The Invisible Threads – weaving a personal journey

Go forth, little one, and meet life

Strong in the strength of freedom from self.

The strength of purity,

The strength of love.

                             ---- from Child Heart by Sister Nivedita

Two western women disciples of Swami Vivekananda went on to play a significant role in India. Sister Nivedita, from England, and Sister Christine, from America, followed Swamiji to India for his work of education especially for women. Sister Christine’s work was from the background and unobtrusive and chiefly focused, besides in the realm of the spirit, on education of women. This articles concentrates on Sister Nivedita whose 150^th birth anniversary we are celebrating this year.

Nivedita’s efforts and contributions in the field of education, science, literature, art, history and politics in India are immense. She has been diversely characterized as a blazing flame, goddess, nationalist, patriot etc, but perhaps the best epithet that she has received is that of a being who breathed the breath of life to old dry bones to create the country anew with sacrifice and renunciation as its mantra. This was perhaps the work for which she was commissioned. One is reminded of the wrath of Shiva on the yagna of Daksha and the insult of Sati therein, which impelled him to tear in rage a lock of matted hair from his head and hurl it on the ground. From it emerged Kali who went on destroy Daksha’s yagna and Daksha himself. Sister Nivedita is perhaps one such lock of matted hair which destroyed the yagna of colonialism, which started to crumble from the day the symphony of resistance started taking form in diverse fields where we see her in action in the turn of the 20^th century in Calcutta and India.

Today, Nivedita lives in the collective imagination of the country as a whole. There are postage stamps, statues of her, and schools, colleges, and bridges named after her.If a random search is made on the internet on Nivedita, images of scores of women named Nivedita across India emerge. However, her ideas, power and philosophy, her roar, her awakening call appears to be invisible. But perhaps it is all flowing like the mythical river Saraswati, in hidden undercurrents. When one starts working for the ordinary people for whom she had dedicated herself,  realization dawns that she lives – she lives actively as a presence.

Education in India - an unfinished agenda

Sister Nivedita’s educational ideal was cosmopolitan, where different cultures, languages and religions are so many different scripts through which the inner freedom is expressing itself. It is her cosmopolitism which let her integrate with the caste-ridden, superstitious and insular world of the women in north Calcutta and subsequently with the whole of India. Her activities were focused on India, for that was, as per her own realization, the work for which Swamiji would have liked her to be dedicated.  In light of this realization, and to pursue diverse activities in all social fields, she had to take the most painful decision of formally disassociating from the Ramakrishna Mission. She felt that raising the masses and women of India, which the Swami had untiringly exhorted with great pain and anguish to the youth of India and for which she was commissioned could best be achieved through this course decided by her. For Swamiji, raising the women and masses was vital not only for India but crucial for the world too; for, India has to make a vital contribution to the grand symphony of global civilization.  She has a message to deliver to the world: the message of tolerance and acceptance, of renunciation and service, of peace and harmony, of unity in diversity, and the oneness of the universe. A vibrant, socially strong India imbued with this civilizational strength can convey this message to the world with strength and vigour.

However, a lot still remains to be done in India in the field of education of the masses and women. More than 300 million people in the country remain illiterate and the situation is much graver for women. Many of those who are officially literate are functionally illiterate. The government brought in the Right to Education Act in 2009, which provides free and compulsory education for all children in the age group of six to fourteen years as a Fundamental Right. Although India has one of the largest welfare schemes for education it faces multiple challenges in implementation ranging from difficult teacher-student ratio, teacher absenteeism, lack of infrastructure and lack of resources. More than 8 million children in the age group 6-14 remain out of school and there’s a shortage of more than 0.5 million teachers country-wide. Some studies point out that 76% of students do not make it to a higher education system. 40% of children in standard 3 cannot recognize numbers up to 100. 52% of children in standard 5 cannot read a standard 2 text. The immense desire to learn remains unfulfilled and not sufficiently addressed. The situation is acute amidst the urban squalors and the migrant population in mega cities like Delhi.

Perhaps Sister Nivedita’s prescription in this regard both explains the situation and provides a direction. She stressed that we have to build up this idea of the sacred duty of giving education to the people as one of the elements of our civilization. As an extension of the idea of giving alms intrinsic in our civilization. She cited the fact that in most western countries, it is required that every young man, when his education is complete, shall give three, four, or five years to military service, and to remain for rest of his life ready at any moment to join in the armed defense of his country.

