'Kaliyuga', 'Chakri' and 'Bhakti': Ramakrishna and His Times Author(s): Sumit Sarkar Reviewed work(s): Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, No. 29 (Jul. 18, 1992), pp. 1543-1559+1561-1566 Published by: Economic and Political Weekly Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4398664 . Accessed: 03/01/2012 00:33 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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SPECIAL ARTICLES

'Chakri' and 'Bhakti' 'Kaliyuga', Ramakrishna and His Times Sumit Sarkar This essay examines a paradox of 19th century Bengal which was increasingly being moulded by the colonial

encounter.Themilieuwas one in which,amongotherthings,sacredtextshad becomemoreaccessible,theprinted wordhad acquiredgreatercirculation,a foreign languagehad gained currencyas the mediumof higherinstruction, time had begun to impose its own discipline, the interaction with a culture which elevated itself to a superiorplaneby virtueof its rationalityand sciencehadpromptedrecourseto self-consciously'rational'arguments towardsmodificationor defence of the 'traditional'and a premiumhad come to be placed on social activism such as education,religiousand social reform,revivalism,philanthrophyand patrioticendeavour.Yetthis milieu also witnessedthe strangeand suddenfascination that an obscureDakshineshwartemplepriest, Ramakrishna Paramahansa,a rusticbrahmanwho knewbarelyany English,receivedlittleformal schooling, held rationalistic argumentin contempt, was disdainfulof book knowledgeand assertedthe futility of organisedsocial reform, exercisedover the Calcuttabhadralok. Thisphenomenonof the Ramakrishnacult reflectsa two-waycrossingof socialfrontiers-the rusticbrahman becomingthe guru of the city bhadralok,the latterfalling underthe spell of an idiom, values and personality differentfrom their own. An explorationof both these trajectoriesoffers scope for a comprehensionof village cultureand religionand the contradictionsQf bhadraloklife. was placed on varied forms of social activism: education, religious and social reform, revivalism,philanthropy,patriotic endeavour. And yet, at the very heart of it all, there was that strange,suddentrekof the Calcutta bhadralokin the late-1870sand early 1880s to a man who seemed to representthe very (Fromdescriptionof MahendrnathGupta's opposite of all such valorisations and firstvisit to Ramakrishna,February1882.] initiatives. Ramakrishna Paramahansa (c 1836-1886),hitherto obscure Dakshineswar THE sudden entry of print-culture and Westerneducation, along with the creative temple priest, was of humble village indigenous response to them through ver- Brahmanorigin, had virtually no English, nacularprose,valorisedbook-learningto an and not evenmuch of formal vernacular(or unprecedentedextent among the colonial Sanskrit)schooling. He thought little of ramiddle class of 19th century Bengal. The tionalistic argument, considered organised most sacredof Hindu texts became widely efforts to improve social conditions futile, availablein written form for the first time, preachedan apparentlytimeless messageof and printedmatterbecamefar moreaccessi- bhakfi in rustic language, and claimed to ble than manuscriptscould ever have been. haveseen,manytimes,the GoddessKaliface Higher education, now being made in- to face. The cult that developed around dispensablefor respectablejobs and profes- Ramakrishna remained an essentially sions, was imparted through a foreign bhadralok affair in Bengal, with some laneuage,farremovedfromeverydayspeech, extensions later, again invariably among educated people, in other provinces and which could be learntonly through books. Contact with a culture which claimed abroadthroughthe efforts of Vivekananda superior status by virtue of its rationality and the Ramakrishna Mission. Some S0 and science stimulated efforts to use self- years after Ramakrishna'sdeath, a short consciously 'rational'argumentsto modify, story imagined two devout elderly women meeting at Benaras:the city lady was full or defen, institutionsand ideas now felt to be 'traditional!Time acquirednew meaning of Ramakrishna, the village woman had and disciplinaryauthoritythroughan equal- never heard of him.2 Today, an average ly abruptentry of clocks and watches,and middle or lower middle class Hindu there was among some a sense of moving householdin Bengalcan be expectedto have forwardin consonance with its linear pro- a portraitof Ramakrishnasomewhere,along gres. Foreignrule,howeverhumiliati, had with, quite possibly,a well-thumbedcopy of broughtthe gift of 'modern'culturefor the the Kathamrita. new English-educatedliterati,and maybeits It was the Kathamritawhich firstaroused evilscould be reducedor eliminatedthrough my interestas a historianin Ramakrishna, gradual reform. A premium consequently with its claim to be a diary-basedrecordof "[Head]-master: 'Tell me, does he read a lot of books?' Brinde [servant-girl]: 'Why should he need books? Its all in his words' The master had just come from his books. He was amazed to discover that Thakur Sri Ramakrishna never read books." -Ramakrishna-Kathamrita, 1, p 17.1

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the conversationof the Dakshineswarsaint between February 1882 and August 1886. Not just scattered saintly obiter dicta, in other words, but actual convers. tion: here, it was tempting to assume, we have somethingclose to G M Young'sdefinition of the ideal social history document, through whichwe can eavesdropon the peopleof the past talking among themselves. More significantly,the Kathamritawas a product of somethinglike a liminal moment, a twoway crossing of social frontiers-the rustic Brahman becoming the guru of the city bhadralok,the latter falling under the spell of an idiom, values,and personalityverydifferent from their own. Both trajectories needed to be problematisedand explored, for perhapsthey could add somethingto our understandingof villagecultureand religion, on the one hand, and the contradictionsof bhadralok life, on the other. The passage in the Kathamrita which describesMahendranathGupta's first visit to Ramakrishnaintroducesus to this intersection of apparentlyvery distinct worlds. The diarist-authorhad stood thirdin the BA examinationsin 1874, and in 1882 he was headmasterof a North Calcuttaschool controlled by IshwarchandraVidyasagar3 -the 'ocean of learning' famous social reformer, and philanthropist.It was naturalfor a man like Mahendranathto assume that wisdom and readingbooks wereall but synonymous: tbe five-volume compendium he prepared from his diary, however,would eventually celebratethe surrenderof men like him to a near-illiterate villager who never read books. Brinde,the servant-girl,almost certainlyilliteate, had no problemin accepting that true wisdom and holiness had nothing

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to do with writtenculture But Ramakrishna wasnot interestedin havingdevoteeslikeher, and he is said to have disliked the crowds of villagers that came to see him when he occasionally visited Kamarpukur,wherehe had been born.4The Kathamrita,as well as biographicalaccounts of Ramakrishna.in contrast, repeatedlydescribe how the saint often went out of his way to win over bhadralokdevotees.5This might appear to be a 'natural' process of upwardmobility. It was conditioned, however,by a colonial situationwhich had obligedmany members of the traditional village or small-townbased upper caste literati to move to the metropolis,try to taketo Englisheducation, or-like Ramakrishna-become a rather new kind of guru for middle-class bhadralok.The ascentinto urbanbhadralok society also left traces in Ramakrishna's discoursein a changing pattern of stresses and silences which can tell us something about varied appropriationsof apparently common religious traditions at different social levels.

importance in any exploration of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda tradition. The Kathamritawas publishedfrom 15to 50 years after the sessions with Ramakrishna,and covers a total of only 186days spreadover the last 4A/2years of the saint's life. The full text of the original diary has never been made publicly available. Considered as a constructed 'text' rather than simply as a more-or-lessauthentic 'source,' the Kathamritarevealsthe presenceof certain fairlyself-consciousauthorialstrategies. There is in particular a deployment of paradox which simultaneously points towardsan overarchingharmony.The high degreeof 'truth-effect'undeniablyconveyed by the Kathamritato 20th century readers is related to its display of testimonies to authenticity, careful listing of "types of evidence:'8 and meticulous references to exactdates and times. Weare remindedthat the 19th century had brought a new vogue for precisebiographiesand histories.But the man whoseconversationwasbeingpresented had been attractiveto the bhadralokpartly because he had been bored by formal

For men like Mahendranath,there was clearlyan initial hesitation-but also a paslogic,9 preferred parables and analogies to sionateeagernessto crossthis threshold.The preciseargumentation,and often expressed attractionfor opposites here revealsa deep a deep aversion for the discipline of time. Thereis, then, a deliberateforegrounding, disquiet among sections of the bhadralok, at least in some moods, about assumptions throughout,of the learnedliterateknowledge/ and styles of activity which on the surface unlearnedoral wisdom polarity. We never ruledtheirlives.Therewerereasons,we shall meet Brindeagain: her one appearancewas see, why such a sense of aridity and disclearly to set the scene for this contrast. satisfactionmanifesteditself preciselyin the Quotations from high-Hindu sacred texts 1870s and 80s. A certain differentiation (shastras)and referencesto abstractreligious and philosophical doctrines embellish the within bhadraloksocial space also needs to be taken into account. English education Kathamrita as chapter-headings and brought reasonable success in professions footnotes-in obvious stylistic contrast to and servicesfor some, though eventherethe Ramakrishna'sown colloquial idiom. The highest rungs would be occupied by point being made, however,is preciselythat Englishmen.For manymore,it cameto conthere is no fundamental conflict. The note only humble clerical jobs (chakri) in paradoxeswhich abound in the Kathamrita governmentor mercantileoffices, once again raise doubts about bhadralokassumptions usually British-controlled. Ramakrishna's (like the inherentsuperiorityof textuallearning which underlayMahendranath'sinitial messagedevelopeda particularresonancein this second, often half-forgotten, world of queryto Brinde)but eventuallyreinforceacthe unsuccessfulbhadralok.Chakrn,I intend cepted categories.' A wonderfulaffinity is to argue, is crucial for understanding shown to prevail between Ramakrishnas Ramakrishnaand situating him within the unlearned wisdom and the shastras, mutuallyconfirmingthe avatarstatusof the oveall context of colonial domination. If Ramakrishna attracted bhadralok saint and the eternal validity of the holy texts. As the Lilaprasanga, the cononical through his 'Otherness' this was to a considerableextentan Otherconstructedby the biographybroughtout by the Ramakrishna bbadrlok themselves. There is no direct Mission, stated in 1911:"The coming of the writtentestimonyleft by the saint: we know thakur this time as an illiteratewas tQproabout him only from bhadralok disciples ve the truth of all the shastras"|0 We need to ponderover the implicationsof a textual and admirers,and the texts they composed simultaneouslyilluminate-and transform. strategy-and movement-that felt the need to simultaneously display and reconcile This is not necessarily a disadvantage,for learned/illiterate, city-educated/rustic the logic of bhadralokappropriationscondifferences. stitutes our major field of interest. The Kathamrita occasionally beckons beyond it Ramakrishna,then, was an appropriated, towardsa less assimilatedRamakrishna,by Otherwith partiallybhadralok-constructed, virtueof its effort to preservedirectconver- whom an urbangroup plagued with a sense sation and its relatively non-canonised of alienationfrom rootscould relatewithout chaater.6 But on the whole it is not undue discomfort.Late-19thcenturyBengal a perhaps unapproachable 'original' had its rural rebels, its troublesome tribal, but Ramakrishna low-caste, or Muslim illiterates: the 1870s Ramakrishna-bv-himself, weremarkedby acute and 1880sin particulawr as constituted in the gaze of the late19th centurybhadralok, who is of centra agrariantensionoverrentsand tenantrights. 1544

Bhadraloksociety, even the clerical underdogs of which could at times have a bit of rental income through petty intermediate tenure-holdingin the PermanentSettlement hierarchy,'Oa naturally preferred empathy with the countryside through a figure like Ramakrishna. Despite the apparent vehemenceof his rejectionof book-learning and activism, acceptanceof Ramakrishna, we shall see, did not usually involve any sharp or total break with normal forms of bhadraloklife and activity.These could still be carried on, but in a new way, enriched by a spiritualityand inner life suited to the times, which helped to mitigate a deepening sense of anomie. There was little obviously new in Ramakrishna'steachings. That may have been one of his strengths, for through Ramakrishnathe city bhadralokcould imagine themselvesto be reachingback to lost traditionalmoorings, in the countryside,in simple faith conveyed through rustic language. The central message was one of bhakti,valorising,as bhaktihas often done, quiet inner devotion over textual exegesis, time-consumingritual, and externalaction. The catholicity of "many views, many paths" (yata mat, tato path) which became

one of Ramakrishna'sprincipal titles to fame, also has many earlier-and 19th century-counterpartsWhat is significantand valuable for historicalanalysis-is the way Ramakrishna contextualised such themes throughparablesand similes drawn from contemporary everyday rural and bhadralok life. Thus the critique of the printedword takes the form of a comment about English-educatedpeople, who refuse to believethat a house was collapsingbefore their eyes, till it is confirmed by that characteristic19th century innovation, the newspaper." And very specific forms of bhadraloksocial activismare listedin a story Ramakrishna seems to have particularly likedto relate,for it is repeatedno less than six times in the Kathamrita: Sambhu Mallik wanted to talk about hospitals,dispensaries,schools, roads,and tanks... Givingjust alms at Kalighat,not seeingKaliherself!(Laughter)... So I told Sambhu,if you meetKwara,wil youaskhim to build some htospitalsand dispensaries? (Laughter).The bhaktawil neversay that. He will rathersay, 'Thakur,let me staynear yourlotus-feet,keepmealwaysnearyou,give me pure bhakti.12

His audience was clearly appreciative,in the early 1880s. We will have to consider why,and for how long-since Vivekananda wouldsubsequentlymakesystematicphilanthropythe central thrust of the Mission he founded in Ramakrishna!sname. Images drawn from quotidian life have beencommon in Indianreligiousdiscourses, and particularlyin bhakti. But the precise situating of such images, in juxtaposition with other kinds of historical evidence, is much easier with a firmly datable 19thcenthan it would tury figurelike Ramnakrishna, be, say, with Kabir or Mirabai. Thus

