be accepted as a delegate to the Parliament of Religions for which he had come, he needed to be sponsored, and he had brought with him no formal credentials from India. Katherine Sanborn arranged for his lectures in Boston, besides. It was a woman who helped Vivekananda take his first step towards unfolding the living Vedanta. But there was in Katherine Sanborn, a Christian, something of the living Vedanta already.
There was even more of the living Vedanta in Ellen Hale, of Chicago — the capacity of reaching out to the other beyond the limits of one’s own history. Professor John Wright had ensured that Vivekananda was included among the delegates to the Parliament of Religions; but, in September, when the Swami returned to Chicago, he lost his way to its offices, and wandered around. Tired, and hungry, he nearly collapsed in front of a house, the home of George and Ellen Hale. For some reason Ellen Hale came out of her house and saw him, sitting on the street, in a state of exhaustion. Even before knowing who the young man was, she took him inside; fed him breakfast; and the whole family looked at him in the following moments as if they had known him for a long, long time. There were two Hale daughters, Mary and Harriet, and the two nieces of George, Isabelle and Harriet McKindley. There was also a son, Samuel. Mary was two years younger than Vivekananda, and her sister Harriet seven years younger. They all heard him at the Parliament of Religions as someone their own. Ellen Hale, then 56, became ‘Mother Church’, and her husband George, in his early sixties, ‘Father Pope’, as Vivekananda called them.
Christine Greenstidel, later called Sister Christine, was born in Nuremberg, on 17 August 1866, of German parents, who in later years migrated to America, and settled in Detroit. Christine heard the Swami for the first time, in Detroit, on 24 February 1894, but did not meet him. She had gone to the lecture with her friend Mrs Funke. Afterwards, recalling that day, she said: ‘Surely never in our countless incarnations had we taken a step so momentous! For before we had listened five minutes we knew that we had found the touchstone for which we had been searching.’ It was on 6 July 1895 that Christine and her friend met the Swami at Thousand Island Park where he had come to spend the summer. They travelled hundreds of miles, in the night and in the rain, to meet him; and, on meeting him, Christine said to him: ‘We have come, just as we would go to Jesus if we were still on earth and ask him to teach us.’ Vivekananda looked at them and said ‘If only I possessed the power of the Christ to set you free now.’
Sara Ellen Waldo was a relative of the famous American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. She had known well not only the tenets of Emerson’s Transcendental School of philosophy, but had studied also the works of Max Müller and, through him, had become interested in the Vedanta. She heard the Swami’s lecture first at the Brooklyn Ethical Association on 30 December 1894. She felt deeply stirred spiritually on hearing his other lectures in New York. She was to become his stenographer in long-hand, and the editor of the transcripts of his lectures and talks. When the New York Vedanta Society was established, Ellen Waldo was its prominent member. Ellen Waldo cooked for Vivekananda, took care of him, protected him in very many practical ways. Above all, she understood his thoughts, and his mission, better than most others. The Swami once said to her: ‘How could you have caught my thoughts and words so perfectly? It was as if I heard myself speaking.’ Ellen Waldo never married, was eighteen years older than the Swami, who gave her a Sanskrit name ‘Haridasi’, meaning ‘the servant of the Lord’.
Sara Ole Bull, born Chapman, was seventeen years old when she fell in love with the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, and married him, who was forty years older than she. They lived in Norway for a while, and then set up their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She always accompanied her husband on his concert tours, and took care of him, and of his finances, with great skill and devotion. Her home became a centre of lively intellectual conversations, to which came some well-known philosophers of Harvard University: William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and others, all of them her friends. Her home was a centre, too, of much musical activity. Then Ole Bull died. When, in her early forties, ‘a delicate, sweet-voiced woman with a tender, dreamy face and masses of dark hair’, she first met Vivekananda in the spring of 1894, Sara had been a widow for fourteen years. She had already studied the Bhagavad-Gita when she met him. In October 1894 she invited the Swami to be her guest. William James and Vivekananda became great friends after being introduced to each other, by Sara. The two met often and had long conversations. It is said that William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1901, and The Psychology of Religion, published in 1902, were the outcome of those talks.
