Sister Nivedita (1867 – 1911)

[KALKI]

Sister Nivedita (Bengali pronunciation: [sister niːbediːt̪aː] About this sound listen (help·info)); born Margaret Elizabeth Noble; 28 October 1867 – 13 October 1911)was a Scots-Irish social worker, author, teacher and a disciple of Swami Vivekananda.

She spent her childhood and early days of her youth in Ireland. From her father, from her college professor etc. she learned many valuable lessons like – service to mankind is the true service to God. She worked as school teacher and later also opened a school. She was committed to marry a Welsh youth who died soon after engagement.

Sister Nivedita met Swami Vivekananda in 1895 in London and travelled to Calcutta, India (present-day Kolkata) in 1898. Swami Vivekananda gave her the name Nivedita (meaning "Dedicated to God") when he initiated her into the vow of Brahmacharya on 25 March 1898. In November 1898, she opened a girls' school in Bagbazar area of Calcutta. She wanted to educate those girls who were deprived of even basic education. During the plague epidemic in Calcutta in 1899 Nivedita nursed and took care of the poor patients.

Nivedita had close associations with the newly established Ramakrishna Mission. However, because of her active contribution in the field of Indian Nationalism, she had to publicly dissociate herself from the activities of the Ramakrishna Mission under the then president Swami Brahmananda. She was very intimate with Sarada Devi, the spiritual consort of Ramakrishna and one of the major influences behind Ramakrishna Mission and also with all brother disciples of Swami Vivekananda. She died on 13 October 1911 in Darjeeling. Her epitaph reads, "Here reposes Sister Nivedita who gave her all to India".

Early life

Margaret Elizabeth Noble was born on 28 October 1867 in the town of Dungannon in County Tyrone, Ireland to Mary Isabel (mother) and Samuel Richmond Noble (father) and was named for her paternal grandmother.:91 The Nobles were of Scottish descent, settled in Ireland for about five centuries.[7] Her father, who was a priest, gave the valuable lesson that service to mankind is the true service to God. When Margaret was one year old Samuel moved to Manchester, England and there he enrolled as a theological student of the Wesleyan Church. Young Margaret at this time stayed with her maternal grandmother Hamilton in Northern Ireland. When she was four years old she returned to live with her father.

Margaret's father Samuel died in 1877 when she was only ten years old[8]:90 Then Margaret was brought up by her maternal grandfather. Hamilton was one of the first-ranking leaders of the freedom movement of Ireland.

Margaret got her education from Church boarding school in London. She and her sister attended Halifax College, run by a member of Congregationalist Church. The headmistress of this college taught her about personal sacrifice.

She extensively studied various subjects, including physics, arts, music, literature. She embraced teaching at the age of seventeen. She first worked in Keswick as a teacher of children. Subsequently she established a school in Wimbledon and followed her own unique methods of teaching. She also participated in Church sponsored activities, being religious in nature. She was also a prolific writer and wrote in the paper and periodicals. In this way she soon became a known name among the intellectuals of London. She was engaged to be married to a Welsh youth who died soon after engagement.[10] The regulated religious life could not give her the necessary peace and she began to study various books on religion.

[KALKI]

Sister Nivedita - Margaret Noble (1867-1911). Her first literary achievement was Kali the Mother, in which she expounds the conception of Kali. There are many 'educated Indians - of Christian missionaries we need not speak - who think that Kali is some blood-thirsty deity worshipped by barbarous people. to such people this book ought to be a revelation. The Web of Indian Life, may be at once said that it is the greatest in the English language upon India. It is not a travel book, but a revelation of the soul of a people.

Sister Nivedita probed into the heart of Indian womanhood and reflected in her rhythmic and eloquent prose the natural simplicity and spiritual fervor of the women of India. Women, she contended, are the embodiment and repository of the ancient wisdom of the East. They are the inheritors of a radiant orthodoxy, unspoilt by age and undimmed by the passing fashions of the day to which men so easily succumb.

"Hinduism would not be eternal were it not constantly growing and spreading, and taking in new areas of experience. Precisely because it has this power of self addition and re-adaptation, in greater degree than any other religion that the world has even seen, we believe it to be the one immortal faith."

(source: The Complete Works, Vol III).

In the chapter on the Bhagavad Gita, she writes: "The book is nowhere a call to leave the world, but everywhere an interpretation of common life as the path to that which lies beyond. "Better for a man is his own duty, however, badly done than the duty of another, though that be easy. "Holding gain and loss as one, prepare for battle." That the man who throws away his weapons, and permits himself to be slain, unresisting in the battle, is not the hero of religion, but a sluggard and a coward; that the true seer is he who carries his vision into action, regardless of the consequences to himself; this is the doctrine of the "Gita" repeated again and again....Not the withdrawn, but the transfigured life, radiant, with power and energy, triumphant in its selflessness, is religion. "Arise!" thunders the voice of Sri Krishna, "and be thou an apparent cause!"

Sister Nivedita talked about the task before India. "We must create a history of India in living terms. Up to the present that history, as written by the English, practically begins with Warren Hastings, and crams in certain unavoidable preliminaries, which cover a few thousands of years...The history of India has yet to be written for the first time. It has to be humanized, emotionalized, made the trumpet-voice and evangel of the race that inhabit India."

(source: Eminent Orientalists: Indian European American - Asian Educational Services. ISBN 8120606973 p. 257-276).

"Beauty of place," writes Sister Nivedita, "translates itself to the Indian consciousness as God's cry to the soul. Had Niagara been situated on the Ganga, it is odd to think how different would have been its valuation by humanity. Instead of fashionable picnics and railway pleasure-trips, the yearly or monthly incursion of worshipping crowds; instead of hotels, temples; instead of ostentatious excess, austerity; instead of the desire to harness its mighty forces to the chariot of human utility, the unrestrained longing to throw away the body, and realize at once the ecstatic madness of Supreme Union. Could contrast be greater?"

(source: The Web of Indian Life - By Sister Nivedita Ramakrishna-Vivekananda. London, 1904. p. 262).

Sister Nivedita realised that India's unrivalled, integrating culture that had spread from the Himalayas in the North to Kanyakumari in the South was due to this closeness with the ancient epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, a closeness that had been attacked and almost severed by Colonial style of education: "These two great works form together the outstanding educational agencies of Indian life. All over the country, in every province, especially during the winter session, audiences of Hindus and Mohammedans gather round the Brahmin storyteller at nightfall, and listen to his rendering of the ancient tales. The Mohammedans of Bengal have their own version of the Mahabharata."

This is why she would never call Indian women as ever having been illiterate. They had imbibed the best in the Indian tradition and strove to bring up their children as a Rama or Krishna, Arjuna or Karna, Sita or Savitri.

(source: In her Bharati saw the Modern Woman of India - By Prem Nandakumar - hindu.com).