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Ramakrishna'sconceptionof evil repeatedly linked together kamini, kanchan, and the dasatya of chakri: lust, as embodied invariablyin women, gold, and the bondage of the office-job. Wiveswith their luxurious ways instill into their husbands a thirst for money, and this in turn forces men into office-work.The temptationsof kaminiand kanchan are age-old themes, but their associationwith chakriis new. Wemeet this triad again in a multitude of late-19th century vernacularplays, farces and tracts as the correlatedevils of Kaliyuga, the last and worstof the four-foldsuccessionof eras in the traditional Hindu conception of cyclical time. A 2,000 year-old motif took on new specificcontoursundercolonialrule, whichhad abruptlyintroducedthe discipline of clock-time,and imposed it so far mainly in governmentoffices and mercantilefirms. Languageis vital here: we can get close to Ramaknrshna, who left behind no systematicexposition,only throughimages. The parablesthrough which Ramakrishna expoundedhis conceptionof bhaktiheld out the image of a traditional, paternalistic, caringoverlord,to whom the devoteecould come close through faithful service, the polar opposite of the impersonal, alien, sahib of the 19th centuryoffice. The alternative, and on the whole preferred,model was an escape from all effort and tension, eventhose of loving service,throughan unquestioning, child-like surrender to the Mother-Goddess, Kali. The first kind of devotionrepresenteda wellknownVaishnava bhava (mood), the second embodied the alternativeShakta tradition as modified in the 18th century by Ramprasad, Ramakrishna'sfavouritepoet. But bhakti in both forms,I intendto argue,had been modulated by felt evils of a specific, historicallyconditioned kind. It had at first a mainly clerical lower middle class ambience, but could attractthe moresuccessfulbhadralok, too, in their more inward-turningmoods. For Ramakrishna,the woman to whom one could not relate as to a mother invariablyrepresentsthe threat of kamini, lust incarnate.Not least among the many paradoxesof the Ramakrishnamovement is the way a saint with such apparent misogynist traits came to have many enthusiasticwomen devotees:middle-agedor elderly bhadralokhousewivesand widows, evenactressesof prostituteorigin. This was happening after a generation of male bhadralok initiatives concentrated on women'squestionsand seeking what by the 1860swas being called 'striswadhinata, the 'freeing'of women through education and rTorm from the more obvious of patriarchal disabilitiesand prejudices(sati, the ban on widow remarriage,polygamy). Ramakrishna cared nothing about such efforts, and yet one of the principalleadersof that movement, the Brahmo reformer KeshabchandraSen who had persuadedthe government to pass a very modern marriagelaw for his sect in 1872,becamne in the late 1870s the fiIrst really prominent bhadralok to Economic and Political Weekly

become an admirer of the Dakshineswar saint. Once again, the interrelationsbetween Ramakrishnaand the bhadralok offer an entry-point into crucial tensions and contradictions, this time related to gender. There were interesting shifts within the Ramakrishnamovement,too. SaradaDebi, Ramakrishna'swife, was kept very much in the background in the saint's lifetime, living in a tinyroom, cookingand lookingafter herhusband,and talkingto womendevotees alone. Ramakrishna rigorously abstained from sexualrelationswith Sarada,and worshipped her as embodiment of the Divine Mother one night as the culminating point of his years of passionate spiritual quest (sadhana).13 After Ramakrishna's death, SaradaDebi became a major cult figure of the movement in her own right, reveredas Sri Ma or Holy Mother.Shifting constructions and imagesof womanhoodin fact will be quite centralto our analysis: gender has to be not an afterthought, but at the very core of any understandingof Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. My principal focus is on the initial interaction between Ramakrishna and the Calcutta bhadralok in the late 1870s and early-80s as embedded above all in the Kathamrita. This provides, I argue, an exceptionallyprivileged but little-explored groundfor understandingsome of the ways in which Hindu religioustraditionscame to be modified to meet the new pressuresand demandsof colonial middle-classlife. What we call 'Hinduism'today is, in its 'crystallised' form,to a consideiableextenta relatively new,late-19thcenturyconstruction,and the Ramakrishnamovementplayeda significant role in its emergence.14 This happenedparticularlythroughthe variedappropriations of Ramakrishna,that continued cross time and seemedto abruptlychange their nature a decad.eor so after Ramakrishna'sdeath, throughthe efforts of his best-knowndisciple. Vivekanandaachieved a tour-de-force which apparently inverted much of his master's teaching. He gave crucial importance to organisedphilanthropy,servingthe 'daridranarayan'(God embodied in poor folk): the conversationwith Sambhu Mallik consequentlyhad to be excised totally from the canonical biography."5Emphasis was shifted from bhakti towards the other two margas(ways)of high-Hinduspiritualquest, Vedantic jnana (knowledge), and karma (redefinednow as social service ratherthan ritual), and Ramakrishna'scatholicity was made into an argument for the essential superiorityof an aggressiveand muscular Hinduism.Vivekananda'stours abroadand across lndia raised the social status of the Ramakrishnamovementin Bengal, and the humble world of clerical chakri lost some of its centrality. Vivekananda,however,must not be reduced to a mere series of inversions of Ramakrishna,for the shifts wererelatedto the opening-up of dimensions virtually unknownto his master.Schematically,these can be representedas the problematisations

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of western domination, of 'Bharatvarsha' seen throughthe prismof an ideallyunified Hindu world, and of the village, low castes, and poor people generally as standing in need of wholesaleupliftment.Vivekananda, again, like Ramakrishnabeforehim, quickly became open to multiple appropriations, though in his case the existence of authenticated writings and correspondencemake the questionof a 'real'or 'original'Swamiji less chimerical. There is Vivekanandathe 'patriot prophet' patron-saint for a whole generationof Swadeshienthusiasts,reyolutionaryterrorists,and nationalistsin general. More relevanttoday, and ominously so, is the image of the Swami as one of the foundersof 20th century 'Hindatva',of an unified and chauvinistic Hinduism. I can only hope to lightly touch on some of these many dimensions here A comprehensivediscussion obviously demands a separate paper,-which would also have to explorein detail the new social compulsion and aspirations of the 1890s which must haveconditioned Vivekananda'sinitiatives. But it is equally impossible to leave Vivekananda out of any study of Ramakrishna. His influence has indelibly marked nearly all the texts we have about Ramakrishna-though the Kathamritaless so than most"6-and there was never any conscious or complete rupture We cannot ignorethe questionas to how that continuity remained possible. Vivekananda was recognisedby most peopleas Ramakrishna's authentic heir, and his reputation, in fact, helped to establish, extend, and perpetuate Ramakrishna'sown image as apostle of an apparentlyvery differentkind of devotion. A quietistic, inward-lookingbhakti, which in certaincircumstancescan developinto its apparent opposite: there are implications here of deep contemporary interest and concern.

II Ramakrishna's interaction with the Calcutta bhadralok has given us an initial impressionof a seriesof oppositeswhichattract each other, a bridging of different 'worlds'or 'levels'.of frontiersthat the "difficult" and yet "had to be crossed".'7It is time to attemptgreaterprecisionabout what 'worlds'we are talkingabout, and when and why they were sought to be bridged. Binaries like elite/popular, city/country, or bhadralok/peasantare of limitedhelp in exploring the tensions that structure the Kathamrita.Ramakrishna,for a start, was not a peasant, but a poor Brahman from Kamarpukutvilagein Hooghly district.The family plot was tiny; it was, nevertheless, cultivated by agricultural labourers.'8 Gadadhar.Chattopadhyay (born in 1836)as a boy played with children of low-caste artisans.His high-castestatus helpedhim to become a friend, however, of the local zamindar's son, and the scanty formal schoolinghe receivedwas at a pathshalarun in that landlord's house. Mround1850, he 1545

wasbroughtto Calcuttaby his elderbrother Ramakumar. The paddy grown on the familyplot was not sufficientto balancethe Ising cost of cloth and other necessities, and

own income as smriti expert Ra-makuumar's fromrulingson ritualdisputeswas also drying up.'9 Kamarpukur,once noted for weavingand other crafts, had started to decline. 1t was afflicted by 'Burdwanfever'(malaria),and hit, like so many parts of the West Bengal 'moribund delta', by a combination of ecological change, disruption of drainage due to railways,and declineof craftsbefore imported manufactures. The traditional high-aste literati, expertsin Sanskrit learning alone, were facing a crisis as English education increasingly became the prefrequisite for entry into the respectable professions. Ramakrishna'sown family, however,was saved from ruin by the patronage of the upstartKaivartazamindarsof Janbazarin Calcutta. Rani Rashmoni had just completedthe Dakshineswartemple,but was findingpujaris(priests)difficult to get because of her low-caste origin. Ramakrishnaand obliged.?? Ramakumar eventually Ramakrishna's passionate and wayward sadhana soon made him abandon formal pnestly duties, and many at that time thought he had gone mad. Rashmoni and then her son-in-law Mathur,however,continuedlookingafterhis simpleneeds.A deed of endowment stabilised. Ramakrishna's positionin 1858,thoughon a ratherminimal basis.2'Other patronsand devotees started comingin after Mathur'sdeath, in 1871:the philantropist Sambhu Mallik, who had a gardenhouse adjoining Dakshineswartemple; a high official of the Nepal durbar posted in Calcutta named Biswanath Upadhyayaand, from 1875, after Ramakrishnahad sought out and impressedthe Keshabsen circle, a growing number of English-educatedprofessional men, clerks, and students.22 Details like these, placed against a background of crisis of the traditional liteati, help us to understandsome of the complexities in Ramakrishna's attitude towardswell off learned folk, the masters of the writtenor printedword. They add a depr social meaningto the orality/literacy contrastwith which we began and which in different forms will accompany us throughout our essay. Baramanush or baralok (rich, literallybig people) patrons were essential for survival, even if they occasionally happened to be of low-caste origin or embodiedculturalvalues in many -ways alien to Ramaknshna. They had, in fact, to be sought for-and yet wereresented at the same time. Ramakrishna loved to recall that his father,despite poverty,had neveraccepted gifts from Shudras.23That to him was the role-model of the unbending old-world Brahman,assertingritualpurity at all costs over wealth and power: admirable, but unrelistic, for Ramakrishnahimself was 1546

spending his adult life as a dependent of a Kaivarta zamincar. From this, perhaps, followed - a self-mocking description. Ramakrishna once confessed that from boyhood onwards he had been a "sukher paira [pigeon that seeks comfort]. I frequented well off households, but ran away from houses where I saw suffering"24 Ramakrishnaadmits to a weakness, mildly ridiculeshimseif, and at the same time confessesthat he had been unableto rid himself of an unfortunatetrait. Implicit here is the dangerof an opposite,degeneratemodel, of the Brahman turned self-seeker, currying favour from rich but low-caste patronsthe very type, one could add, of the decadent Brahmanof manytextsdenouncingthe Kaliyuga.The 'mad'sadhanathroughwhich Ramakrishnaeventuallygained recognition as holy man and preceptortypified a third, subtler form of negotiation with the baramanwshof the world, through which patronagecould be won without loss of selfrespect. In the days of his 'madness'.when recognitionwas still to come, Ramakrishna had prayed:"Mother, if the zamindarsof my desh [village home] show me respect, I will believethat all this [his visions] is true. Then even they came to talk to me on their own"'Acknowledgementby the baramanush remains indispensable, but the zamindars now come "on their own" to the hitherto humble, unknown temple pujari. Holy madness also gives a licence to mock authority. Ramakrishnarecalled with considerablesatisfactionthat his 'madness'had permittedhim thento say 'thingsbluntlyand straightout to people.I showedno deference for anyone, had no fear of baralok!'25He had even slapped Rani Rashmoni once, for being inattentive during a devotional song.21The years of tempestuous sadhana were over, and Ramakrishna was now a respectableguru of the bhadralok: he still lookedbackon those 'mad'vearswith pride The ambiguity persisted throughout. Thus Ramakrishna, by then quite a wellestablished figure, took special care to button himself up while going to visit Vidyasagar.In courseof their conversation, however,he informed Vidyasagar that the celebrated reformer was like a ship, he himself a tiny boat. But ships may run aground in small streams, boats sail freely on riversbig or small.27Subserence and resentment,we shall see, would jostle at the heart of Ramakrishna'scentral conception of bhakti, with divinity at times patterned by him on the model of the bramanush patronin a relationshipthat was acceptable but not tension-free For a man like Ramakrishna,resentmentwould alwaysfall far short of overt critique The occasional mockery of the- powerful would be inextricably mingled with deference. Ramakrishna's attitudes recall, perhaps, that "sidewardglance' of 'muffled challenge' with which the St Petersburgclerk looks at his superiorsin Dostoyevski'sPoor Folk.28 Such ambiguity toards power would be shard by manyof Ramakrishna's bhadralok

audience, and, more particularly, by its clerical component. If Ramakrishnawas ambivalent towards the superiorones of his world, the bamlok, a second kind of ambiguity surfaces in the parables drawn from nature and rural life which are so abundant in his discoursec Virtual absence of formal learing kept Ramakrishna'soriginal world not too distant from the oral culture of peasants, artisans, and village women. But birth in a high caste family with some reputation for ritual expertise already meant a certain distancing, and Ramakrishna himself moved away from the village towards the new world of city bhadralok. The Kathamrita conversations provide rich evidence about the ten-

sions of a never-quitecompletedmovement: they help us to appreciate, too, the ways through which Ramakrishna's language itself becamean additionalattractionfor his urbandevotees.Late 19thcenturybhadraok writing had changed recently in the direction of greaterchastity and decorum, with the proseof Vidyasagarand Bankimchandra rejectingas vulgar the style associated with earlierliteraryfigureslike IswarGupta.Such self-imposed restraints perhaps at times became slightly oppressive, as creating an uncomfortable distance from everyday speech. The Kathamritainsisted on keeping Ramakrishna's colloquialsms, and prese

to its readersa languagethat seemedattractively earthy and unsophisticated, and yet perfectly understandable s The remarkable thingabout R nature imagery is the unselfconscious ease with which he passes from similes conventionally 'beautiful', to others that would seldom be mentioned in chaste late 19th century bhadralok writing. The sea, blue from a distance, but colourless close by, indicates the equal validity of sakar and nirakar types of devotion-conceiving divinity as with or without form.29Steadfastnessin yogic devotionis conveyedby the image of a bird sitting with total concentration on its egg.30 But villagers defeating around a Kamarpukur pond can serve Ramaknshna'spurposeas well, and as ofte, as sea or birds,3'and there are also caustic commentsabout the Brahmohabitof dwelling constantly on the beauty of God's creation. They admire the garden, said Ramakrishna, and forget to look for its owner or babu.32Thereis no "dissociation of sensibility"33in Ramakrishna,no marking out of a distinct realmof subjector diction as properor poetic. Nature in his conversation is different from the way it is representedin the occasional formal set descriptionsMahendranathGupta gives of the surroundingsof Dakshineswar,in improageryderivedthroughBankimchandra!s se ultimately from canons of Sanskrit aesthetics. It differs also from the style of the 'romantic' poetry of nature, being developed, precisely around the 1880s, by Biharilal Chakrabartiand Rabindranath. Nature to Ramakrishnlawas not yet a spectacle of sheer beauty, to be admired