Sara Bull donated liberally to the making of the Belur Math in India, and to the establishment of the Vedanta Societies in America. But, important though that was, it was the least part of what she gave. Infinitely more meaningful, she gave to the young Hindu monk her unlimited love and her care. A deeply spiritual person, from those depths of hers she recognised straightaway the depths of Vivekananda. When tired of the world, he would turn to her for rest — and she, always anxious to create conditions where he could study, think, and write. Sara Bull had an unwavering place in his life. He gave her a Sanskrit name, Dhira-mata, meaning ‘the steady mother’, which is what Sara Bull was. And what she was, embodied the living Vedanta.
Betty Leggett and Josephine MacLeod were two sisters who used to go to listen to the lectures of Swami Vivekananda, in New York, in the winter of 1895. It was on 29 January 1895 that they first heard him speak but did not meet him. They went to his talks three times a week that whole winter. It was only later when Francis Leggett, a successful businessman, accompanied them, and invited the Swami to his home for dinner, that they first spoke to him. Francis Leggett was not yet Betty’s husband. She had lost her first husband, William Sturges, some years earlier, and she had two children, Alberta, a daughter, and Hollister, a son. In April that year, Frank invited Vivekananda to his opulent country mansion ‘Ridgely Manor’, and of course he invited Betty and her children and Josephine. By that time, the whole family had come to love the Swami, and he them: so that when Betty and Frank were to get married—they decided it had to be in Paris—they expressed their great desire that he go with them, which he did. This Hindu sannyasin from India affixed his signature as a witness to their marriage. Betty’s name is among those who made large donations to the building of the Belur Math and towards other activities started in the name of Vivekananda. Frank was among the few to whom the management of the New York Vedanta Society was entrusted.
It is to Pravrajika Prabbudhaprana, born Leona Katz, that we owe a detailed biography of Josephine MacLeod, called Tantine, the Life of Josephine MacLeod: Friend of Swami Vivekananda, published in 1995. Excepting Vivekananda’s letters to Josephine, I have derived the other details of her life from Prabbudhaprana’s Tantine. Also, there is present in this audience a gentleman, my friend Alfred Wuerfel, who told me that, sometime in 1938, he had met Josephine MacLeod, in Almora, and had shaken her hands. On hearing this, I shook Alfred’s, hands twice, and in doing so I had the feeling that I was shaking hands with Vivekananda—if only by proxy, twice removed.
Josephine MacLeod, born in 1858, had just turned thirty-seven when she first heard Vivekananda. Recalling that event, she said: ‘Instantly to me that was truth, and the second sentence he spoke was truth, and the third sentence was truth. And I listened to him for seven years and whatever he uttered was to me, truth. From that moment life had a different import.’ She was five years older than Vivekananda; but in her later years, she would reckon her age from the day she first heard him, 29th of January 1895.
She was tall, very attractive, and, like her inseparable sister Betty, clothed always in exquisite dresses, Paris-made, in the latest fashion, with an imperious air about her. Variously called Joe, Jo Jo, Yum, or Tantine, Vivekananda loved her dearly; in her life, till the very end, he would remain the closest presence. In one of her letters to Alberta, her niece, later Lady Alberta Sandwich, she said: ‘The thing that held me in Swamiji was his unlimitedness. I never could touch the bottom—or top—or sides’: ‘It is the Truth that I saw in Swamiji that has set me free’; ‘It was to set me free that Swamiji came’. Even in his days, when someone would introduce her as the Swami’s disciple, she would spring up and say: ‘I am not Swami’s disciple. I am his friend. To this, Alberta would add: ‘She is not his friend. She is Him.’
Pravrajika Atmaprana wrote a biography of Margaret Elizabeth Noble, called Sister Nivedita, which was first published in 1961. I have read hardly anything on Sister Nivedita which is more moving, and more intelligent, than Pravrajika Atmaprana’s biography of her. It is written in a way that only a woman could write about another woman. Excepting Vivekananda’s letter to Margaret, and her own letters to various people, compiled in two volumes by Sankari Prasad Basu, and first published in 1982, I have derived all other facts of her life from Atmaprana. My understanding of Swamiji’s relationship with Nivedita, magnificent but complex, is wholly my own. Even in that, though, I have benefitted by certain insights which the Pravrajika offers us. Moreover, I am grateful to her for lending me her personal copies of the two volumes of Letters of Sister Nivedita.