In like fashion, she said India needed to organize the army of education. Every student, when his own education is over, may be called upon to give three years to the people. It is of course understood that just as the only son of a widow is in the West excused military service, so one whose earnings are absolutely necessary to others must be excused the educational service. The community, on the other hand, needs to maintain the student, living amongst them as a school – master. On the one hand the duty of teaching, on the other, the duty of maintaining, so the teacher and the taught make the perfect social unit and the result in due course would be that the great masses of the people might be swept within the circle of articulation. The process has to be self-supporting and self-propagating. “Alms to the teacher” and “knowledge to the people” must be the converse truths, taught at one and the same time. No government organization could arrange a scheme like this and bring education to all. Only by a common impulse of the people and the students themselves can it be made a reality.   

The method of education

Each soul is potentially divine and the goal is that each person will consciously seek the divinity within by carving out a road to the infinite and developing an independent sect for himself, so to say. The preceptor can only provide the suggestions and the possible directions but the struggle is one’s own. Each has to think her own thought, speak her own word and stand on her own legs. This uniqueness inbuilt in the process of acquiring knowledge demands a vibrancy in the educational process.  The holistic education developed by Nivedita rooted in the culture of the students is perhaps a pointer of how one needs to proceed. Holistic growth, in contrast to “one sided education,” with empathy for all and curiosity for all streams and at the same time bulldog intensity in latching on to one’s own ideals is the global ideal set by Ramakrishna. Broadening to include all without losing the intensity and depth of one’s endeavor is what Ramakrishna taught and was vivified by all his disciples.

Concretely, on education Sister Nivedita had delineated three chronologically distinct elements, which are as vital today as they were in her times:

a) Training the human mind as the instrument of knowledge, focusing and concentrating the powers of the mind

b)    Fund of ideas and concepts common to society as a whole and which must be imparted to every individual like languages, mathematics, sciences, arts, music etc.

c)    Imprint and the message of education on the individual – his/her unique chance of contributing to the riches of humanity as a whole

Educational endeavors need to weave its pattern around these elements, for assisting in manifesting the immense potentialities uncoiled in the mind of students.

There is another element to educational efforts or rather to all kinds of external social effort for spiritual practitioners or seekers. This falls within the realm of Karma Yoga – work as an offering to the Infinite, as an end in itself or put in another way as a means of self-abnegation. Work as a means of erasing the small “I” to realise the larger “I.” For Nivedita or Sister Christine this element was implicit, for their lives were blazing fires which only burn to give warmth to others. The school that she started and they together ran is standing tall today and has played a crucially important role in the establishment of the great Order of nuns of the Ramakrishna tradition.

Nivedita’s aim of education

To Sister Nivedita the end of education is cosmopolitan and universal for all times and all climes. Here all humanity is at one. To her, by this fact of the attainment of the universal must education ultimately stand justified or condemned. However, she stressed that ideals presented must always be first clothed in a form evolved by our own past -  imagination must be first based on our heroic literature; our hope must be woven out of our history. From the known to the unknown, from the easy to the difficult, must be the motto of every teacher and the rule of every lesson. In all learning we should try to give knowledge only in answer to enquiry. This is the ideal. If we could attain it perfectly, every child would grow up to be a genius. But curiosity about truth can only grow out from within one’s lived world. However, the familiar is not the goal, knowledge is the goal, trained faculty is the aim. Universality is the aim where all the educated persons of the world can meet, understand, and enjoy each other’s associations. To grow to the universal is an uphill task and no shortcuts are available till now. Each soul has to grow himself / herself through knowledge from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

She avowed that it would be a sin to bring up an Indian child on anything but the Mahabharata. For example an Indian child would better appreciate the beauty of the truthfulness from Yudhishthira. But if the child could not, when educated, appreciate the poetry of Homer that fact would mean a limitation of culture.

She also reiterated that telling is not teaching. The balance between information provided and inspiring learners is a great struggle. According to her right training is the result of right will and it cannot be simply evoked by mere words of command.

To Nivedita there is another facet of education: the hunger for the good of others as an end in itself. In this sense a child’s center of gravity must lie for them outside the family. Mutual aid, co-operation, and self-organized unselfishness is to be the motto. There is nothing so belittling to the human soul as the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of worldly reward. There is nothing so degrading to a nation, as coming to look upon the life of the mind as a means for bread-winning. Unless we strive for truth because we love it and strive to attain, unless we learn to live and rejoice in the life of thought, great things of the heart and intellect will close their doors to us. A nation stands or falls in the long run by the number of such souls that it is capable of producing out of the rank and file of the ordinary people.

Our experience

As seekers on the spiritual path one is always expecting signs, be it more calmness and peace, or visions and powers, or looking for expansion and attaining more love. But sometimes the divine is perhaps not interested in giving one any of these and through a simple course of events puts the traveler on a different and new path which had not been envisaged before.