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seeing, and talking with, the Goddess during his frequent trances-and this was the sole claim to superior religious power Ramakfishnaever made.Once again,seeing was held to be superiorto hearing,say,a text readout by a pandit. Interestingin this condenigrationof reading, textis Ramakrishna's though that, too, uses the eyes: evidentlyhe was not particularlyused to silent reading, that central practice of developed literate culture. 'Seeing' would be the only way through which plebeians with little or no education could claim devotional equality with, or pfimacy over, the baralok masters of textual learning. As with the work of peasants,artisansor women, devotion here yields direct, sensuous results. Direct perceptionhad been privilegedas the only valid form of knowledge in the pratakshyabad of- the ancient Indian materialisttraditionof Lokayatc,whichhas been denigrated down the ages as a philosophy of the vulgar people.42Perhaps we havein Ramakrishnatracesof a 'religious materialism',not utterly dissimilarto what Carlo Ginzburghas diagnosed for his 16th century North Italian miller-minus, of course, that social radicalismwhich makes Menocchio so remarkable.43But Ramakrishna, as usual, perhaps like Hindu traditions in general, straddles different 'levels' or 'worlds'. The primacy of visual perceptionis assumedalso in a wide variety of Hindu religiousand philosophical traditions, though this is manaspratyaksha, spiritual or mystic seeing, rather than anything comparable to everyday visual experience. One recalls the justly-famous ancient hymnwhich claims to haveseen the Absolute Purusha, resplendentlike the sun, dispelling all darkness. Sanyasis claiming to Ramakrishna liked say.37 True religious awarenessis like the practical knowledge yogic powers, along with preachers of bhakti, have often counterposed their about varietiesof yarnpicked up by the apsuperhuman powers of seeing the divine prentice,neverfrom books, but throughseragainst the Brahman claim to textual ving a master-weaver.-" Such passages inand Ramakrishnaclearly fits knowledge,43a dicate not a general "'withdrawal"from in with such traditions. jnana and karma, as has been recently Such affinitiesare not surprising,for conargued,38a but a valorisation of village tinued familiarity with the rural world of labour and oral-practicalwisdom over city nature, labour and oral culture is accomlife and the writtencultureof the literati,old panied in Ramakrishnaby a certaindistanor new. cing. The labour of artisans, peasants, Ramakrishna'sfables are often imbued and women has become a parable of with a strong note of peasant wisdom and perseveranceand devotion:little remainsof practicality.The pandit crossingthe Ganga the sweat and pain of toil. This is a rural boasts of his shastric knowledge. But then Brahman sensibility, perhaps, which does a storm begins, and he does not know how not aestheticisevillage life unlike romantic to swim. His companion says: "I may not literature,but seeks to reduceit into lessons know Sankhya and Patanjali, but I can in religion and morality. swim'"39 Of the three friends who meet a A similar process can be seen at work in tiger in the forest, the true bhakta is the one the selection Ramakrishna made, in the who climbs up a tree, not the man who Kathamritaconversations with bhadralok resigns himself to death, or even the third devotees, of some 40 odd songs from his who caUlson Iswara for succour. The bhakta favourite composer, RamprasadSen. The loves God so much that he says: "Why songs of this 18th century Kali-bhakwacan bother Iswara with this?" His of course is still be heardin village lanes and on the lips also the most practical choice.' of beggars. They often present a faith heroically preservedin and through enorPerhaps a note of 'plebeian' practicality can be inferred also from Raxnakrishna's mous suffering, poverty, inequality and exploitation: passionatedesireto see Kaliface to faceduring the days of his intensesadhana.4' Who calls you, Tara,compassionateto the L,ater poor! on, too, he insisted that he was literally

through a distinct and self-conscious aesthetic sensibility. It was also something impregnated with human labour. It is remarkablehow often the everydaytoil of peasants, artisans and women is made to convey messages with a positive contentunlike,we shall see, most of Ramakrishna's images dravn from city life. The peasant, sticking to his ancestral land even if crops have failed in a year of drought, working carefully and hard to bring just the right amountof waterto his field from a distance, is often made to epitomise the perseverance needed for true bhakti.34 The housewife who preparesfish in variouswaysto suit the distinct palates of her many children becomes the symbol of the multiplicityof paths to the divine35 The bhakta can remain in the world, but not be lost in its temptations, like village women minding theirbabies,talkingto customers,whilethey workat the dheki (huskingmachine),careful ,that their hands do not get injured.36 Evidentin such parablesis a love and delight in the sensuous details of rural workaday life, whereindividuallabour can be seen to produce immediate, palpable results: land yielding crops, women turning fish into many dishes, grain being husked into rice. City life-and, more particularly,the life of the intellectualand the clerk-must haveappearedsingularlybereft of this feel of sensuous productivity,to Ramakrishnaas well as to his audience. The valorisationof rurallabour,again, is often associatedwith the questioningof the dry abstract arrogance of formal written culture, the inana of pandits or of the English-educated. Seeingis betterthan hearing, and hearing is better than reading,

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To some you give wealth, elephants, and chariots, While others are fated to work Ior wages, without enough of rice and sag. You have brought me to this world, and beateni me as iron is beaten, I will still call to you, Kali,

See how much courageI have-" Little remains of this anguish, suppressed anger, and sublimation of what is recognised to be injustice, in the songs sung by Ramakrishna to city audiences of middleaged householders and educated young men. His choice highlighted the more obviously doctrinal pieces, along with the ones where the mood of triumphant union with Kali marginalises or eliminates suffering. lb bor-

row for a moment from Weber,a movement is taking place from a "theodicy of suffering" towards a "theodicy of good fortune! 45 Ramakrishna's parables of village life do occasionally mention instances of zamindari oppression-but always as things which have to be accepted, facts of life no different from droughts or other natural calamities.46 Rural hierarchy is accepted and even idealised at times in the figure of the benevolent baramanush patron. This contrasts significantly, we shall see, with Ramakrishna's views on certain forms of power in city life. Ramakrishna spent 35 years of his life in a suburb of Calcutta, but it was only during the last 10 years or so that he suddenly gained acceptance and renown among the Calcutta bhadralok. The timing coincided,

significantly, with a kind of hiatus in bhadralok history. By the 1870s and 80s, the 'renaissance' dream of improvement and reform under British tutelage was turning sour. The Brahmos had split up, Vidyasagar was increasingly frustrated and lonely, and racial tensions were mounting under Lytton and through the Ilbert Bill furore. The alternative, patriotic vision of solving the country's ills by drastically modifying or overthrowing foreign rule did not, however, appear really viable till around 1905. Organisations like the Indian Association or the early Congress still had a very limited appeal, even among the bhadralok. The hiatus bred, in the first place, a disquiet about the multifarious schemes and endeavours of the bhadrlok, so many of which seemed to end in a whimper. Ramakrishna's rejection of social activism, embodied for instance in his scornful comments about Shambhu Mallik's philanthropy, thus won an appreciative audience-even though its own foundations were rather different. Subordination of external action to inner piety came natural for someone affiliated to traditions of bhakul, and there was, perhaps, also an element of plebeian cynicism. Philanthropy merely boosted the ego of the do-gooding bararnanush: it was sheer arrogance for anyone to think that he had the

power to really improve the world.47 Forthe bhadralok,the hiatus betweenthe myths of renaissance improvement and 1547

nationalistdeiveranceencouragedmoods of introspection and nostalgia. There was a partialturing-away from forward-looking male activism towardsa series of logicallydisinct but often intermingled'Others':past as contrastedto present, country vs city, a delibeate feminisationas opposed to active masculinity,the attractiveplayfulness and irresponsibilityof the child and the pagan" as againstthe goal-orientedinstrumentalrationality of the adult malc One can now begin to understandthe scope aAdpowerof amakrishnans appeal, which fitted in with, and helpedto stimulate,such broadertrends. His earthyparablesseemedto bring back a ruralworld from which the city bhadralok now sometimes felt they had unwisely :uprood thtmselves.Ramakrishna's lifelong love for women's roles-acting feminine parts in boyhood, dressingup as a woman for a time in Mathurs house, even allegedly having periods49-was chronicled with respect and admiration by Mahendrnath Guptaand other biographers.Feminisation in any case had a resptab pedigreein certain forms of. Vaishnavadevotion.50Even mor ati was Ramakrishnaschild-like surrender to the Shakta divine mother: "Aaining lswamamakesyou into a five-year old boy"51-a

womb-reversion,

almost,

alloing uninhibitedscope to what in other 9ont;xt wold be termedirresponsible,unmanly, irrational behaviour., What was happening,however,was not a ruptureor neat sepaation into activist and inward-turninggroups, but a commingling of moods. In Bankimchandra!sAnandamath, for instance-published, incidentally, in 1882, the year in which Mahendranth began his trips to Dakehineswarh snysis are engagedin a hardmasuline project of overthrowing British-backed Muslimrule,and they explicitlydistinguish their Vaishnavism from the non-violent bhakti of Chaitanya. Yet their Bande Mataramhymn is addressedto a nurturing bounteousmotherland, and the novel contains a dream-sequencewhere Kalyanisees Vishnu cradled and enveloped by an ndisinct all-embracingmother-figure.52 In Bengali poetry, the 'epic' style of Michael MadhusudanDuttain the 1850sand 6Qshad glorified herdic action in defiance of overwhelmingodds Precisy around the 1880s, this bepn to be partiallydisplaced by the more introspective 'romanticelyricism of Bihalal Chakrabartiand Rabindranath, where naturewas given a new centrality.A rura retrospectbecame prominent also in autobiographies, which were now being composed in unprecedented numberthanks to the simultaneous entry of print-culture and vernacularprose-They werecoming to acquirea 'developmental'format, in which a mans life became 'a study of his progress towardsand absorption into his historical role"'53-and yet it was reformist authors using this formatwho seemedto lingermost oe idealisedmemoriesof childhood spent in traiional ruralfamiliesM5Introspection and intme detail, marialised in the cen158Lconomic

subversionwas particularlyattractiveduritig the hiatus between the renaissanceand the nationalistmyths, but its appealextended beyond the 1870s and 80s in time, and had a specific social dimension. It stood in ambivalenco')' markedcontrastparticularlyto the imposed Probablyuider Ramakrishna'sinfluence, the Brahmosassociatedwith Keshabchandra world of formal routinised education and Sen began conceptualising and addressing time-bound chakri. divinity in maternal terms. Ramakrishna's Not all sectionsof the Calcuttabhadralok spel helped to turn another once-militant were equally open to Ramakrishna!sinfluence in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Brahmo, Bejoykrishna Goswami, into a RaniRashmoniand Mathurof the Janbazar Vaishnavamystic who wanted to "become family apart, the really big zamindars of like a child, just like what he had been in infancy"-' The child-likebehaviourvaloris- Calcutta showed little interest in Ramakrishna. A few well-off householders ed by Ramakrishnaor Bejoykrishna,it must be added, was modelled on a construction becamedevotees,he was occasionallyinvited of childhood, possibly specific to upperto the garden-housesof the rich, and there caste Hindu society, which differed from weresome sessions with Marwaribusinessboth Puritanical discipline and romantic men of Barabazar.61a But on the whole the insistenceof Ramakrishna'sfirust glorification of pure natural growth. The biogrpher, RamachandraDatta, that his master had Hinduchild "is closelyintegratedinto family life withouthavingany of its responsibilities. been the guru, not of the rich, but of the madhyabitta (middle class)62 seems He has no pasonal timetable... no rulesof hygiene or cleanliness imposed from acceptable-with the further,vital clarificaoutside... He seems to live by pure tion that the higher or more successful whim...'"7 Biographers of Ramakrishna stratumof the Calcuttaprofessionalmiddle class also remained more or less immune love to describe what they term his balakfromthe spell of Dakshineswarin the saint's bhMaw(the nmoodof relatingto divinity as own life-time. The disciples who became a child), includinglack of inhibitionsabout sanyasis under Vivekanandasuffered from nudity or soiling himself in public"5 The acute scarcity of funds till the late-1890s. child-model thus slides into that of the pagal, and, partly again under Lawyers, journalists, teachers, (except Ramakrishna'sinfluence, the runaway irMahendranath),63 and writers seldom responsiblemale and the pagal as embodifigurein the Kathamrita,and politicianslike ment of holy foUly became long-lasting SurendranathBanerjineverbotheredto pay Ramakrishna a visit. Among the major stereotypesin Bengali literature 9 figures of what today is often called the Direct referencesto colonial domination Bengal Renaissance, only Keshabchandra are extremely rare in Ramakrishna'sdisSen became close to him, and it was jourcourse, but surelyit is not far-fetchedto see in the series of 'Others' fostered by his nals run by the NababidhanBrahmogroup that firstmade Ramakrishnaknownamong aumple traces of an implicit rejection of the English-educated.64There were brief values imposed by the 19th century west. Colonialism counterposedto Europeanacencounters-usually at Ramakrishna!sintive virile masculity the stereotypeof the itiative,and none of them too happy-with conquered'native as'effeminate,irritating- leaders of the other two Brahmo factions ly childish,or at best pleasantlychild-like60 (Debendranath Tlgore and Shibnath The educated Bengali did not surrender, Shastri), with the Hindu-revivalist orator SasadharlIrkachudamoni, as well as with without qualification, to this 'colonial Vidyasagar,the poet MichaelMadhusudan, discourse, as uncritical admiration of and the novelist Bankimchandra5 But the EdwardSaid had led some to aspume.Excluded anywayfrom the privilegodmale ocone major literary figuri4who became a devotee was the actor-playwrightGirishcupationsof militaryand politicalcommand and successful independent entrepreneur- ch4ndra Ghosb--who had failed in his school-leaving examination and had then ship, and relegatedto dull and lowly clerical spent years as a clerk. It is the world of jobs, theywereperhaps pressinga muffled chakri, of clerical jobs in mercantile and defiance througha preferencefor feminisation, child-likebehaviour,and the irrespon- governmentoffixs, that really do tes R s Calcutta milieu. His devotees sible unreasonof the pagal. These provided a widerscope to certainhuman possibilities includeda sprinklingof deputy-magistrates than the rigidcode of Victorianresponsible and subjudges, along with a few who held relativelysenior jobs in mercantileoffices: male behavioursought to be imposedas the the upper rungs in both kinds of service bhadralok'srole-model. Ramakrishnaand his devoteosfreely pssed their emotions, would have been British preserves. More plungedinto ecstaticdancs wt in public: often, the disciples were struggling clerks, or young men who might soon haveto start the Kathamrita describes the master looking for clerical posts.66 uninhibitedlyfondling and "'playing"with his teenagerdisciples.6 Ramakrishnain efThe stresses and silences about Calcutta fect subvertedthe distinctionsbetweenadult in Ramakrishna!sdiscourses confirm and supplementthe infune derivedfro dlata and child, male and female, work and play, whichthe 'civrilising' mission of the westwas about his city contacs Despite long years in Dakshineswar(a northernsuburbof the makingmore rigid in colonial Bengal. Such tral narrativeof adult public activity,could be given freer rein an memories of childhood, and these consequentlybecamechannels for "expressing difficulty and

