Why Swami Vivekananda wished India's future had strong Muslim bodies and Vedantic souls
In his addresses in India, Vivekananda made no mention of his Vedanta lectures. His focus was completely different. His emphasis was on the deprived and the underprivileged people of the country, in serving whom one would serve god. Spirituality was not for the weak or possible on an empty stomach. He sought, therefore, to create mass consciousness through education, regenerate the people by creating a national character, and believed social reform measures would follow in due course since they could not be forced on a people not ready for them.
Describing the Hindu orthodoxy of his days as a religion of "don’t touchism" where virtue was found in the purity of the cooking pot, he did not hesitate to debunk the puerile practices that still existed in popular Hinduism. He said, whether the bell should be rung on the right side or the left, whether the sandal paste mark should be placed on the forehead or some other part of the anatomy; people who spend their days and nights in such thoughts are truly wretched. And we are the wretched of the earth and are kicked around because our intelligence goes no further.
Aghast that millions of rupees were spent on temple rituals while the living god perished for want of food and education, Vivekananda lamented, "A mortal sickness is abroad in our land. The entire country is one vast lunatic asylum." Continuing his outburst, he cried, "Throw away the bells and the rest of the rubbish into the river Ganges and worship the incarnate God in man, worship all that are born as human beings." As Professor Tapan Raychaudhuri concluded, such a man could hardly be called a Hindu revivalist.
At the same time, Vivekananda’s plans for national reconstruction gave priority to Hinduism with an agenda to correct its institutions such as the caste system so that inequity could give way to mutual respect. He considered all Hindus to be brothers and believed that in the time to come the Sudras, or the working class, who were lowest in the caste ladder, would initiate a revolution for their own space in the hierarchy. Elaborating on her master’s ideas, Sister Nivedita wrote, All castes are equal in Dharma. It is by the fulfilment of swadharma, one’s own duty, not by the dignity of the task to be performed, that a man’s social virtue is measured. The integrity of a scavenger may be more essential to the commonwealth at a given moment, than that of an emperor. All tasks were equally honourable that serves the motherland.
Vivekananda spoke of taking back into the fold of Hinduism all those who had been constrained to leave it for Islam and Christianity because of certain intolerant practices. Interviewing Vivekananda for Prabuddha Bharata in 1899, Nivedita had asked her master whether those returning to the fold would choose their own form of religious belief out of the "many-visaged Hinduism", and she was told categorically that, of course they would have to choose for themselves. "For unless a man chooses for himself, the very spirit of Hinduism is destroyed. The essence of our Faith consists simply in the freedom of the Ishtam." Repeatedly, Vivekananda proclaimed his belief in communal synthesis by stating, for instance, that he wanted future Indians to have strong Muslim bodies and Vedantic souls.
To Nivedita, he mentioned his intense pride in the artistic inheritance of the Mughal era and his admiration for the Mughal policy of taking Hindu brides so that the rulers of India had Muslim fathers and Hindu mothers. As Nivedita wrote of her master, "He was the modern mind in its completeness," who never made the mistake of thinking the reconciliation of the old and the new was an easy matter. "How to nationalise the modern and modernise the old, so as to make the two one, was a puzzle that occupied much of his time and thought."
In her introduction to the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Nivedita explained that Hinduism needed to organise and consolidate its own ideas. Quoting Swami, she wrote, We Hindus do not merely tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in the mosque of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrian, and kneeling to the cross of the Christian. We know that all religions alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism are but so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the infinite. So we gather all these flowers, and binding them together with the cord of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet of worship.
In the context of the raging Brahmo-Hindu debate of the day between reform and revivalism, Nivedita described her master as being neither a reformer nor a revivalist since he sought to go further to address the needs of the people at large and create consciousness. Nivedita characteristically drew on examples from world history to emphasise that reform did not mean a break from the past but an improvement of the present. "The Pope went to Avignon as a Protestant!" she exclaimed. "But he came back," she added, "and when he did return, it was as a good Catholic, glad to be at home, in familiar places, glad to be freed from the necessity of protesting against anything. So of reforms in general."
(Excerpted with permission from Penguin India.)