Our forays into the field of education started as if by chance. One cold, foggy winter night way back in 2002 we were forced into the world of a frail three or four-year-old under-privileged girl, running in the middle of the road desperately trying to search for her mother whose whereabouts she vaguely knew to be working in some high-rise apartment. She knew not which apartment her mother worked, and on being asked she, with great trust, led us to her home, which was a locked door in the urban village – Chilla in east Delhi –adjoining the colony of high rise apartments. We did as much as we could do then, but this emotionally overpowering incident forced us, as it were, into initiating our small endeavor with children in the village. Fourteen years have passed and the small lamp that was lit still burns in front of the altar.

By February 2003 on the auspicious day of Saraswati puja, a small 10 ft x 10 ft room was taken on rent amongst the single-room quarters of migrant workers in the village with the help of a housemaid. Students of all ages poured in, mostly first generation learners. Due to the constraints of space the outer limit has been kept at 30 students. Some of them were already enrolled in the neighborhood government school and the first task was to get all children coming to the class registered in those public schools.

The work is in in the nature of after-school instructional and tutorial classes for mostly first generation learners, children who are not privileged to access the available educational facilities. The basic emphasis during these 14 years has been to work on languages, both Hindi and English, mathematics, geography, and history. Our stress has leaned towards making the young students be inspired to learn rather than collect by rote information and facts. Self-study and peer study circles are encouraged. Some of the students who  started the journey with us are today pursuing higher studies, doing graduate courses.

The place offers a platform for all sincere seekers and many volunteers have joined us for various periods of time, sharing their experience of music, arts(painting, drawing and craft), storytelling, articulation and expression exercises and also teaching regular school subjects. The center is wholly supported by our personal resources, but people have been contributing materially off and on. We have received constant blessings from many revered practitioners of the Ramakrishna- Vivekananda tradition. It is however blissful to see the senior students, pursuing graduation, initiating their own endeavors to help other children in need.

Interestingly, when domestic and professional reasons forced us recently to be less active participants, threatening closure of the center, the senior girls readily took over the command, emerging from the background as a solid force. This whole unimagined and unplanned development has striking resemblances with the experience and practice of Nivedita’s school where senior students graduated to teaching.

One decision we have consciously and deliberately taken has been to weave our activities around Ramakrishna and the religion that he lived. His inclusive God-centered religion celebrating the spiritual realization of all religions through different paths and creeds is an ideal that we keep. We came to realize later that this is one issue which was also deliberated by Nivedita and kept as a cornerstone in her educational endeavors as a departure from the secular trend in education. Swamiji, too, had given it thought and expressed that it is understandable as an attempt to go beyond sects through a sect. We celebrate the festivals of all religions.  As she has said “I would like to teach everyone the greatest respect for everyone else’s creed.”

A class begins with the chanting of some prayers. Rallying around Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi’s name has made us introduce concepts of universalism, expansion, selfless activity, renunciation, and service. The class ends with chanting universal prayers seeking peace and happiness for all, followed by a short guided meditation. 

Nivedita stressed that any kind of engagement requires one dynamic force and that is character: Yato Dharmastato Jayah,  where there is Dharma there is victory. This is true for both the teacher and the taught. Nivedita’s stress on first making a fine character was so firm that she could say “tell me your hobbies and I will tell you what sort of citizen you will make”. In migrant urban squalors of 9ft by 10ft households, it is a constant fight to train the mind and cultivate hobbies. Television and popular movie cultures dominate. Be that as it may, the struggle of minds, young and old, to rise against all these odds is an enriching experience. All who have volunteered have experienced the infectious vibrancy of the work and the place.

When we look into our experience and read about Sister Nivedita’s initial efforts of establishing her school, we realize that there are uncanny similarities in the methods, aims, ideals, and events. The parallelisms make us feel today that it is her work that we are made to carry out in our small humble way. She lives on and toils for the people of her country. We pray that we get a particle of her spirit and be an offering to her God – “This, the desire to serve, the longing to better conditions, to advance our fellows, to lift the whole, is the real religion of the present day. Everything else is doctrine, opinion, theory.” She still lives the benediction conferred on her by the great Swami:

Be thou to India’s future son

The mistress, servant, friend in one.

The Resonating Whispers - A Homage

Work quietly she says bear, forbear

Work quietly she orders do not despair

I lead you, sure I do...

Be patient, bear forbear

Spurning ease, move on plod on

Forsaking gain work on hands on

Renouncing self, join the glorious dance

Never bitter never too wise

Work quietly she whispers bear, forbear.

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