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educated unemployment or price-rise. Yet theirimportanceii) a varietyof late 19thcentury and 20th centurymovementsis obvious enough-and so is, in 'cultural'terms,their vital 'intermediate'role. Theirs has been a predominantly high caste, yet depressed worldentryinto whichhas been the firststep in upward mobility for neo-literates from lower down the social hierarchy.And if the Kaliyugamyth has been relativelyopen to occasional appropriationsfrom below," it could also extend its appeal to the late 19th century'high'bhadralokin their moreintrospective and pessimistic moods. This was possible, I intend to argue, particularly becauseof the new and crucial centralityof chakniwithinthe Kaliyugaliteratureof colonial Bengal. For some two thousand years, from the VanaParva of the Mahabharataonwards, Kaliyugahas been a recurrentand powerful dystopia, a format for voicing a variety of high caste male anxieties. Its many evils-located in the presentand the future, for Kaliyugais supposedto havebegunsoon after the end of the Mahabharata wartraditionally include oppressive mleccha (alien and impure) kings, Brahmans corruptedby too much ratipnalargument(the "science of disputation"), overmighty Shudras expounding the scriptures and ceasing to serve the Brhmans, girls choosing theirown partners,and disobedientand deceiving wives having intercourse with menials, slaves, and even animals.76The 19th century made a selection, with new stresses, from this impressive catalogue. Brahman corruption and rationalistic criticismof traditionalveritieswereobviously relevantthemes. Little was made (except in some later, early 20th centurytexts)77 of fulfil them270 I have argued elsewhere that the Shudrathreat,whichneverbecamemuch the anguish and frustrations of genteel of an issue in 19thcentury Bengal (as conpoverty in this world of the unsuccessful trastedto Maharashtra).Women remain a bhadrdok-pandits losing patronagein the key target-but no longer primarilyfor sexnew era, obscure hack-writers, humble ual immorality:pride of place now went to school-teachers, clerks, unemployed the 'modern'wife, allegedly ill-treatingher educatedyouth, high-schoolor college boys mother-in-law,enslaving the husband, and with highlyuncertainjob prospectsproduc- wasting money on luxuries for herself.78 ed a late flowering of what may be called The crucial innovation in a multitude of 'Kaliyugaliteraturein midand late 19thcen- late-19thcentury tracts and farces was the tury Bengal.7' Embodied in a mass- of close inter-relationshippostulated between cheap vernaculartracts, plays, and farces, the disorderlywife, the 'modern' craze for and finding a visual counterpart in many money,and the chakri the husband is forcKalighat paintings,72these constitute the ed to take up to get the one and please the most relevant context for understanding other-precisely, in other words, RamaRamakrishnaand his appeal. This 'low life krishna'striadof kamini-kanchan-chakri. of literature73togetherwith Ramakrishna's And so the gods, on a visit to colonial conversation(in which the Kaliyugamotif India in Debganer Marte Agaman (1889), recurswith some frequency)providean en- keepmeeting"clerks., dozingas theyreturn try into a grosslyneglectedworld.Historians home from office. Their faces are worn out of the 'Bengal Renaissance'have concen- after the whole day's work. . . The sahib's trated on the well known intellectuals, the kicks and blows the whole day, and when older kind of work on nationalism focused they return... the naggingof wives. . "79A on politicsinspiredor manipulatedfromthe play entitled Kerani-carit(1885) makes the top, while 'subalternstudies'concerneditself disciplineof time its centralfocus: "Welose primarilywith peasantmovementsand con- the day'ssalariesif we reachoffice a minute sciousness.74What for conveniencemay be late... half the salarygoes on fines. . . there termed lower middle-class. groups have is not a single gap in our day's routine'"The enteredhistoricalnarratives,if at all, mainly clerk'swife complains that she now sees litunder 'economistic' rubrics as victims of tle of her husband, but is quickly consoled

metropolis) and lengthy sojourns at the Janbazar mansion in the heart of central Calcutta, Ramakrishnaremained in many ways an outsider to the city. The poignant nostalgia of the dasi (servant-women)is a favouriteimage of his, serving her master's family with devotion, looking after his children,and yet thinkingall the time of her distant village home67-conveys, perhaps, somethingof his own mood. Ramakrishna could display, even in the 1880s, a rustic sense of wonder at times about city marvels.' But, in total contrast to rural labour,,most urban work-processesfailed to arouse his interest-even though Dakshineswarwas an area where jute mills werespringingup. The city rich do not constitutea distinctcategoryin his conversation, being conflated with the rural zamindarin the image of the baramanush,baralok, or babu. The limits of Ramakrishna'scity contacts and appeal are indicated also by the silenceaboutthe nmiddle-class professionsof law, journalism' and teaching. The one specifically urban life-situation which becomes really vivid in Ranakrishna's discourse is the life of the clerk (keran): Whata mess! A salaryof twentyrupeesthreechildren-no moneyto feedthemproperly;the roof leaks,no moneyto repairit; impossibleto buynewbooks for the son, to givehimthe sacredthread;haveto begeight annasfromone, fourannasfromanother!69 Other passages graphically describe the unemployed kerani, desperately running aroundfor anotherjob, as well as the travails of time-bound office-work.70 A poor Brahmanlike Ramakrishnahad a natura empathy for clerks, poor, overwhelminglyupper caste, having bhadralok aspirationswithout the resources,often, to

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by the thought that the salary would,bring jewels for her.80And while little is said directlyabout colonial dominationas mkeccha rule, Harischandra Bandopadhyay's Kaler Bau (1880) contains a powerful subtext. "Slavesto governmentofficials, we have to spend our time in home as slaves to the wives" complains a husband.The figureof the suffering mother, neglected by her son who has been entrappedby the wiles of the modern wife, becomes here a metaphorfor the enslaved 'motherLland,the Bangamata who has become the "slave (das,) of the London queen".81 Placedin this context,Ramakrishnasoftrepeatedcomments about kamini and kanchan cease to sound like mere reiterationof age-old verities, and acquire a specific late-l9thcenturyresonance.As in manycontemporary farces and Kaighat paintings, kamini at times conveys a fear of loss of male authoritywithinthe household:"Men are made fools and worthless,by women... If the wife, says, 'Get up, he gets up-'Sit

down',he sits down!'A causticremarkabout an ex-devotee,now busy runningerands for his wife, drew appreciativelajighter from audience.But the centl link Ramakrishna's is betweenkaminiand the dasatya of chakri (bondage of the office-job), mediated by karichan-and direct referencesto colonial domination, extremely rare otherwise in Ramakrishna'sdiscourse,here put in an appearance."Look, how many educatedpeople trainedin English,with so manydegres, accept chakri, and receivekicks from their master'sboots everyday.Kaminiis the sole reason for all this"82Ramkrishnaonce told a favouritedisciple that he should jump in the Ganga, ratherthan "become a slave of someone by taking a job"83 He was also quite explicit about what is objectionable about office-work:"Yourface sems to have a dark shadow upon it. That's because you are working in an office. In the office you haveto handle money,keepacqounts,do so much other work. You have to be alert all the time."14 'the precise nature and implications of this aversionto chakri,runningthroughlate 19th century Kaliyuga literature and Ramakrishna'sconversation, needs some analysis. Chakriwas generallyill-paid, and increasingly difficult to obtain: but the "salary of twenty rupees" mentioned by Ramakrishnawas not really negligible by contemporary standards, and educated unemployment was not yet the explosive issue it would become later on. What made chakri intolerable,at this specific conjuncture, was rather its connotation of impersonal cash nexus and authority, embodied above all in the new rigorous discipline of work regulatedby clock-time. Disciplinary time was a particularlyabrupt and imposed innovationin colonial India. Europehad gone through a much slower, and phased, transitionspanningsome five hundredyears: from the first 13th-14thcentury mechanical clocks with hour-handsalone, through the later innovation of watches counting off 1549

minutesand seconds, down to the developed 18th-19thcenturyapparatusof disciplinary time in modern armies, bureaucracies, hospitals, schools, prisons, and factories.85 Colonial rule telescoped the entire process for India within one or two generations. In Bengal particularly,government and mercantileoffices (along with the new type of schools and colleges) became the principal locus for the imported ideas of bourgeoistime and discipline Factorieswere still rare(and mainly, so far, involvedwhite employers and migrant non-Bengali labourers),capitalist farming non-existent, and few Bengalis served in the army. Calcutta in the late 19th century, however, was the headquarters of British Indian bureaucracy, mercantile enterprise, and education.Regularhours of work throughout the yearin offices must have contrasted sharply with the seasonal variation in labour-temponormalto village life. Mughal bureaucracyhad had its clerks, of course, but jobs in British-controlledoffices under bosses seeking to impose Victorian standards of punctuality and discipline must have still meant a considerable departure. Time-boundoffice work, again, had to be performedin the unfamiliarenclosed space of the modern city building. In school and office alike,therewasthe additionalproblem of an often imperfectly-understoodforeign language of command. Chakri thus became a 'chronotype' of alienated time and space,86late 19th century Kaliyuga'sheartof darkness,the principal format through which awarenessof subjection spread among colonial middleclass males. Unable as yet to resist foreign bosses effectively, the clerk-or the writer empathisingwith him-often passedon the blamein partto women.Awakeningpolitical consciousnessthus becameinter-twinedwith a strengtheningof patriarchalprejudices. In course of time, this predominantly lower middle class discourse on chakri merged with broader critiques of colonial domination, formulated by more sophisticated intellectuals. The office was one obvious, highlyvisiblesite of racialdiscrimination, manifestedin salary-differentialsand everydaybehaviourof white bosses. British rule, it came to be argued, was directly responsiblefor making Indians dependent on servileclericaljobs, for it had destroyed handicrafts,ruiningagriculturethroughexcessive taxes, and blocked independent business through 'one-way' free trade. Remedies were now sought through autonomous efforts at technical and 'national' education, swadeshi enterprise-and, inpoliticalstruggle.Withinoffices, crea-singly, too, the first signs of clerical organisation and protest would become manifest from around 1905.87 All that still lay in the future:for the moment, Ramakrishnacould evokea profound responsethrough his promise of escape into an inner world of bhakti, into which one -could retreat, even while carrying on the dutiesimposed by a heartlesstime-and rule1550

bound society. This was Ramakrishna's specific,originalcontributionto the general critique of chakri. Over this inner world presides, significantly enough, an Ishwara who in Ramakrishna's parables gets repeatedlyconflatedwith the idealisedfigure of the traditional baramanush or babusomeone utterly different from the impersonal, distant office boss (usually called manibin the Kathamritaconversations).The raja, zamindar,or old kind of city patron88 pleasedwith the seba (devotedvoluntaryservice, as contrasted to bondage or dasatya) of his khansama(servant),might ask the latter one day to sit next to him.89 A poor man'sson in this paternalistic,personalised mode of authority could become rich overnight, if the baramanushweds his daughter to him.90It is essential, however,to get to know the babu directly,even if his officials (am/as) try to block your way-after which eventhe amlas will respectyou. Maybethere is a hint here of the age-old ruraldream in manylandsof the distantoverlord,just king, 'little father' of the poor. 'Willed submission'9'was an acceptableway of relatingto such figures,at least in retrospect:they can serve,therefore,as prototypesof the divine. Runningthrough all such parablesis an implicit 'other': the modern Britishcontrolled office, governed by impersonal rulesand abstracttime-schedules,wherethe amlas are as troublesome as ever, but the superior(sahib) is no longer approachable. A story frequentlyrelatedfrom the mid 19th century onwards about Ramprasadseems relevanthere.The composer is supposed to have been caught by an official scribbling versesabout Kali all over the account book of his employer.The 18thcentury Calcutta baramanush,far from dismissing him, was moved to tears, and gave Ramprasada lifelong pension.The writtenversionof this tale seems to have originatedwith IswarGupta in 1853-54,in a pioneer biographicalessay which, incidentally,identified that by-gone age as a lost golden satya-yuga in which patrons like KrishnachandraRoy of Nadia still knewhow to treatwith honour the traditional literati. The essay simultaneously valorised unlearned wisdom over formal trainingin poetry and religion alike.92The anguishof a decliningtraditionalhigh caste literati, and the misery of clerical chakri, thus come togetherto constitute the core of late 19th century Kaliyugasensibility. Kali-yuga, however,is not necess-arilya symbol of pessimism alone. The worst of ages, it, paradoxically,has also been seen as the best of times. In it, according to much bhakti literature,deliverancecomes easily, for mererecitationof the name of Hari may suffice. The paradox extends further, for womenand Shudras,the two major sources of corruption in all pre-modern Kaliyuga texts, "canattain good simply throughperformingtheirduties"to husbandsand twiceborn men.93 Subalternity is privilegedprovided, of course, it remains properly subaltern.The humble constitute the ideal bhakzas.Bhakti and Tantra,the two forms

of religious practice repeatedlydeclaredto be appropriate for Kali-yuga, are both explicitly open to women and Shudras, unlike Brahmanical learning and ritual. Extremedegenerationcould also foreshadow a total reversal, with Vishnu coming as Kalki-avatarto restore satya-yuga. Here, however,the Brahmanmale takesoveragain, for the restorednorm will be of ideal caste and gender hierarchy.94 A 'genderparadox'95thus underlayconceptionsof Kaliyuga:the insubordinate,unchastewoman was a principalsourceof evil, but bhakti, too, had a feminine face, being personified by the pure dutiful wife or mother.This paradoxtook on new formsin the 19thcentury,as certainmodulationswere nade in the remedial dimensions of Kaliyuga. From the 1880s onwards, most notablyin the plays of GirischandraGhosh and those influenced by him, the ideal women (usually a wife) emerged as active helper in the restoration of moral order. Going beyond the model of exemplarypatientsufferingtypifiedby Sita, she interven in a mannerwhich is deferential,yet assertive:a mode that anticipates,perhaps,some aspects of Gandhian passive resistanceor The woman may be helpedby satyagraha.91 an old-worldservant,representingthe good Shudra,and graduallya sub-themeextolling simple peasant virtues starts entering the literature.97Inspirationfor remedialaction comes

from figures of holy

madness,

sometimes obviously modelled on Ramakrishna,and, occasionally,the Kalki-avatar himself enters to restoresatya-yuga.98 Ramakrishna'sown ways of confronting the evils of Kaliyuga had, however,certain significantly distinct nuances. Nineteenth century Kaliyugaliteraturecould pass over easily from denunciation of the disorderly woman to the exaltationof the pure Hindu wife, for the evils it pilloried amounted to little more than a shrewishnesswhich could be tamed or reformed. The evil woman in Kaliyugaliteraturewas insubordinate,quarrelsome, lazy and luxurious, but seldom reallydangerousor sexuallyfrightening.The trope had flourished on the margins of a much broader bhadralok discourse which from the 1820sonwardshad insistentlyand obsessivelyprobed Hindu conjugalityas its centralconcern. By the late 19thcentury,a very wide spectrum of Hindu sensibilities had come to regardthe pure Hindu wife as the last unconquered space in a universe increasingly dominated by alien western values.99

Ramakrishna was emphatically not interestedin probing or celebratingHindu conjugality,for deep withinhim lay an acute physical revulsion for heterosexual intercourse.He frequentlyequatedit withdefecation, and expresseda fear and adhorrence about the female body which arousedmale lust: "Blood, flesh, fat, entrails, stools, urine-how can one love such a body?"The "limbsand openings"of women'sbodiesappeared "enormous"to him.'??Sex to him consequently was not any less disgusting

i "16,1011Caiild PoA.tica1 'Wcckiv

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when pursued within marriage: rather, it could then become associatedwith kanch/an and the need for salariedjobs, and therefore doubly dangerous. The redemptivewife was thus no resolution for Kaliyugaanxietiesto Ramakrishna. Wbmenbecame tolerableonly if somehow totallydesexualised,which for Ramakrishna meant looking on them as mothersbringing them in other words under the powerful taboo of incest. "After much effots' Ramakrishnasays, he was able to tolerate women devotees, by identifying all women as "manifestations of Ma A shift in discoursefrom Anandamoyee'".101 conjugalityto motherhood,we shall see, did becomecommon towardsthe end of the century,1c2and by 1905Durga-Kalihad emerged as collective redeemerand patrioticicon, a powerful symbol of the 'mothertland. Ramakrishna'smothergoddess, however, offered only individual solace, not any overall deliverance from the afflictions of Kaliyuga.Nor did the apocalyptic solution of an imminent Kalki-avatarappeal to him much.Theredoes existone startlingpassage in the Kathamritawhere Ramakrishnacan be seeing toying with such dreams, while recallinginsultssufferedfrom Dakshineswar Temple officials: "The Kalki-avatar will come at the end of Kaliyuga.A Brahman's son-he knows nothing, suddenly a horse and sword will come.. "103 Kalki as a Brahman "who knows nothing". and is, presumablylike Ramakrishnahimself,poor, seems to be a late 19thcentury innovation. It tums up again in Kalir A basan (1902), writtenby the "poor Brahman"head pandit of a Calcuttaschool. And, in December 1904,a wanderingpoor Brahmansadhuwho had once been a village school-teacher turned up at a rural bhadralok household in Dacca district, actually claiming to be Kalki-avatar.I14 More indications, perhaps, of the socialambianceof the Kaliyugamotif in late 19th-carly20th century Bengal. Ramakrishna's mainresponseto Kaliyuga was, however,along the paths of devotional and not apocalyptic bhakti. This took two basic forms in his discourse:the evocation of the paternalisticbaramanushmodel as counterpointto the alien world of chakri, and the way,more emotionally satisfactory for him, of total surrenderto the Shakta mothergoddess, becomingagain a five-year old child.Both wayswerestructuredin terms adaptedfrompatternsof religiousdiscourse availableto Ramakrishna.It is time to turn to the more formal, specifically religious, structureof Ramakrishna'steachings.