Margaret Noble, born on 28 October 1867, was Irish; her ancestors, the Nobles, had settled in Ireland for five centuries. She carried within her the two inherited Irish passions, for justice and freedom. To these, she added another passion—the passion for truth. These three would ever remain the dominant themes of Margaret’s life.
She first met Vivekananda in November 1895, at the house of her friend, Lady Isabel Margesson, in London. In her search of Truth, at once compelling and agonising, she had moved from one system of faith to another, her soul thirsty still. She loved Jesus with her whole heart, but found the Christian doctrines ‘incompatible with Truth’. At the same time as her faith in Christianity tottered, and she was ‘very unhappy’, she would also rush into church ‘to feel peace within’. But, as she recalled some years later, ‘no peace, no rest was there for my troubled soul all eager to know the Truth.’ That took her to the study of natural sciences, in which she would discover, she thought, the Laws of Nature. Meanwhile she read the life of the Buddha; and, as she said, ‘became more and more convinced that the salvation’ he preached was decidedly ‘more consistent with the Truth than the preachings of the Christian religion.’ She was a founding-member of the Sesame Club, to which came persons like George Bernard Shaw, Patrick Geddes, and William Butler Yeats.
It was during this searching for truth that Margaret Noble met Swami Vivekananda. At the end of each lecture or talk by him, there was from her always a ‘but’ and a ‘why’. When these had ended, and before the Swami left London for New York Margaret had called him ‘Master’. Vivekananda unfolded to her his vision, if still in general terms only; with an intensity, however, that was well known to her in her own nature, and she simply said: ‘I will help you’. Seeing with clarity who she was, with equal simplicity he said: ‘I know it’. His vision was that of regeneration of the women of India, upon which he laid greatest emphasis.
Madame Emma Calvé was a great French singer of those times, adored for her rendering of Carmen. She was the toast of Europe. Described as ‘tempestuous, headstrong, and sensuous’, she seemed to have been involved in emotional attachments. It was, most probably, during the Swami’s second visit to the West, 1899-1900, that she first met him in Chicago, in November 1899. She had come to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Her marriage had broken earlier, and, a passionate love affair had also come to an end, which, it is said, had left her desolate. She had brought with her on her Chicago tour her much-loved six-year old daughter, whom she had left, before she went for her evening performance, at a friend’s house. Emma suffered a tragic blow right in the midst of her recital that evening. She was informed that, perhaps because of a short circuit in the room her daughter was in, there was a fire, and the child was burnt to death. Emma collapsed. She thought of killing herself, but somehow didn’t. Her friend suggested that she meet an Indian monk who was in town, and passed on to her his address. She didn’t; thinking, perhaps, ‘what have I got to do with monks?’ But one day she pressed the calling-bell of the house where Vivekananda was staying.
Vivekananda looked at his obviously distressed visitor with those wonderfully compassionate eyes of his, touching her, as it were, with his unspoken warmth. Emma began to weep, and cried for what seemed to her a long time. When she had steadied herself, the monk said: ‘Come again, tomorrow, at the same time.’ When she stepped out onto the street, the world seemed to her different.
Emma Calvé met the Swami again, and again, and felt healed and restored. He did not give this celebrated French singer a lecture on the impermanence of life, and the world a maya, or anything of that stuff. He gave her something of his strength. What he said to her was: ‘Build up your health. Do not dwell in silence upon your sorrows. Transmute your emotions into some form of external expression. Your spiritual health requires it. Your art demands it.’ One day he asked her to help him in the kitchen; and she cried again. But this time the tears were caused by her peeling the onions. Madame Emma Calvé would remain devoted to Vivekananda as long as he lived.
