Agent of Change

Sep 23, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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Next January 12, will be the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda. As a boy growing up in the 1960s, Vivekananda was one of the greatest influences of my generation. It has been a source of great disappointment that this towering personality in the renaissance of Hinduism in the 20th century is not more widely known in the present. We need role models like him.
The ’60s was a time of great ferment in the Indian community, especially for children. I was part of the cohort that first experienced the switch of “Fifth Standard” into “Form 1” while in
primary school. Two high schools had been launched on the West Coast and many of us who might not have afforded the tuition to the then dominant private high schools, were exposed to a secondary education to the GCE “O” level.
Those were heady days and the brighter students took to the sciences like duck to water. The scientific method gave us a new tool to examine the world around us – and in a faint echo of the “enlightenment’ ethos of two centuries before, made us question our traditional beliefs. The practices of the older villagers, including those of my grandparents who raised me, seemed quaint. I must have been twelve or thereabouts when I first encountered Swami Purananda at yagna in my village.
He was a breath of fresh air and spoke of a virile Hinduism that appealed to me and my friends. He stressed a scientific education (he had already founded the school at Cove and John) and an understanding of the rituals that were handed down to us. He spoke in glowing terms of another great Swami – Vivekananda. In the neighbouring village an “Institute of Culture’ (Sanskriti Bhavan) had been launched by an individual who had been one of the earliest to absorb higher education. (He’d become a permanent secretary.) Vivekananda was a central figure of the ‘new Hindu” that they emphasised.
Born as Narendra Nath Datta to a wealthy family in Calcutta in 1863, he’d been sent to Presidency College, one of the four universities established to transform the Indian upper classes into ‘brown Englishmen”. No Indian subject or language was to be taught and Narendra studied (western) philosophy, logic and history. It was rather ironic when, to explain the word ‘trance’ in a poem by the English Romantic poet Wordsworth, his English Professor recommended that his students visit an Indian mystic Ramakrishna on the outskirts of Calcutta.
Several of these elite students were intrigued by this ‘illiterate’ simple man – who declared, and demonstrated that the ancient Hindu teaching of experiencing a higher consciousness was real and achievable. After obtaining their degrees they became disciples of Ramakrishna. Vivekananda was therefore one of the earliest Indians who could move with ease between western scientific concepts and philosophy and ancient Hindu responses to some of the same questions.
As boys, we were enthralled when we learnt he’d attended the World Conference of Religions in 1893 in Chicago and swept all in attendance off their feet with his exposition of Vedanta (the “Perennial Philosophy” as Huxley later called it) and Yoga. The philosopher William James and the president of Harvard, we concluded, were no intellectual pushovers. Enmeshed within the British “educational” system in Guyana (Queen’s College, modelled on the ‘public schools’ of England, was our scaled down version of Presidency et al in India; the country high school I attended was a poor man’s version of Queen’s…) we can now ruefully see that we were looking at Vivekananda through “British lenses”.
But that was where we were – as was the India of 1893 that revelled in Vivekananda’s triumphant bedazzling of a wide swath of the intellectual elite of the US and England during the next two years. If the class that insisted ‘we were not yet ready for self rule’ could fall at Vivekananda’s feet after his expositions of Vedanta, then we might have ‘something of value”! But the eloquence of Vivekananda did also suggest to boys of my generation that we might be able to use the ‘master’s tools” to free ourselves from thraldom.
We pored over Vivekananda’s complete works – seven volumes. There was not a question that we posed to which he had not suggested an answer – or at least pointed us towards the answer that we had to discover for ourselves. Regarded as one of India’s greatest nationalists, he exemplified the essence of the Vedantic message: Each soul is potentially divine; the goal is to manifest this Divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal; do this either by work, or worship, or mental discipline, or philosophy—by one, or more, or all of these—and be free. This is the whole of Dharma (mistranslated as “religion”). Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.
Let us re-live Swami Vivekananda’s message.

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