III The moretechnically'religious'aspectsof Ramakrishna'sdiscourse compels the problematisationof a whole rangeof assumptions and themes. Conventional orality/ literacydistinctions,for a start, begin to appear ratherdifferent as we listen to a holy man, quite often called "illiterate"'by his disciples, using with considerableexpertise Economic and Political Weekly

abstruse doctrinal and philosophical concepts normally assigned to the realms of 'high' or 'textual' culture alone. Following a patterncommon in muchhagiography,the Kathamritaand other accounts by devotees simultaneously stress Ramakrishna'suniqueness,and his manifoldconnectionswith a varietyof religiouspracticesand doctrines: village cults, obscure sects like the Kartabhaja, the world of Tantricism,mainstream Vaishnava and Shakta traditions, even fleetingly-Christianity and Islam. A saint, in hagiography,has to have very distinctive features(in this case, particularly,unlearned wisdom, and supremecatholicity), and yet fit into normal religious modes. The problem of recurrence and uniqueness, or linkagesand distinctions,concernshistorical analysis, too, and goes beyond the (by no meansunimportant)issue of Ramakrishna's personal qualities. What it can revealalso aresome of the waysthroughwhichreligious traditions were being reshaped amidst the new pressuresof colonial life. Thus, it is insufficient to merelyacclaim Ramakrishna's justly-famous catholicity as a 'traditional' or 'age-old'featureof 'Hinduism':its precise originsand features,the natureof its appeal, and changing implicationsrequireexploration. Again, Ramakrishna evolved into a rather new kind of guru, relatqd to, yet distinct from established types of religious preceptors.He was, perhaps, a guru suited particularlywell to the demandsof colonial urban bhadralok life, and anticipates in some ways(not all) the 'god-men'of today. The two models of bhaktiwhich constituted the core of his teachings,and which we have already seen manifested through parables, also havedoctrinalaspects,antecedents,and linkages,among whichthat betweenmotherworship and deep aversion for sexuality demands particular attention. Ramakrishna'sconversationand attitudeshereoffersimportantinsightsinto shiftinglate 19th centuryimagesof gender,whichin theirturn were bound up with the development of discourses of nationalism. Finally, the possibly audience-specific features of Ramakrishna'sdiscourseneeds to be keptin mind. His devotees included middle-aged householders, an inner circle consisting mainly of adolescents of college or even school-going age, respectable housewives and widows,actressesof prostituteoriginand the lone disciple of non-bhadralok status, his Bihari servant Latu. Ramakrishna's message could well have varied slightly with his audience-and here the Kathamritabegins to fail us, for it offers direct access only to the first group. Audience-specificityraises the question of variedappropriations-and so we areled on into a brief study of what becamethe dominant reading, that of Vivekananda. Ramakrishna's conversation often has surprisingly deep 'textual' foundations, even where it seems to be most contextdetermined, or a product of home-spun wisdom alone. Thus bhakti to him, as in much contemporaryKaliyugaliterature,was

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the counterpoint to the new 19th century

world of chakri, which reduced the quantum of freetime and left little room for contemplationor ritual. But the association of Kaliyugawith lack of time is also a veryold theme,with bhakti as the correspondingappropriateand 'easy' response for men who havelost in physicalstature,span of lifc, and moral worth alike.105A more startling example is Ramakrishna'spreferencefor the bhakti of a kitten, clinging helplessly to its motherin total dependence,over that of the baby monkey, who holds on to its parent withX certainwill and effort of its own. The two images actually come unalteredfrom a philosophicaldispute, way back in the 13th centuryin far-off Srirangam(ramif Nadu), between the 'Tenkalai'and the 'Barkalai' sects of the Sri Vaishnavas, followers of Ramanuja, the founder of Visistaadvaitabad.106 Ramakrishnawas particularlyknowledgeable about the doctrinal categories of GaudiyaVaishnavabad-not surprisingly,as Vaishnavabhakti in Bengal since the days of Chaitanya has combined mass appeal with a uniquely rich theological literature, in the vernacularas well as in Sanskrit. He made,for instance,an analysisof threetypes of devotees (sattvik, rajasik, and tamasik bhaktas) which goes back to the Bhagavat Purana, adding a brilliant gloss that identified these sub-divisions with types drawn from contemporary bhadralok life. 107 Ramakrishnawas also perfectly capable of making precisely-defineddoctrinal choices: of raganuga(emotional or cstatic) bhakti, for instance,over the more ritualsed vaidhi. A much more unusual-indeed, somewhat puzzling-choice was Ramakrishna'spreference for Ramanuja's philosophy of Visista-advaita, as against the orthodox Gaudiya Vaishnava version of dualistic about whichhe bhakti,achinta-bhedabheda, remainedcompletely silent.10 For the rest, a discourse on the five standard bhavas (moods) of Gaudiya Vaishnavabadwas a regularfeatureof his conversation:relating to divinity as subject to ruler (shanta), servant to master(dasya), parentto child (vatsalya), friend to friend (sakhya), and lover to beloved (madhur4 He had tried out all these duringthe days of his 'mad' sadhana, he told his disciples, but had now settled down into dasya. The model of acceptable authority,seba wilingly offered to the traditional baramanush or baralokRamakrishna'scounterpoint, as we have alreadyseen, to the dasatyaof chakri-thus also had a firm doctrinal foundation. What can explain such long lineages,the apparentlytextualbases of the discourseof a man supposedly illiterate? Despite the testimony of the servant-girl Brinde, Ramakrishnaperhapsdid havea few books, and he is said to have given one of them, a medievalmonistic(Advaita Vedanfic)text, to his favourite disciple Narendranath (Vivekananda). This Ashtavakrasamhita uses the image of an ocean in its account of the highest stage of high-Hinduspiritual 1551

realisation, and resemblances have been found between such passages and Ramakrishna's descriptions of his frequent expenences of samadhi in terms of immersion into an endless oceanar. But the bulk of Ramakrishna'sdoctrinal knowledge zvidently could not have come from private reading of books. The Kathamrita forces upon us a keener awarenessof the complex interpenetrations

went on his own initiative to meet KashabchandraSen in March 1875-beginning an interaction with Brahmos, and, more generally, with the English-educated:the people he once described as "Young 2'5 Bengal". The conversations of this, later Ramakrishnain the Kathamrita,as well as-to an enhancedextent-hagiographical accounts, bear on them the marks of this trajectory, of literacy an.' orality. Historians in recent for they indicate certain patterns of selecyears have been moving away from sharp tivity in referencesto the yeats of religious elite/popular, textual/oral disjunctions, experimentation.The stresses and silences towardsan understandingof ways in which hereare significantin severl differentways. elementsof 'high'texual culturecould 'sink' Conditioned by the transition from poor into and get intermixedwith prsominantly Brahman villager to guru of Englishoral practices.Distinctionsmay persist, not educatedcity bhadralok,they simultaneousthroughany rigid separation of traditions, ly point to broader shifts within religious beliefs or artefacts, but in differential appracticesthemselves, and help us to underpropriationor use of a broadly common stand the precise (and changing) menings heritage109Such interfacesare perhapsparand implicationsof Ramakrishna'sfamous ticularly marked in a culture like that of catholicity. Hinduism,which has had a literateelite for The village cults of Dharma, Gajan, wellovertwo thousandyears,but whichstill Manasa, or Shitala figure only in reminitriedtill the late 18thoenturyto keepits most scences about boyhood, and the tone resacredtextsin purelyora form. Oralityhere mains purely descriptive, without either in fact became an instrumentof high-caste praise or blame. They never enter Ramadomination: Ramakrishna could have krishna'smany listings of alternativevalid relativelyeasy access to 'high' knowledge, paths, where only mainstream forms of despite poverty and lack of formal educahigh-Hinduismare mentioned, along with tion, as he happened to be of Brahman referencesto (undifferentiated)Islam and birth. Christianity. Such cults, Ramakrishna In contrastto the specialised textuallearevidently thought, wereirrelevant,perhaps ningof thepandit, the traditionalrenouncer, almost unknown or forgotten, for his holy man, or sanyasinormallypickedup his bhadralokdevotees, or in metropolitanlife skills through apprenticeshipto a master in general. Manasa, other local or plebeian and/or contacts with other similar wanderforms of the mother-goddess like Chandi, ing sadhus. ltansmission, in other words, and Dharma had provided the standard was through predominantly non-textual themes of much of pre-colonial Bengali means, from watching, hearing about, or literature.Ramakrishna'srelative silence is participatingin a varietyof religious praca possible indication, therefore,of a shift in tices. Ramakrishna,for whom, as we have the 19thcentury bhadralok milieu towards seen, seeing and hearing were always more Sanskritised high-Hindu forms of privilegedover reading,clearly belongedto devotion, grounded in brahmanical texts a world of this kind, which could be 'high' made much more widely accessiblethrough and non-texttal at the same time, and was, printing and translation. furthermore,markedby great heterogeneity. 'lIntricism, along with the Kartabhajas, The striking feature of Ramakrishna's figure much more prominently in the original village world, as revealed by his Kathamrita conversations, and one of occasionalreminiscencesand lateraccounts Ramakrishna'sfavouritesongs came from of Kamarpukurby devotees, was certainly another 'obscure'sect, the entirelylow-caste catholicity. Gadadhar encountered in Sahebdhani.116 Reference or exposition, boyhood a multiplicity of cuits--Dharma, however,is usuallycombinedwith warnigs, Gajan,Manasa(oz Vishaiakshmi),Shitalaand the ambiguous tone deepened, to verge with mainlyplebeiandevoteesbut occasional on virtualsilencing, in later hagiographical high-caste participation. Devotional pracliteraturecomposed under Vivekananda's tices easily crossed sectarian bazriers,and ventional norms of Brahman pujari shadow.Tkntricismdown the centurieshas could vary within the same famiiy. Thus behaviour,"3took up, followed, and then provideda crucially important 'underside' Gadadhar's father Khudiram began as a discardedthe practicesof one traditionafter to Hindu religious traditions in Bengal. It devoteeof Shitala,and latermade Raghuvir another. The Ramakrishnawe meet in the constituted the doctrinal core of Shakta (Ram)his chosen deity,whilethe prosperous Kathamritawas significantly different. He practices, influenced many types of Pyne family of merchantsworshippedboth remained on the whole now on a single, Vaishnavism,and formeda vital substratum Siva and Vishnu. Ramakrishna's elder preferredpath of devotion (a combination in the ritualsand doctrinesof predominantly brotherRamkunar becamea worshipperof of dasya with sanian-bhava, bringing low-caste 'esoteric' Sahajiya cults-among Shakti without this troublinghis Vaishnava together elements from Vaishnava and which the Kartabhajaand the Sahebdhani father. The boy Gadadhar could imbibe Shakta traditions), though still supremely are late examples. Open, unlike much of mainstreamHindu traditionsthrough watcatholic in his acceptanceof many paths to brahmanicalknowledge and ritual, to lowching folk theatreperformancesof epic and the divine. It was this more relaxed, selfcastes and women, tfie Tkntricperspective puranictales.(therewerethreesuchjatra parconfident Ramakrishna, firmly grounded of attaining spiritual goals in and through ties in Kamarpukur), and he soon stred aconce again in normal caste practices,"l4 the body involvesthe ritualtransgressionof ting them out himnselfwith friends. In adsecurein his guru status,less of a seekerand conventionalnorms about meat, fish, wine dition, two pilgrim routes intersected at more the dispenser of holy wisdom, who and sexualintercourse(symbolically,or with 1S52

Kamarpukur,from Burdwanto Puriwith its Vaishnavaassociations, and from Calcutta to the Saivitecentreof brkeswar. Ghar developed an early interestin the constant flow of pilgrims and sadhus through his native village "0 Numerous "sadhu-sants, sanyasis and bairagi babayi' used to pass through Dakshineswar, too, Ramakrishna once recalled,taking the riverroute down to the great pilgrimage centre of Gangasagar. "Theydon't come hereany longer,now that the railway has been constructed.""' A whole series of mentors thus came Ramakrishna'sway, as, fired by an intense desire to literallysee Kali face to face, he pursued a sadhana initially passionate and wild enough to be thought by many to indicate possession or madness."2 They brought with them formal knowledgeof diversedoctrines and rituals, and so helped to structure Ramakrishna'sdevotional practicesinto recognisableand established forms. The flow of sanyasisthroughDakshineswarthus provideda substitute,in Ramakrishnias case, for the yearsof wanderingwhich is a standardconstituentin the life-histories': many religious leaders: in the 19th century, for men as different as Sahajananda Swami the founder of the Swaminarayan sect, Dayananda, and Rammohan. The mysterious and beautiful Bhairabi Brahminicame first, around 1861,and instructed Ramakrishnain Tantric practices and concepts which have provided an 'esoteric, often somewhat disreputable, substratumto much of mainstreamBengal Shakta and Vaishnavatraditions. Bhairabi assuredRamakrishnathat his unusualstates indicated not possession or madness, but mahabhava, akin to what had been manifestedin Chaitanya.She was followed by Vaishnavacharan,a Vaishnavapandit who was also a memberof the largerlylowcaste Kartabhajasect. Initiation into orthodox Vaishnavatraditionscame from the Ramayat sadhu Jatadhari, while between 1864-66Totapuri,a sadhu from the Punjab, guided him on the very different path of Vedantic contemplation of the Absolute. Ramakrishnaalso made brief forays into Islam and Christianity,though these never becamemajorconstituentsof his thought."2a The striking feature of these years of 'mad'sadhanawasthus religiousexperimentation. Ramakrishna, flouting all con-