Charlotte Elizabeth Sevier, and her husband, J.H.Sevier, the English couple, first heard the Swami, in London, during his second visit to London in the summer of 1896. Joe had accompanied him on that visit. She later recalled that, coming out of the hall after a lecture by the Swami, Captain Sevier had asked her, with a characteristic English scepticism: ‘Do you know this young man? Is he really what he seems?’ Joe’s one-word answer was ‘yes’. It must have carried such feeling, and conviction, that the Captain made up his mind then and there: ‘In that case one must follow him and with him find God.’ The husband and the wife asked each other’s permission to become the Swami’s disciples. No impulse of the moment, no gushing of a passing emotion, Charlotte and John knew for sure that India would thenceforth be their destiny—and home. In Almora, in the Himalayas. The Swami had already, started a journal called Prabuddha Bharata, ‘The Awakened India’, which he wanted to be the voice of the living Vedanta. After the press was shifted from Madras to Almora, the Seviers, as much with their devotion as with their Western competence in matters of organisation, made the Prabuddha Bharata truly a strong voice. They had accompanied Vivekananda when he went to the Continent in order restore his health. They were with him when he met, on the 9th of September 1896, at Kiel, Prof. Paul Deussen, whose work on the Vedanta was already famous. It was in Switzerland that, enchanted by the beauty of the Alps, he thought of starting an ashrama at Almora, the Advaita Ashrama, where some young people, from India and the West, would be trained: those from India, to go to the West and make the Vedanta a living force; and those from the West, to work for India in the field of education. The Seviers gave a practical shape to that Himalayan dream of Vivekananda.
When Roxie Blodgett had made that very witty remark, on witnessing the young females rush towards Vivekananda after he had finished speaking at the. Parliament of Religions in September 1893, she could never have imagined that, six years later, that magnificent man would be her guest in Los Angeles. Nor could she have imagined that she would cook for him, and make sure that he had a delicious meal after his lectures, and that she would talk to him about the villainy of men, and he would talk to her of the even greater wickedness of women!
It was at Mrs. Blodgett’s house that, on 13 December 1899, Alice Mead Hansbrough, and her sister Helen Mead, first met Vivekananda. They had heard him speak on the 8th of December at Blanchard Hall, in Los Angeles. But she had already known him for two years before that, if only through his books Raja Yoga and Karma Yoga. On reading them, she recalled later, she would think, ‘What a wonderful man he must be who wrote the words!’, ‘And I would try to form a picture in my mind of what he looked like’. On hearing him, what struck her, quite apart from the greatness of his thoughts, was his voice, which it would many others. Alice wrote later: ‘His voice was the most musical I have ever heard. I should say he was a baritone—certainly nearer to bass than tenor.’
Along with the Swami, Joe was also a guest of Roxie Blodgett’s. It was Joe who had invited Alice Hansbrough to meet the Swami. The two sisters, Alice and Helen, invited him to stay with them. He continued to stay with Roxie Blodgett, however; but one day, it seems unannounced, he arrived at the doorsteps of the home of the Meads, and said, ‘I have come to stay with you.’ That was in Pasadena.
Alice Mead Hansbrough left her Reminiscences, from which Marie Louise Burke has drawn an intimate picture of Swami Vivekananda’s two months, January and February of 1899, with the Meads. You will find it in New Discoveries, volume 4.
There were several other women who bestowed upon him their love, their devotion, and their practical care. Their portrait, as indeed the portrait of the women I have introduced to you this evening, is drawn, with equal love and faithfulness to detail, in the pages of Marie Louise Burke’s six volumes of Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries.
There has been a long-standing tendency to look upon the Western women who permeated his life, and helped his work grow, as his instruments. This tendency is, however, as unVedantic as it is against the spirit of Swami Vivekananda. Although they all died long ago, Josephine MacLeod in 1949, none of them is dead. Persons like Vivekananda and these women never die. It is of great importance, therefore, that the prevailing tendency, wherever it exists, of looking upon other people as somebody’s instrument is given up as the very first step towards the living Vedanta.
Never, never, never, did Vivekananda use the word ‘instrument’ to describe the women who came into his life. On the contrary, as long as he lived, he expressed to them, in a clear full-throated voice, his deepest gratitude to them for what they did for him and, even more, for what they meant to him. During the days that he stayed with the one or the other of them, and in his letters to them when he was travelling or from the Belur Math, there was an outpouring of his own feelings of love and gratitude to them.
