Reba Som - Margot: Sister Nivedita of Swami Vivekananda

It was during the 150th birth anniversary celebrations of Swami Vivekananda in 2013 that I became curious to learn more about Sister Nivedita. The Ramakrishna Mission had booked all four galleries of the Tagore Centre at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Kolkata, of which I was then director, to host an art exhibition. It was well known that Swamiji and particularly Sister Nivedita were great advocates of Indian art. From what I knew, neither of them were artists as such, and I told myself the art connection needed to be researched further. Back in Delhi, I was amazed to find most people unaware of Sister Nivedita, who was often confused for a nun of the Missionaries of Charity. Yet on her cenotaph is written that Sister Nivedita had given her all to India. It convinced me then that her story must be told.

This then is a biography of Margaret Noble (18671911) of Ireland, called Margot by her family and friends, who came to India in 1898 inspired by Swami Vivekananda and made it her home. Named Nivedita (which means dedicated) by Swamiji, who initiated her into the vows of a brahmachari nun, she lived up to her given name and devoted herself fully to the cause of India.

On the eve of her 150th birth anniversary, this book captures the thoughts, emotions, concerns and doubts of a sincere and committed woman, voiced in over 800 letters, making this biography almost autobiographical. The letters that Nivedita regularly wrote to her close friends, in particular to Josephine MacLeod, whom she called Yum, Sara Bull, whom she often addressed as Saint Sara, and the journalist Ratcliffe, were practically in the nature of diaries. In her last years, aware that the novel of her life had unfolded in her letters, Nivedita, with a premonition that her end was near, sent her personal papers to her dear Yum and asked for her letters to be kept in safe custody. After her death, Josephine MacLeod decided to share Niveditas personal papers and letters with Lizelle Reymond for a definitive biography of Sister Nivedita in French, which was translated into English as The Dedicated: A Biography of Nivedita (1953). In time, Narayani Devi serialized it in Bengali in the monthly journal Basumati in 1962, attracting a wide readership. The letters of Nivedita were sent by Reymond to India to remain in the possession of a Vedic philosopher named Anirvan who could utilize them for further research. Fortuitously, Anirvan selected Sankari Prasad Basu to receive and keep the precious collection. Basu, a well-known author whose painstaking seven-volume work Vivekananda O Samakaleen Bharatvarsha earned him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978, was considered the ideal recipient of this priceless legacy. Taken aback by the unexpected windfall, Basu went on to fulfil his promise to Anirvan, spending several years deciphering the handwriting, doing research on the letters, and translating many into Bengali for his five-volume work, Nibedita Lokmata (Ananda Publishers, Calcutta, 196894).

Letters of Sister Nivedita was published in two volumes in 1982 by Nababharat Publishers and, as its editor, Sankari Prasad Basu in his introduction recounted the amazing circumstances in which he came to receive the letters. The third volume with a comprehensive introduction that he had in mind never appeared. Basu passed away in 2014 and the volumes of Letters are out of print. It was by chance that I secured from a bookseller on College Street in Kolkata two silverfish-eaten copiesthe brittle pages and their musty smell adding to my excitement as I leafed through them. What I discovered was not necessarily Niveditas world-moving power that Basu had described but fascinating windows that opened through her eyes and keen observations into the social, cultural and political labyrinth of early twentieth-century India.

The letters revealed a flesh-and-blood Nivedita, who had embarked on a unique adventure in the quest of a larger dream. Leaving her country behind, she wished to learn the culture of faraway India so she could contribute towards the education of women in the light of their own civilizational values, rather than through the judgemental notions of an outsider. This was part of her training in the methods of education imparted by the nineteenth-century thinker Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and adopted by his disciple Friedrich Froebel, which had inspired her in her teaching career in England. When she had first met Swami Vivekananda in England in 1895, it was not so much his spiritual thoughts of Advaita Vedanta, which in any case she concurred with, but his call to women with a Celtic dedication and determination who could address the crying need to educate women in India that appealed to her.

In India, she found herself in the midst of multiple and contradictory dynamics. She had to understand the multi-dimensional thought process of her gurus spiritual ideas, which often took her by surprise. Moreover, she found herself caught in the great contemporary debate between Reform and Revival. The Brahmo Samaj, which advocated comprehensive social and religious reforms, had been patronized by stalwarts like Raja Ram Mohan Roy and later by Rabindranath Tagores father, Debendranath Tagore, encouraging women to step out of the inner quarters of their residences, the andarmahal, to educational institutions outside. Traditional worship of idols was replaced by Brahmo congregational prayers to the Universal Creator. The Hindus, threatened by this challenge to their ritual-based religious worship, socially ostracized the Brahmos. Nivedita found herself poised between reformers like the Brahmo Tagore family, with whom she socialized well, and the revival that was voiced by the Hindus, who viewed reform with wariness, and with whom she now belonged.