Econonic

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the wife alone, in dakshinachara,but literally, and with any member of the circle, in vamachara).Coitus reservatus,the key element in such ritualised scx, could be replaced,however,in morerespectableforms of Tantricismby the mysticunion of Shakti and Siva within ones own body through arousing the kundalini, or by the sublimation of sex into the child-like love for the mother-goddess."7Disreputable,yet often deeplyattractive,Tantricand Sahajiyatraditions have had a powerful appeal for lowcastes and women-while providing at the same time a kind of secret second life to many high-caste men (as autobiographical literaturewell into the 20th century occasionally reveals)."18 Ramakrishna'sconversationrevealsconsiderableknowledge about Kartabhajaand Tahntric prActicesand technicalterms.1"9The Kartabhaja,whose practicesincludedritual violation of caste-and possibly-sexual taboos at an annual festival at Ghoshpara, figure in one catalogue of valid forms of devotion, on par with Vaishnava,Shakta, Vedantic and Brahmo.'20 And another account of their teachings is immediately followedby the assertionthat "onlythe low can become high. . . cultivation is difficult on uplands'"'21 Yetdiscipleswererepeatedly warnedalso that the Kartabhajacombined "big words... with licence. Theirsis a very dirty sadhana, like entering the house through a latrine"22' A similar ambivalence characterises Ramakrishna's many references to Tantricism, which, arguably,was much more fundamentalto his entire way of thinking than has been genemlly acknowledged.'23 Tantficism,as expressedparticularlythrough the songs of Ramprasad,probably helped Ramakrishnato blend together-as Ramprsad had done a centurybefore-the two major traditions of Bengal Hinduism, Shakta and Vaishnava.The much quoted equationof moneywith soil (tak;amat4 mati taka)has an obviousaffinitywith the Tantric affirmation of the identity of "cremationground and dwelling-place, gold and grass''.24Affinities are noticeable also between Ramakrishna and his nearcontemporaryBamakshepa,the pagal Tntric sadhu of Tarapithcremation-groundin Birbhum-another poor brahman without formal learning who likewise combined catholicity with intense devotion to Kali. Bamakshepa, who avoided Calcutta and deliberately flaunted a rough and bawdy style of talking, perhaps indicates what Ramakrishnacould have been if he had remainedfuuted in his pagal phase,and not evolved into a guru preferring a purely urban

bhadralokaudience.125 The Kathamrita discourse, however, is replete also with warnings about TIntric sadhana with women-even though that preciselywas what BhairabiBrahmanihad taught Ramakrishna,making him sit on the lap of a beautiful nudeyoung womanas the culmiinatingpaint of a long processof training.'26 The Tantricism Ramakrishna Economic and Political Weekly

himself talked about followed the safer forms of arousing the kundalini, and pursuit of santan-bhava. Conversationsusing or expounding Tlntric terms are prefaced with the remark that these were "secret matters"(guhya katha),and Mahendranath pitferred to put the bulk of such passages in the later volumes of the Kathamrita,

publishedwhen Ramakrishna's reputationas pre-eminent saint of the bhadralok had become unassailable. He also took care to include,'as an appendix to the last volume of the Kathamrita, a violent attack on

vamacariTantricismby Vivekananda.'27 The vital, yet difficult and embarrassing interfacebetweenTantric-Sahajiya traditions and Ramakrishnais reminiscentof similar problemsencountered four centuries back by Chaitanyaand his followers.sz'It clearly points also towardsa contemporarytransition. Tantrictraditions were being made more respectablethrough excisions, and at times sought to be suppressedaltogether,in bhadralok circles as stricter ideas about genteelitydeveloped in the shadow of 'Victorian' norms in the late 19th century.'29 The multiplicity of religious txperiences and experiments,along with the transition we have noticed from the years of 'mad' sadhana to the more domesticatedguru of the Kathamrita,conditionedthe best-known feature of Ramakrishna's teachings-a specific blend of enormouscatholicitywith clear expression of preference.Catholicity for Ramakrishna was inseparable from bhakti:all forms-andpaths were valid, provided they werefollowedwith genuinedevotion. The mother loves to prepare varied dishesfor herchildren,to suit theirdifferent tastes. 130 The sheer breadth of Ramakrishna'stolerance for other faiths evokes wonder and admiration today: There is a pond with three or four ghatsHindus call what they drink jal, Muslims pani, the English water. He is called Allah by one, god by others, some say Brahma, others Kali, still others Ram, Han, Jesus or Durga. 31 Ramakrishna's catholicity would soon

come to be displayed as a timeless essence of Hinduism: its precisemeanings and implications become clearer,however,if contextualised against a background of shifting

lines of demarcationbetweenreligioustraditions. By the 1880s, a variety of pressures and influenceswerehelpingto generalisecertain identitiesand conflicts,and a transition from "fuzzy"to "enumerated"communities ,was well under way.132 The early 1890s would see, for the first time, Hindu-Muslim riots spreadacross a large part of the subcontinenton a single issue (cow-protection), while Christianmissionarypropagandaalso provokedacute tensions at times. To Ramakrishna,however,Jesuscould still come between Han and Durgain a listing of varieties of devotion,and thereis no developedsense of a sharply-distinct'Hindu' identity-let alone any political use of it.132aThe total lack in him of the 'modern'sense of history that print-cultureand colonial textbookshad

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stimulated kept Ramakrishna immune also from th.e myth of 'riedieval' 'Muslim tyranny' evident in bhadralok discourse from the l820s onwards. Wvhetherout of innocence or delibeate choict, Rarnakrishnarepresnted a kind of protec; againrstthe creation of sectarian walls, 'et inhis own way he did bea witness to changing times. Ramakrishna's acquaintances with Islam (or Christianity) where fairly minimal, 33 and the religious or philosophical concepts he used came entirely from what today would be considered much of pre'Hindu' traditions-unlike colonial bhakti, with its close interrelationships with Sufism, or, at a very different level, Rammohan. A two-fold tansition was under way in the late 19th century: the sharpening of distinctions between a 'Hindu' and other religious identities, and the blurring of differences now being perceived as internal to Hindu dharma (in the sense, actually rather new, of Hindu 'religion' or 'Hinduism'). Ramakrishna himself had no conception of hostile 'Others' in Christianity or Islam; his catholicity, none-the-less, did not really involve any 'syncretism' between Hindu and other religions. It related principally to divisions. within the Hindu world. Doctrinal tensions within 19th century middle-class Hindu society had been sharpened by Christian polemics against 'idolatery' and Brhmo efforts to replace image-worship by of the formless (nirakar) adoration Brahman, who was nirguna, not to be described in terms of humanly-conceived qualities. There were debates also about the relative efficacy of contemplation, devotion, and ritual (nana, bhakti, and karma). Ramakrishna provided a healing touch in such conflicts-particularly welcome, perhaps, for the Brahmos tired of internecine strife who became the earliest among his bhadralok admirer Doctrinal subteties and textual debates were irrelvant, he assured his devotees, p sakara-saguna worship (or divinities with form and qualities, given representation in images) and nirakar

sadhana,jnana, bhakti,and karma, wre all but alternative paths of attaining the same goal. Ramakrishna's catholicity embraced, we have already seen, Vedic-Pauranic texts and rituals, Tantricism, and obscure sects like the Kartabhaja and the Sahebdhani. Vaishnava and Shakta concepts, images and songs intermingled in his sessions with devotees, and kirtan and Ramprasad alike could send him off into the ecstatic condition that his disciples liked to call samadhi. For the Ramakrishna of the Kathamrita years, however, celebration of difference always went along with clear expression of preferences. An obvious primacy was,given to bhakti, and as ecstatic devotee of Kali Ramakrishna was bound to prefer sakara worship. One can get to a roof in many ways, Ramakrishna liked to say, by staircase, ladder, or rope-but the ways must not get mixed up: "You have to stick firmly to one

way to get to Iswaro"'3' To each his own, so to say-but each should normally also -

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suiting the simple faith of the masses in image-worship.Caste was irrelevantat the highestlevelsof Vedanticjnanaand sanyas: being unimportant,no effort was neededto attack it in everydaypractice. The adhikar-bhedaof Ramakrishnahas to be situatedwithinthis continuumbetween the two logically-opposedpoles of extreme fluidity and precisedefinition of hierarchy. Thus caste,on the whole,was not particularly prominentin his discourse, and he often recalledhow, in the days of 'mad' sadhana his own sacred thread "had flown off by itself:"14 But Ramakrishna, too, argued that caste becomes unimportantthrough a naturalprocessof spiritualrealisationalone, and once used an abusiveepithetaboutthose who triedto end it throughconscious effort. A joke he made was resentedas an instance of highcaste prejudiceby a Teli devotee.142 In more general terms, we have seen Ramakrishna move in personal life from extreme religious experimentationtowards an insistence on each sticking to his own practicesand beliefsin a worldof fairlyrigid divisions. But this was still some distance removedfrom a single,clear-cuthierarchisation exalting the supremacy of Vedantic monismbasedon thejnana of learned,highbrahmanical culture. Ramakrishna occasionally admittedthis superiorityin theory, but loved to reiteratehis own preferencefor dualisticbhaktithroughRamprasad'swords: "I do not want to become sugar, for I love its taste."Ambiguity persisted also in the relationship between Vedic-Pauranicand Tantriktraditions.In Vivekananda,we shall see, the transitionwould be completed,with Vedanticjnanafirmlyplaced at the apex of a single, well-defined hierarchy.This was accompaniedby a much sharperdefinition of dividing-linesbetween Hindu and other religioustraditions.In Ramakrishna,in contrast, the term 'Hindu' is not particularly common, and the Hindu/Muslim/Christian demarcationoften does not seernqualitatively too differentfromthe distinctionsbetween Shakta, Vaishnavaand Brahmo. The postKathamritacanonical literature, however, tended to read back such firm hierarchisation and dividing-lines into Ramakrishna, emphasisinghis affinities with Vedanta."43 The sacredthreadand conventionalsanyasi attire, to take another example came back in most standard iconographic representation of Ramakrishna,in significantcontrast to Kathamritadescriptionsand the seldomreproduced1879 photograph.1' Along with Ramakrishna'scatholicity, many facets of the bhadralok cult that developedaroundhim as guru provideentrypoints into a religious world in process of being reshapedand crystallisedinto modern Hinduism.The guruin Indiantraditionshas takenon multifariousand changing forms. defending the status quo in orthopraxy Guru-cultshavebeen indispensablefor most against Christians,Brahmos,and "atheists lower-caste Hindu or be-shara Sufi and rationalists""' Reformers are conheterodoxies, as necessary concomitant to demnedas intolerant-banning evenvolun- their rejection of the textual expertise of tary sati, forciblytryingto modifyage-old brahmans and mullahs.'45DViksha(initiacustoms of marriage and widowhood, intion) from a guru is indispensablealso for

stick to his own. Stable choice, ratherthan any reallyopen or fluid 'syncretism'or experimentation, despite his own earlier history, was Ramakrishna'sadvice in the 1880s. Here we encounter the cruciallyimportant concept of adhikar-bheda:immense catholicity, going along with firmly conservative maintenance of rules appropriatefor each level,jati, or sampraday (community), which are all conceived as havinga place in a multiplicityof orthopraxies Adhikar-bhedahademergedas a formal doctrine in the 17th-18thcentury as a highBrahmanicalway of accommodating difference in philosophy, belief and ritual. A particularapplicationof it was the concept of smartapanchopasana-the equal validity and orthodoxy of devotion to Ganapati, Vishnu, Siva, Shakti, and Surya.'"1The roots,perhaps,go much furtherback, to the notion, basic to Hindu notions of hierarchy and caste, of each human group having its svadharma(one's own religious path).'36 Adhikar-bhedais open to somewhatdifferentimplications, depending on whether looked upon 'from below' or 'from above'. Adhikar-bhedacatholicity has allowed the formation and survival of a multitude of practices and' beliefs, numerous sampradayas with a fluidity and openness in their initial phases which makes even classification as Hindu or Muslim not always easy.'37 'Living-spaces' have thus opened up for subordinate grdupslowcastesand women-within the interstices of an order marked by great caste and genderinequalityand oppression:moments during which caste could be disregarded, rituals and taboos.of superiors mocked or turned on their heads.38 Such livingspaces,however,also help hierarchyand oppressionto endure by making them appear less unendurable.A recentfine studyof Mira and Kabirhas indicated how this dialectic of protest and subordination manifested itself, above all, through bhakti.139 1 Catholicity,groundedin adhikar-bheda, can also havean oppositethrust. In official, high-caste doctrine, adhikar-bheda often becomes synonymous with, not fluidity or openness, but neat compartmentalisation, the drawing-upof moredefinite boundaries, and the arrangement of the various philosophies,rituals,beliefsand sampnadays in a fixed hierarchyculminating in highBrahmanpractices and Advaita Vedantist philosophy.Mid-19thcentury conservative Bengali Hindu texts like Loknath Basu's 'Hindu-dharma-marma'(Calcutta, 1856, 1872) and Nandakumar Kabiratna's Sandeha-nirasana(Calcutta, 1863) have a conception of orthopraxy at first sight almost as broad as Ranakrishna's,but this is used essentiallyas a polemical weapon in