Only a few examples will suffice here. First of all, not to a woman but to a man, Professor John Wright, who had ensured that Vivekananda was made a delegate to the Parliament of Religions, he wrote on 4 September 1893: ‘I hasten to tender my heartfelt gratitude to you for your letters of introduction’; and then, on 2nd October, from Chicago: ‘I owe so much to you that it would have been an insult to your ahetuka (unselfish) friendship to have written you business-like letters in a hurry.’ Of Mr. and Mrs. John B. Lyon of Chicago, who had taken him in their home and took care of him, Vivekananda said that they were ‘the noblest couple I have ever seen’. Of the American women, he said, in his undated letter in 1894 to the Maharaja of Khetri, Ajit Singh: ‘American women! A hundred lives would not be sufficient to pay my deep debt of gratitude to you! I have not words enough to express my gratitude to you!’ And then followed, in that letter, the particular passage about them which I quoted at the beginning of this lecture. Let it not be supposed that all this was only at the beginning, when he was uncertain of his work in America. To the Hale family, especially to Mary, he would remain deeply attached till the last day of his life. To Josephine MacLeod, to his ‘Joe’ or ‘Jaya’ he wrote in one of his letters: ‘I can’t even in imagination pay the immense debt of gratitude I owe you. Wherever you are you never forget my welfare; and there, you are the only one who bears all my burdens, all my brutal outbursts.’ Of Charlotte Sevier and her husband, he said they ‘clad me when I was cold, nursed me better than my own mother would have, borne with me in my weaknesses and trials—and they have nothing but blessings for me.’ To the three Mead sisters, Vivekananda said: ‘You three sisters have become a part of my mind forever.’
Instruments are for use. They are to be used for a certain purpose, and then put aside, till there is a need to use them again. Not only did Vivekananda not ever think of those marvellous women as instruments; he never used any human being for his own ends or for his work.
This is best illustrated, to take only one example, in his attitude towards Margaret Noble, later Sister Nivedita. When she had decided to leave her home, her mother and sister and brother, England, and everything that she was familiar with as a part of her daily life, to come to India and devote her life to the education of Indian women; in his letter of 29 July 1897 he warned her of the very many difficulties that she would face if she did came to India. He warned her ‘of the misery, the superstition, and the slavery that are here’. He told her: ‘You will be in the midst of a mass of half-naked men and women with quaint ideas of caste and isolation, shunning the white skin through fear or hatred and hated by them intensely’. He warned her, ‘On the other hand, you will be looked upon by the white as a crank, and every one of your movements will be watched with suspicion.’ ‘Then the climate is fearfully hot’, he warned her; ‘our winter in most places being like your summer, and in the south it is always blazing.’ He warned her, moreover, that ‘Not one European comfort is to be had in places, out of the cities.’ ‘If, in spite of all this, you dare venture into the work, you are welcome, a hundred times welcome.’
In that letter, he said to ‘My dear Miss Noble’: ‘I am now convinced that you have a great future in the work for India. What was wanted was not a man, but a woman, a real lioness, to work for the Indians, women specially.’ He said: ‘India cannot yet produce great women, she must borrow them from other nations. Your education, sincerity, purity, immense love, determination, and above all, the Celtic blood make you just the woman wanted.’
Most important of all, what Vivekananda said to this young, Irish woman was this: ‘You must think well before you plunge in, and after work, 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’: ‘I promise you that’. The words ‘I will stand by you unto death’ were underscored by him.
Margaret Noble landed at Calcutta on 28 January 1898. Vivekananda was at the docks to receive her.
Alice Hansbrough wrote in great detail about the days that Vivekananda spent at her home in Pasadena. She spoke of one occasion when ‘he talked for six hours without interruption—from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon’, after which, she said, ‘the air was just vibrant with spirituality’. The three Mead sisters felt, in the words of one of them, ‘as if Christ himself was in their midst.’ And that was because, as every woman who came into his life acknowledged, he not only talked of love as the essence of the living Vedanta, but lived it in all his relationships. At no time did Vivekananda claim for himself anything more than that. Alice recalled, ‘He took away any feeling on our part that he was superior to us. Though some people found him aloof, I never did. I felt as though he was someone to whom I was closely related, someone whom I had not seen for a long, long time, and who had been a long time coming. I had felt I carried a burden—not on my back, but on my chest. After I met Swamiji I felt the lifting of the burden that had been on my chest for long I had ceased to be conscious of it.’
