Sri Sarada Devi as powerful narrative center of Sister Nivedita’s semi biography The Master As I Saw Him

( part of a published article)

 The Master As I Saw Him (1910) is no ordinary biography or hagiography. It is not even a biography, but a semi biography that contains powerful reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda, at pivotal junctures of his historic role as one of the most important makers of modern India.  In comparison to the many noteworthy  biographies written on the Swami, by latter day scholars like Satyendranath Mazumdar (1919), Shankari Prasad  Basu (1975 onwards) , Swami  Jitatmananda (date not available), Chaturvedi Badrinath (2006) and  Amiya Sen (2013), Nivedita’s is the earliest one of its kind, and the only one written by a woman. Years later, another Western woman devotee, Marie Louise Burke or Sister Gargi, wrote Swami Vivekananda in the West: New Discoveries, first published in two volumes in 1957, and then in six volumes between 1983—1987. An interesting work from Swamiji’s time, is Sarat Chandra Chakrabarty’s Swami Sishya Sambad (1908) which is not a biography, but a record of conversations that Sarat Chandra, Vivekananda’s disciple, had with the Swami. Other significant essays published within the first three decades of the twentieth century, were by renowned intellectuals like Surendranath Dasgupta (1918) and  Khagendranath Mitra (1927), whose articles on Swamiji, appeared in the journal Bharat Barsha Patrika. These essays have been recently republished by Sutradhar, in Volume 4, of their Vivekananda Anudhyan Granthamala Series.   

Sister Nivedita’s biography veers towards hagiography at certain moments, when the magnitude of Swami Vivekananda’s personality comes across as operating far beyond the scope of human powers, but it is also an extremely vital text culturally and historically. It carries lively social observation, lived historical moments and contexts and varied textures of women’s lives, and thereby possesses a materiality and specificity that are remarkable.

It will be impossible for me to attempt a comprehensive analysis of the above mentioned text, within the short purview of this essay. However, what struck me as most singular in a quick review of The Master As I Saw Him, is Nivedita’s portrayal of Sri Sarada Devi, in the chapter ‘Calcutta and the Holy Women’. Sarada Devi represents both a centripetal and centrifugal center, drawing in many of the other characters that Nivedita speaks of, including Swami Vivekananda, and she also provides a framework of standards, within which the moral and spiritual excellence of other personalities mentioned in this text, may be measured.  After all, as Nivedita herself claims, ‘So deeply is she reverenced by all about her, that there is no one of the who would, for instance, occupy a railway berth above her, when travelling with her. Her very presence is to them a consecration’(122). Of course, Nivedita devotes several more pages on the Swami than she does on the Holy Mother, but the concentrated force of her observations on Sri Sarada Devi, and the intense love and reverence with which she speaks of her, creates a powerful biographical/ hagiographical, documented, yet myth making, moment, within her biographical reminiscences of Swami Vivekananda