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Tantric sadhana and many forms of Vaishnavadevotion,and orthodoxhigh-caste familiesoften havekula-gurus,givinginitiation througha secretmantra. Fundamental usuallyto all these formsis an initiationrite, and a conception of paramparaor lineage. Thus the relationshipbetweenkula-guruand the families initiated by him would be inheritableon both sides in a patternsimilar to the linkage in matters of puja and lifecycle ritualsbetweenthe uppercastejajman and the familypurohit.The guru wouldnormally cxpect complete deference and obedience, might sometimes acquire a reputation for miraculouspowers,and even come to the regardedas true object of worship. The kula-gurusof orthodox families had a guiding role in crucial family decisions, while the gurus of lower-caste sects or Tantriccircles presidedover distinctiveand generally secret rituals, involving ecstatic song and dance and, at times, ritualisedsex. The subterraneanworldof non-bahmanical heterodoxies developed as a corollary an enigmaticsandhya-bhasha,or languageof twilight,richin doublemeanings,full of images drawnfrom everydaylife whichseemed simple but had deeper meanings for the initiated.46 Ramakrishna'scirclewas distinctivehere in manyways.The needto find and staynear a sat-guru(true guru), presumablyhimself above all, was a constant refrain in Ramakrishna'sconversation. But relations with disciples remainedrelaxed and informal. Ramakrishna never claimed special miraculous powers, often expressed contempt for such siddhai, and disappointed some devotees by consulting a doctor during his last fatal ilness. Therewere,usually, no initiation rites or mantras,147 no insistenceon total obedience, and not even verymuch outwarddeferenceas the Thakur uninhibitedly'played'with his boysand went together with them to watch plays. Ramakrishnadid not seek to displace the dikshagiving kulaguru in the lives of his uppercaste disciples: his remaineda purelyemotional influence, more-or-lessindependent of specific life-cyclemoments or situations, and perhapsall the more powerfulbecause of this relative detachment from everyday life. An open-market fluidity suited to a metropolitan, mobile society thus distinguished Ramakrishnafrom more traditional types of gurus, and the printedword played a crucial role in the spread of his reputation."48 There weresome tendencies, however,towardsthe end of Ramakrishna's life and particularlyafterhis death,towards a reabsorptionof Ramakrishnainto more familiarpatternsof religiousleadership.The Kathamritarecordsdebatesamong disciples about Ramakrishna's possible avatarstatus,'49 the Lilaprasangamentions some miraculous incidents,150many devotees began worshippinghim formally after his death, and Sarada and the swamijis of the RamakrishnaMission startedgivingdiksha to new recruit5.51 The Kathamritaaccountsof sessionswith

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Ramakrishna repeatedly highlight the Thakur's frequent trances, and these obviously enhancedhis appeal. Ramakrishna, from boyhood onwards, had periodically lost consciousness, become motionless as a statue,and then seemedto be talkingon very familiar terms with figures (usually Kali) visible to him alone. The possible physical or psychotic explanations here are less importantthan the interpretationsgivenby different cultures to trance states.152Consideredin early days to be a form of illness borderingon lunacy, or instances of spiritpossession (and as such apparentlyresponsible for attracting lar,ge crowds during Ramakrishna's brief visits to Kamarpukur),"53the trancescame to be invariably interpreted by bhadralok devotees as samadhi:the mysticalcommunion in highHindusadhanain whichthe individualjivatma merges for a while with paramatmaor brahman, the ultimate in spiritual realisation. A monistic Vedanticstamp was thus put on a man who on the whole seems to havepreferredthe waysof dualisticdevotion. The trances were often preceded, or accompanied, by ecstatic songs and dances joined in by devotees. These had been important features of the secret inner life of plebeian sects (the sole written text of the Kartabhaja,for instance,had been Bhavar Geet, a collection of songs).154 There was nothing secret, however, about Ramakrishna's circle, and not a trace of the ritualised sex central to the hidden life of manyTantric-cum-Sahajiya'esoteric'cults. Women-devotees,in fact, were carefully segregatedfrom the men by Ramnakrishna. UnlikemainstreamGaudiya Vaishnavabad, again,which,too, hadabjuredesotericpractices while retainingthe centralityof song, the singing and dancing in this purely bhadralokcult remainedan indoor affair. Chaitanyaand his followershad made song (kirtan) the principal mode of mass proselytisation,and KeshabSen tried to revive this mode for Brahmoismin the 1870s.We nevr hear,howev, of Ramakrishnaleading sankirtanprocessions in streets. The absence of distinctive secret rituals left its mark on Ramakrishna7slanguage. Closer,in its use of everydayimages drawn from rurallife and labour,to the language of lower-castesectsthanto the formalsutrabhashya format of high-Brahmanical exegesis,its meaningalwaysremainedsingle and on the surface. Sandhya-bhasha had

been markedby a richnessand fluidity of metaphor:the boatmen,river,or caged bird of the Baulscan be understoodin manydifferentways.55 Metphor, in contrast,is rre in Ramakrishna:its place is taken by clearcut analogiesor parables,with the intended message often carefully verbalised. 156 Drained of metaphorical excess and iconoclastic content, the rustic turn of phrase and quotidian analogy of the 20th centuryurbanguru,goci-manor god-woman ends up in banalities. Ramakrishna, perhaps, representsan eXarlyphase of this transition towards an urban consumer-

oriented Hinduism. Ramakrishna,then, did not offer to his devoteesany definitiveset of ritualsor doctrines, the satisfaction of total surrenderto a diksha-guru, or promise of miracles. Tb the middle-aged householders who constituted his principal audience in the Kathamrita, his was a broad message of what in bhaktitraditionshas often beencall-

frequently.A linkage may be suggestedhere with grihastha sanyas, for, as Dineshchandra

Sen perceptivelyremarkedmany yearsago, the remarkable thing about the Gaudiya Vaishnavatheoryof bhavaswas the relationship establishedthroughit betweenreligious sensibility and the emotions of everyday householderlife: parentalaffection, friendship, love (adulterous as well as conjugal), ed grihastha sanyas.157 Despite the repeated the devotion of servant to master.'62The condemnations of kamini and kanchan, dqsya-bhava Ramakrishna had come to renunciationwas not called for. The devotee prefer was expounded by him through a could remainin the world, while not allow- series of homologous parables. Here king ing himself to get immersed totally within and khansama (servant), bamlok patron and it, on the model of the dasi in her master's would-be client, babu and durwan household. "You have money and,weajth, (gatekeeper) have implicatiogs which are and yet you call Iswara-that is verygood!' doctrinal as well as (obviously) social, for A brahmosub-judgeonce summedup what they are being used to assert the claims of might well have been a characteristic dualisticbhakti over Vedanticmonism. The audience-responsewhen he declaredthat he samanya jiva (humble being) should not was "filled with peace and happiness on assume an immediate identity with the hearingthat there. .. [was]no need to leave Absolute; he needs a prior mediation the world,that Ishwaracan be attainedeven through devoted service, bhakti expressed while living as a householder:"58Thus through seba: Thekingis sitting;if thekhansamagoesand wealth could still be pursued, though in a occupiesthe king'sseat,saying,'King,what non-attached (nishkama) manner, and the you are, I am, too, people will think him wife could remain, though sex should be mad. But the king himself, pleasedby the given up after one or two children.The purkhansama'sservice (seba), might tell him one suit of bhakti within one's household even day, 'Whydon't you come and sit, next to had its advantages and was like fighting me-what you are, I am, too! Then if he sits, from inside a fort, for one's minimum that would be all right.'63 material needs would be taken care of.'59 Personalisedseba is the opposite of ruleHere, in other words, was a kind of 'thisworldlymysticism' living in the world,pur- and timebound chakri governed by the suing the normal bhadralokway of life, but cash-nexus, dasya-bhava contrasts with inwardly 'distancing160 oneself from its dasatya-and yet the etymological neartravails and frustrations as typified, identity of dasya and dasatya may not be above all, in the chronotope of chakri. entirelyirrelevant.The servant-mastermodel Schematically,this can be regardedas the was not tension-free,and demanded conspolar opposite of Weberian 'worldly tant effort: it remained some distance asceticism' The one allowed householder removed from Ramakrishna's favourite devoteesto pursuewealthin moderation,in bhakti image of the kitten clinging to its obviously traditional,non-innovativeways, mother in total surrender.Dasya bhava in with no premiumplacedupon diligenceand Ramakrishnaultimatelytakes second place economic success, rather,perhaps, its op- to sa'tan-bhava, relating to divinity as child posite. The other, in its ultimate 17th cen- to mother. This had no place in Gaudiya tury Puritanmanifestation, had inculcated Vaishnavascholastics, but came to Ramaa work-ethicbased on new conceptions of krishnafromShaktatraditions,as modulaed time and discipline, where salvation was above all through Ramprasad's songs. sought "primarily through immersion in Santan-bhava, unlike dasya, could be ones worldly vocation.'161 perceivedas unmediated,effortlessintimacy, The doctrinal component of grihastha- made tension-freeby complete surrendersanyas came from a blending of selected and so Ramakrishnaultimately privileged Vaishnavaand Shaktaelements:once again, ShaktaoverVaishnava,Kaliover everyother through Ramakrishna, we can watch the deity. processesof continuity-cum-changeat work relationshad been qwte Shakta-Vaishnava within religious traditions. Ramakrishna conflict-ridden at times,"Mbut a comingdislikedthe more ritualistic,vaidhi formsof together became noticeable from the 18th Vaishnavadevotion, while rejecting,by im- century,with Tantricismoften providingthe plication, also the alternative,more simple unifyingsub-stratum.The lbntric centreof and plebeian,emphasisupon formalreitera- Tkrapith,for instance, became a favourite tion of Hari-nama alone.l61aEmotional, haunt for Vaishnava as well as Shakta raganuga bhakti, conveyed primarily sadhus.'65FormalShaktadoctrine was, and throughsongs (kirtans),figure prominently, remained, essentially Tantric, but the however,in accounts of Ramakrishna'sses- emergenceof a rich tradition of religious sions with his devotees. He was fairly poetry and song (Shyamasangit) from knowledgeable about, but not deeply in- Ramprasadonwardsaddeda vitalemotional terested in the intricacies of Gaudiya dimension, absent in the often purely Vaishnavascholasticism-with the signifi- mechanicalTantricpractices.'" Derivedin cant exception of the doctrine of the five part fromVaishnavaimagery,and repeatedly bhavas, which enters his conversationvery emphasising the essential identity of Kali

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and Krishna(and quite often tnany other formsof devotion),the resultantmix became an extremely powerful compound, richer perhapsin the rangeof humanexperienceit could incorporatethan Gaudiya Vaishnavabad. The aestheticised love-play central to Vaishnavasong (padabali) had little to say about death, or sufferingother than viraha (separationfromthe beloved).Shyamasangit (Shakta songs) deliberately embraced sharperpolarities:Mother Kali emergedas grotesque, terrible and beautiful-cruel, waywards,and yet somehow endlessly loving.'67 Acceptance of total divine control was combinedwith a recognitionof infinite divine caprice,6" and the devotees own response could oscillate across many registers:expressiosn of sheer terror and anguish, deep resentment about the inequities of life, jubilant embracingof contradictions,a sense of triumph over suffering achieved perhaps through Tlntric sadhona, the peace of complete child-like surrenderto the Divine Mother.Such complexities no doubt appeared more relevant than the endless love-playat Vrindabanin times of trouble, of rapid change beyond comprehensionor control-the times,in different ways, of both Ramprasad and Ramakrishna.Kali,again,is relatedin many ways to conceptions of Kal (time) and Kaliyuga'}69the Kaliyuga moods we have analysed as crucial for Ramakrishnahad perhapsa special affinity for Shakta forms of devotion. It may not be coincidentalthat a significantly large number of composers of Shyaamasangitcame from more oldfashioned, often declining, zamindars and zamindari officials of late 18th and early 19th century Bengal.'70 Mother goddess cults had flourished also in diverse forms among many plebeian groups. Even in the 1880s, Mahendralal Sircar, the doctor treatingRamakrishnaduring his last illness, could dismiss Kali as "that Santal bitch".'71 A major contribution of Ramakrishna, perhaps,was to help make Shakti worship much more respectable and widespread among western-educated middle-class groups.

Shaktaworshipin Bengal had developed around the two poles of secret Tantric chakrus and public Kali or Durga Pujas, organisedoften amidstgreat ostentationby :zamindarihouseholdsor other rich patrons. Ramakrishna,like Ramprasada hundred yearsbefore,shiftedthe emphasisawayfrom these poles towards a more intimate, yet domesticatedand respectable,formof devotion in whichShymasangit(sung individually, unlike the congregational Vaishnava sankirtan) acquired a central role. Ramakrishna, however,as we have seen, toned down considerably the accents of anguishand resentmentwhichhad beenvery noticeable in Ramprasad.He projected a much less tension-riddenconception of the moher goddess. Ramprasad's Kaliwasoften unjust, cruel, partial towards her rich sons:

the poet's ego retainedan independentidendthyand, as in all real life families, the 1556

mother-son-relationshipwas not bereft of tensions and contradictions.Such maturity seems to have been deliberatelyabandoned by Ramakrishnain an act of total surrender of ego, imagining himself to be a child, or indeedperhapsas infant,in a kindof wombreversion, completely free of problems, because unquestioning. Ramakrishnawentbeyondthe Rarnprasad model also in his insistence that santanbhava, looking upon all women as emanations of the mothergoddessand so, without exception,as mothers,was the only wayone could hope to conquer the.lure of kamini. A very strong personal note is evident in Ramakrishna'smany passages about the horrorsof the feminine body, as well as in his obsessive equation of sex with defecation. Sarada Debi recalled later that dysentery,of which her husband has been a chronic victim, had often made his body an objectof disgust for Ramakrishna.There seems to have developedin him a deep fear of matter flowing out of ones body-and the orifices of women appearedenormous and frightening.'12 One might also speculate that the Tantricsexual exercises BhairabiBrahmanihad made Ramakrishna undertakehad contributedto a distasteand revulsionfor heterosexualintercourse.But once again the personal in Ramakrishnais related also to the social-cum-historical:a very similartheme of overcomingsexuality by conceiving of the temptressas mother is prominent in Nathpanthi legends about Gorkhnath which have circulated for centuries in Bengal's countryside;73 Ramakrishna'smother-worshiphas also a wider dimension going beyond the limits of purely Shakta practices-for it may be related to certain major shifts within bhadralok constructions of womanhood. For much of the 19th century, bhadralok discourses had persistently problematised conjugality, constructing the womanusually the wife-as victim in need of male reformistsuccour, epitome of surrenderto alien values,or last repositoryof indigenous virtue in a world otherwise lost to foreign Westerndomination. The pure womanagain, in late 19th century plays, as wife more often than mother-could also occasionally figure as active agent in a deferentially assertive mode. Ramakrishna, who radicallydevaluedall formsof conjugalrelationships and presentedwoman-as-mother as sole counterpoint to the horrors of kamini, was a part of, and contributedto, a decisive shift in the direction of identifying ideal womanhoodwith an iconic mother figure.