On hearing Vivekananda speak, if women were transported into the unsullied heights of the human spirit, their woman’s heart was also touched deeply by his natural childlike nature, in which there was not ever a trace of artificiality. Of that, there were numerous expressions. In her biography of Josephine MacLeod, Prabuddhaprana mentions some of them. Roxie Blodgett would narrate how ‘He would come home from a lecture, where he was compelled to break away from his audience, so eagerly would they gather around him— come rushing into the kitchen like a boy released from school, with “Now we will cook”.’ Joe would appear and discover the culprit among the pots and pans, still in his lecture robes.
At Ridgely Manor, the stately house of the Leggett, up in the Catskill mountains, away from New York, Vivekananda spent several days in August of 1899. Margaret had come with the Swami on this second visit of his to the West. Apart from Betty’s family and Joe, there were some other guests, among them Maude Stumm, a twenty-year old artist. At dinner, the Swami was always seated to Betty’s right; but after he had finished eating, he gave himself the freedom of getting up and puffing on his pipe outside. Betty soon discovered that there was a way of holding him back. Betty would, say, ‘I believe, Swami, there is some ice cream to follow’, and he would return to the table with an expectant look never seen on the face of anybody beyond sixteen. One day Joe asked him how he liked the strawberries that were picked from the garden, and he said that he hadn’t tasted any. When Joe said ‘why Swami, we have been serving you strawberries with cream and sugar every day for the past week’; he replied, ‘Ah, I am tasting only cream and sugar. Even tacks taste sweet that way’. Joe caught a mischievous twinkle in his eyes when he said that.
The living Vedanta has never preached that sugar and cream, or ice cream, is incompatible with spiritual freedom. This man, who loved cream and sugar, and ice cream, had, by all accounts, a deep spiritual impact upon the lives of those who came in contact with him; for he made them aware of that liberating energy that lies in the depths of everyone. When Betty happened to go to the room of a guest at that time, she found her crying. When Betty asked her why, she said: ‘That man has given me eternal life.’ Prabuddhaprana mentions that at the dinner parties at Ridgely, women wore gorgeous gowns and jewels and that the lights and flowers decorating the table dazzled all eyes. On one such occasion, she mentions, Vivekananda was heard saying to Maude Stumm, ‘Don’t let it fool you, Baby’.
Vivekananda once said that to understand him would require another Vivekananda. That was the plain truth. What that meant was that no one else, however kind and devoted and loving to him, could convey the essential truth of the deepest part of his inner life. He alone could; and he did, with a clarity and lucidity that is rare in the history of great spiritual personalities of the world, man or woman. He did that in his letters; in those, in which he spoke of his inner suffering and trials, mostly to women, to Mary Hale, to Joe, to Sara Bull, to Nivedita, and to Christine. They convey the story of his self-division.
Vivekananda was not a self-divided man in the sense in which this expression is used in psychopathology. There it means a person paralysed, in the will and in actions alike, on account of his, or her, own confusion, as to what he, or she, really is. When contrary demands are made upon him, or her, it always leads to a distorted nervous behaviour. Vivekananda was a self-divided man in the sense that he was several potentialities at the same time, each demanding expression and its fulfillment but put aside—excepting that which Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa had decided should dominate. But that could not be, not in its entirety. Vivekananda let the other parts of his personality speak also, and be. But none of them could be in its entirety either. In this conflict, he suffered, deeply indeed, but also changed very substantially the western perceptions of India, especially the perceptions of western Christianity. He brought freedom from fear to thousands of people—at an immense cost to himself.
The key to that self-division in his soul lies, as far as I understand him, in his longing for spiritual quiet and his irrepressible impulse to refashion Hindu society so that the poor and the outcast in it would have that human dignity which was denied to them for centuries. That key lies, more dramatically, in the event that took place between Ramakrishna and Narendra, or Naren, shortly before the passing away of the Paramahamsa in 1886. One evening, as if in fulfilment of his own deepest wish to know from personal experience the meaning of the central utterance of the Upanishads, Aham Brahmasmi (‘I am Brahman’), Naren passed suddenly in a strangely exalted state in which he lost all consciousness of his body, retaining only that of his head. Frightened, Naren cried out to another disciple of Ramakrishna meditating in the same room, ‘Gopalda, Gopalda, where is my body?’ When the latter rushed to Ramakrishna for help, the Paramahamsa said with a smile, ‘Let him stay in that state for a while. He has teased me long enough for it’. Soon afterwards Naren passed into a deep trance, from which he emerged only hours later. Thereupon, looking deep into his eyes, Ramakrishna said to Naren: ‘Just as a treasure is locked up in a box, so will this realisation you have just had be locked up and the key shall remain with me. You have work to do. When you will have finished my work, the treasure-box will be unlocked again’. Afterwards, Ramakrishna said to his other disciples about Naren: ‘the time will come when he will shake the world to its foundations.’
Wanting to leave nothing to chance, though always certain of Naren’s own potentiality for great work, Ramakrishna, some four or five days before he died of cancer of the throat, called Naren; and, looking deeply into his eyes again, himself passed into a trance. Precisely at that moment Naren felt as if a powerful electric shock was going through his body. On coming to, Ramakrishna burst into tears, saying ‘Oh Naren, today I have given you my all, and have become a Fakir, a penniless beggar.’ With this was transmitted into Narendranath Datta another person, who was the antithesis of all that he himself was. Frithjof Schuon says: ‘Each of them was the ideal and the victim of the other.’
During the days of the Parliament of Religions, when he was staying with John B. Lyon and his wife Emily, whom, as I said earlier, he described as ‘one of the noblest couples I have seen’, one day he confided to Mrs. Lyon that he had had the greatest temptation of his life in America. ‘Who is she, Swami?’, she asked him, teasingly. He burst into his childlike laughter, and said: ‘Oh, it is not a lady, it is Organisation!’
It was this temptation of Vivekananda that had disturbed the other disciples of Sri Ramakrishna. Longing for the blissful heights of the spiritual, but forced by Vivekananda into social action, they had wrongly assumed that the two are incompatible. One day they reproached him for having introduced into Ramakrishna’s teachings the Western idea of Organisation. That touched him to the quick. ‘You are sentimental fools’, he said to them harshly.
What do you understand of religion? You are only good at praying with folded hands, ‘Oh Lord! how beautiful is your nose! How sweet are your eyes’ and all such nonsense… And you think your salvation is secured and Shri Ramakrishna will come at the final hour and take you by hand to the highest heavens. Study, public preaching, and doing humanitarian works are, according to you, Maya, because he said to some, ‘Seek and find God first; doing good in the world is a presumption!’ As if God is such an easy thing to be achieved! As if He is such a fool as to make Himself a plaything in the hands of an imbecile!
You think you have understood Shri Ramakrishna better than myself! Your Bhakti is sentimental nonsense, which makes one impotent. You want to preach Ramakrishna as you have understood him, which is mighty little! Hands off! Who cares for your Ramakrishna? Who cares for your Bhakti and Mukti? Who cares for what scriptures say? I will go into a thousand hells cheerfully, if I can rouse my countrymen immersed in Tamas, to stand on their own feet and be men inspired with the spirit of Karma-Yoga’.
His face flushed, his voice choked, his body shaken and trembling, he suddenly fled to his own room. Overwhelmed, all were moved to silence.
Later, he said to them, softly, ‘When one attains Bhakti, one’s heart and nerves become so soft and delicate that they cannot bear even the touch of a flower!’ ‘So I am trying and trying always to keep down the welling rush of Bhakti within me. I am trying to bind and bind myself with iron chains of Jnana, for still my work for my motherland is unfinished, and my message to the world not yet fully delivered.’ ‘Oh, I have work to do! I am a slave of Ramakrishna, who left his work to be done by me and will not give me rest till I have finished it!’
It required the perceptiveness of a great French novelist, Romain Rolland, to say in his biography of Swami Vivekananda: ‘Every mission is dramatic, for it is accomplished at the expense of him who receives it, at the expense of one part of his nature, of his rest, of his health, often of his deepest aspirations.’ But it is also true that each one of the Western women in his life perceived this in one measure or another. Sometimes it baffled them, as it did Nivedita, when he began to express his self-division in the very moments of his dazzling success. But, baffled or not, they became even more protective of him and provided him, first of all, a loving home where he could freely express the incredible range of his thoughts and emotions. None of his brother-disciples ever understood him: the Western women did, although not all of them were his disciples.
The other source of Vivekananda’s self-division lay in his deeply loving nature and his recognition of the necessity to be impersonal in the organisation that he was working to establish—in the service of the poor masses of India. He was thus torn between the personal and the impersonal. Neither of the two self-divisions I have spoken of was, however, innate to Vivekananda. What was forced upon him, created them. ‘You have work to do’ and the consequent ‘temptation’ that arose, Organisation—these two. On 15 March 1894 from Detroit, he wrote to Mary and her sister Harriet this: ‘I am wearied of lecturing and all that nonsense. This mixing with hundreds of varieties of human animal has disturbed me. I will tell you what is to my taste; I cannot write and I cannot speak, but I can think deeply, and when I am heated, can speak fire. It should be, however, to a select few, a very select few. Let them, if they will, scatter my ideas broadcast—not I. This is only a just division of labour. The same man never succeeded both in thinking and in scattering his thoughts.’
It was upon Nivedita, not merely to her, that Vivekananda expressed his self-division between the personal and the impersonal in its fullest force. Upon Margot, no one else. That was because he saw, from the very beginning, that genuine though her passion was for India, and for the women of India, she had for him ‘a lover’s adoration’. This is not my phrase. Evidently on the basis of what Josephine MacLeod told Romain Rolland—and their conversation was recorded by him in great detail in his diary—he used that phrase as an explanation of Vivekananda’s initial harshness to Margot.
In her letter of the 30th of March 1899, written to Joe, Margot had said: ‘I suppose the fact is that anyone can see that I worship him—and that’s the truth.’
Certainly everyone saw it, Vivekananda most of all. So he wrote to her, on October 1, 1897, even before she arrived in India for good.
“The great difficulty is this: I see persons giving me almost the whole of their love. But I must not give anyone the whole of mine in return, for that day the work would be ruined. Let there are some who will look for such a return, not having the breadth of the impersonal view. It is absolutely necessary to the work that I should have the enthusiastic love of as many as possible, while I myself remain entirely impersonal. Otherwise jealousy and quarrels must break up everything, I am sure you understand this. I do not mean that one should be a brute, making use of the devotion of others for his own ends, and laughing in his sleeve meanwhile. What I mean is what I am, intensely personal in my love, but having the power to pluck out my own heart with my own hand, if it becomes necessary, ‘for the good of many, for the welfare of many’, as Buddha said. Madness of love, and yet in it no bondage. Matter changed into spirit by the force of love. Nay, that is the gist of our Vedanta.”
On 25 March 1898, Swami Vivekananda initiated Margot into the life of Ramakrishna Order which he had brought into being a year earlier, and gave her the name ‘Nivedita’, or ‘the Dedicated’. After the ceremony was over, he asked her to offer flowers at the feet of the Buddha, and then said to her, in a voice choked with emotion, ‘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.’
[This is the first of two Lectures delivered at the invitation of the Max Mueller Bhavan, Goethe Institute, New Delhi. Wednesday, 27th of March 1996. Chaturvedi Badrinath was a member of the Indian Administrative Service, 1957-89, and served in Tamil Nadu for thirty-one years (1958-89). He has written several books, including ‘Dharma, India and the World Order: Twenty-one Essays’ (1993), and ‘The Mahabharata – An Inquiry into the Human Condition’ (2006). He passed away in Pondicherry in February 2010. Courtesy: The Beacon, a web-based only feature magazine of writing and reading (long-form essays, fiction and poetry) that believes in confluences more than in consensus.]