The new, enormously valorised motherson relationship quickly took on patriotic overtones. Already in the early 1880s, in Bankimchandra's Anandamath with its Bande Mataram hymn, the wild and terrible Kali is the 'Mother as she has become: oppressedand starving-while the resplendent ever-bountiful Durga symbolises the future liberated 'mother'land.The duty of the sons is an active one--the liberationof

the Motherfrom alien bondage.DurgaPuja correspondinglyfromaroundthe turnof the century started emerging from the households of zamindarsto becomesarbajanincommunity-organised-intowns,and Hindu nationalistsduring the Swa,deshiera made manyeffortsto appropriatePuja ritualsand the Shyamasangit form for the patriotic cause 174 Ramakrishnahimself-forwhom Kaliwas beautifuland everlovingin her verywildness, in needof no transformation,demandingno activitybut only total child-likesurrenderremained quite far removed from this Hindu-nationalist discourse. And yet the gulf between chikd-like immersion and activist duty was not unbridgeable, as Vivekanandawould soon indicate. Our focus so far has been primarilyon the Kathamrita, and it is easy from that to

slip into an assumptionthat Ramakrishna's teachings in the early 1880s constitute a single bloc. But speech is inherently 'dialogic'. modulated by contexts and audiences -and Ramakrishna'sdevotees inc-ludedmany apart from the middle-aged householders who tend to predominatein Mahendranath'stext. The Kathamritadoes not give an equivalent direct access to other

groups: the very young men who later become sanyasis(theyareoften present,but not possibly in their more intimateconversations with the saint-for 'M',householder himself, never quite became a member of that innercircle),the wivesand widows,the prostitutes-turned-actresses. Ramakrishna's message may well have variedsomewhatto suit such distinct audiences, making the rangeof possibleappropriationsevenwider. Formiddle-agedhouseholders,as we have seen, Ramakrishnaofferedbhakti-embodied in grihastha

sanvyas-as

an 'easy way,

soothing many tensions, demanding no learned understanding of doctrine or mastery over ritual, requiringvirtually no sacrifice of normal bhadralokcareersand life-styles.These needed only to be carried out in a nishkama, detached manner. In addition, the condemnation of social activism could perhaps be read by such people-some of them reasonably well off-as a denial of the need to spend savings on too much charity or philanthropy. But it might still be unduly cynical to explain Ramakrishna'sappeal, even among this milieu,entirelyin termsof his providing a comfortable 'theodicy of good fortune'. The elementof playfulnessand rejectionof some of the inhibitionsof normalbhadralok behaviour(becoming emotional in public, dancing in .ecstacy) could have been particularly attractive to middle-aged householders in contrast to the dingy formalities of respectableadult life. The lure of a kind of sanctified escape from responsibility,at a time when these tend to crqwd upon a man with the onset of middle age, should not be underestimated. Again, middle-ageddevotees,evenwhen reasonably successful, must as minor gove~mcnt officaalsand seniorclerkshavebeen frequently

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subject to the pin-pricksof a superiorand foreignofficialdom. The critique of chakri would not have appearedimeaninglesshere. Through Ramakrishna, the householder could perhaps find the solace and comfort of an innerspace, distanced from an everyday worlddominatedincreasinglyby money and alien power. The message for the young men and boys was presumablysomewhatdifferent,and far more challenging, than that imparted to householders, for it inspiredsome of them to make a definitive breakwith kamini and kanchanin the forms of marriageand conventional jobs. Quite often they had to overcome considerable parental hostility even for visiting Ramakrishna,for frequent trips to Dakshineswarcould mean neglecting the formal studies which had become the indispensablequalification for respectable professional or clerical careers. Ramakrishna often encouraged such truancy,and once made a pun that equated passing examinationswith bortdage.'76For these teenagers, here was a middle-aged man, reveredsaint and perhapsavatar,who mixedand talkedfreelywith them in a manner at once serious and yet utterlyinformal. Such a combination would have been rare with elders in hierarchisedhomes or with teachersin schools or colleges-the second major site, so far as bhadralok were concerned, of the new discipline of time. The transcending of the barriers Qf age and youth, work and play, in Ramakrishna's companyperhapshad a particularattraction for adolescents,engagedin a difficult transition from boyhood to adult responsibility. We have already explored some of the waysin which chakri, the petty clericaljob which was all that most of these young men could haveotherwise aspiredfor, had come to be perceivedas quintessentiallyunattractive. It was also getting more difficult to obtain, as Narendranath,academicallythe brightest among Ramakrishna'sdisciples, discovered through bitter personal experiencewhen his father'ssudden death in 1884made him hunt desperatelyfor some time for an office-job.'77 Conjugality, the other sacrifice demandedof a sanyasi, apparently had few attractions, too. The Kathamriiais full of hints that the young marriedmen drawn to Ramakrishnawere neglecting their wives-with considerable encouragement, at times, from the saint himself. Biographicalaccounts of devotees mentionwith some regularitya repugnance for marriedlife, at times precedingthe first encounter with Ramakrishna.'78The prospect, usually, was of marriageby parental arrangement with much younger, uneducatedgirls, well below the age of puberty.-1 Westerneducationand tates, confinso farto males,may have ed overwhelmingly created a new cultural distance within the bhadralokfamily.Moreimportant,however, was the close interconnectionbetweenmarriageand the sharpenedstrugglefor survival bound up with the travails of chakri. "Nowadays parents marry their boys too Economic and Political Weekly

young. By the time they finish their educa-

tion, they arealreadyfathersof childrenand have to run hither and thither in search of a job to maintainthe family"- Ramakrishna had told Sarat and -Sashi Chakrabarti, cousins who later becameprominentfigures in the RamakrishnaMission."wLife-stories of many disciples indicate more or less independent perceptionsof the same crucial association of kamini with a kanchan obtainable,in niggardlyamounts,only through chakri. The skewed family situation, considered from the woman's angle, may go some distancetowardsexplainingwhat otherwise appearsthe most puzzlingof Ramakrishna's manyparadoxes.The man whose conversation was full of extremely negative comments about the lust-filled bodies and luxurious and selfish ways of woman'81still won the devotion of many women. Weeven haveaccounts of women casting off inhibitions and parda to go to Dakshineswarin a spirit of almost joyous abandon.182 Ramakrishna'sabhorrenceof sex, and advice to keepoff intercourseafter one or two children,perhapsstrucka chord in married women. Sex must haveoften seemeda terrible duty for young girls married off to totally unknown men at a tender age, in an age when absence of contraceptivesmade child-bearing frequent, dangerous and extremely burdensome.182a

Middle-aged

or

elderly housewives or widows may have found a way of overcoming loneliness and the tedium of household chores by setting themselves up in a mater_nalrole vis-a-vis Ramakrishna.They lovedto cook and bring food for him, which the holy man eagerly acceptedand often asked for.'83And while conversation littlesurvivesof Ramakrishna's with feminine audiences, one must not excludethe possibility that he added an extremelyrare,non-personaland (in a limited sense)intellectual,contentto lives otherwise largely bereft of such mental sustenance.

A startlingelementwas addedto the circle of womendevoteesof Ramakrishnaafterhis visit to Girish Ghosh's Chaitanya-Lila (1884). The holy man blessed Binodini for herperformanceas the youngChaitanya:the man who normally abhorredfemininecontact allowed actresses, recruited from prostitutes, to touch his feet. Sex in such degradedform was presumablyan objectof pity and grace, not a threat-and perhaps, for a man who found even sex in marriage intolerable, prostitution was not all that specially repugnant. Ramakrishna'sunexpectedblessingof theatrewomen gavea new respectabilityto a profession despised by many,'4 and assuaged feelings of guilt: he became,in fact, in course of time a kind of patron-saint for the Calcutta public theatre.185 A wider impact became noticeable also when, in the mid-1890s, prostitutes-and not merely the actresses drawnfromthem-began turningup in lage nulmbersat the annual Ramakrishnabirthday festivalsat Dakshineswar,much to the horror of many bhadralok.'86 Binodini

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herself, with some liaw-i-d en ouragement from Girishchandra Ghosh, was emboldened to publish a moving, if somewhat anboyantly repentent, account of her life as prostitute and actress.'87 The paradox of the Ramakfishna cult opening up certain spaces for women, in and through highly sexst assumptions and practices, is epitomised in the career of Sarada Debi. The wife who, in her husband's. lifetime, was relegated firmly to household duties, and who could never become a mother thanks to Ramakrishna, blossomed out after Ramakrishna's.death into a cultfigure in her own right, 'Holy Mother', embodiment of motherhood for Vivekananda and other devotees. Her sayings, taken down and preserved by reverential devotees as Ramakrishna's had been, vividly illuminated this paradox in their autobiographical sections. Life with her husband at Dakshineswar is repeatedly recalled as a tale of bliss (ananda)-- nd yet, without any felt sense of contradiction; we encounter, at times in her very next words, memories of a tiny, dismal room in an obscure corner of the temple compound with a doorway so low that you often hit your head entering it. Life was an endless round of preparing food, for Ranakrishna as well as for devcotees who kept dropping in at all hours, and (f waiting for nightfall to relieve a herself by the river-for no one had thought of providing a latrine for women. She learnt to read only after overcoming much opposition. particularly from Hriday, the cousin of Ra k-crishna who had managed the material side of the saint's life till the early 1880s. Ther-I were weeks during which Sarada hardly saw her husband, and could only hear him, tat king and singing with male devotees, thrcough the chinks of a bamboo curtain. And yet life had been bliss: Ramakrishna had never called her by the contemptuous rui, and had never beaten her. The memories of the years after 1886 take on a very different, increasingly selfconfident, if still engagingly naive, manner. RaAiakrishna, Sarada tells us, appeared in a dream to tell her to start giving diksha, and she also began going into samadhi. We now have passages where she claims to bejagaterma, mother of the universc Her body, precisely because it has endured so much suffering, is dev-sharir, divine.I8 Prostitutes apart, all Ramakrishna's devotees came from the bhadralok-with a solitary exception: Latu, the illiterate Bihari servant the saint had inherited from his early disciple, the well-established north-Calcutta doctor Ramchandra Datta. Latu was given, appropriately, the task of cleaning up by the bhadralok disciples when Ramakrishna during his last days could not go outside for defecation. The memoirs of Latu, taken down and published, provide certain fascinating sidelights. Son of a Chapra district shepherd, Latu retained all his life

a dignity, independence,even a certain aggressivenesswhich not everyone liked, and manyassociatedwith his passion for wrestl1557

with the problemsof extremelyvariedworlds which still for some reason requirea stable centrein the figure of Ramakrishna.Diversity of appropriationsof a founding father is of course the rule ratherthan an exception. While still worth exploration in terms of implicationsand contexts,the thememost relevant for our present study in the persistence of a need for affiliatidn with Ramakrishnaacross decades of sweeping change. The power and weight of the canonical traditionas establishedby Vivekanandahas somewhat obscured the range of meanings that the image of Ramakrishnahas had the capacity to take on or inspire. There has been, for instance, a TantricRamakrishna, in considerable discordance with Vivekananda'sviolent condemnationof Vamacari ways.An acrimoniouscontroversydeveloped in the 1930saround the precise importance of Bhairabi Brahman.90 Ramakrishna's householderdevotees,again, had little sympathyinitially with Narendranath'sband of young sanyasis, and there was even an unseemly quarrel between the two groups over Ramakrishna'sashes.191Middle-aged householders, led by RamachandraDatta, instituted a distinct cult centered at Kankurgachiin east Calcutta, emphasising a qutietisticand highly ritualiseddevotionto IV Ramakrishnaas an avatar,to the exclusion of social activism.This was, arguably,closer Dakshineswar temple, where Ramakrishnahad lived for 30 years, and in some ways to the spirit of the RamaBelurMath, founded by his most illustrious krishnawe meet in the Kathamritathan the Vivekananda adaptation.'92The national disciple, face each other today on opposite banksof the Bhagirathi,presentingin many and international fame of Vivekananda eventuallyeclipsed the Kankurgachivariant waysa vivid study in contrasts,evenopposiof RamachandraDatta, but pure rituised tions. The temple, like any major Hindu sacredsite, is thronged with crowds which devotion has persistedas a subordinatebut vital strand even within the canonical cut acrossclass divides,noisy,colourful,not Ramakrishna Mission tradition. Sarada over-sensitiveto dirt. The holiness of the Debi is a crucial figurehere, with her claim plc permitswomento shed inhibitionsand bathein the riverghat alongsideof menfolk. that Ramakrishna had predicted that he would be "worshippedin everyhome"after The approacches are cluttered with shops death, and insistenceon the importanceof slling a varietyof momentoes,trinketsand diksha, manfraand other rituals.'93 Among eatables,and the atmosphereresemblesthat the Ramak rishnananda sanyasis, of a bazaar,or mela. Solemnity reigns to (Sashibhushan Chakrabarti)in particular some aetentonly inside the centralshrineof preferredthe ways of ritualised bhakti and BhavatariniKali, and, moreevidently,in the puja. The elaborate ceremonies he concorner-room where Ramakrishna used to stay:heredevoteessit, ponder,or pray.Belur ducted at the Math were often summarily Mathis muchmoreof an uppermiddle-class dismissedby Vivekanandain privateletters 94 as useless "bell-ringing'". devotional-cum-tourist spot: almost aggressivelyhygienic,it is full of guards and From the mid-80s, Girish Ghosh and his notices warningvisitorsoff from bathingin epigoni began projectingyet another,subtly the riveror spoiling the lawns. An image of distinct, Ramakrjshnathrough the north Ramakrishna,fullyclothedin spotlesswhite, Calcuttaprofessidnalstage, reachingout to an audience considerably wider than the conQstitutes the central shfine. A glass ourlimited range of personal contact or even tain preservesit from physicalproximityor touch of devotees or visitors. Asked where print. Girish personally was on excellent Vivekananda and his associates had termswith householderandsanyusidevotees themselvesstayed, a Swamijipoints vague- alike, and his representationsserved ultily in the distance.He is muchmoreinterested matelyas a kind of bridgebetweenquietistic, in tellingus that the mainbuildinghad been though no longer highly ritualised, bhakti constructed by Martin Burn in the 1930s, and Vivekananda'snew turn towardssocial and that Kamala Nehru and IndiraGandhi service. In Bilvamangal (June 1886), N/asiram (May 1888) and Kalapahar had been regular voisitors. And ye Dakshineswarand Belurremain (September 1896), Girish introduced the tied together by indissolublelinkages,each figureof the wanderingpagal or 'holy fool~ shedding its lustre on the other: leaving us mad to the conventional world, but puring. ServingRamakrishnabecame for him a liberation from the burden of naukri in Ramakrishna'shousehold. He was fond of reteilingRamakrishna'sdasi parable,adding to it a note of plebeian poignancy derived from an immediacyof experience:"He told me this story, so that I could learn how to survivein the house of the masil (master). How else could my sorrows have ended?" Seba to Latu was sharply distinct from flattery-the baralokexpectflattery,but not God. Butseba, evenfor Ramakrishna,could be arduous,too-and Latu recalledhow he was often scolded, and once was made to walk six miles to bring some special food for Ramakrishna.Saradacould talk freely with him, even in her years of rigorous parda- and Latu's memories about her strikea note utterlydifferent from the standarddeificationinto abstractmother-figure: "How harda life she had led. She stayedin that tinyroom, for so manyyears,unnoticed by everyone' Revrs as one of Ramakrishna's intimate disciple$, renamed Adbhutananda, Latu steadfastlyrefused to stay, or even spend a night at, the Belur Math founded by Vivekananda."Wearesadhus-why should we have land, houses, gardens, wealth? I won't stay in such a place!"89

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veyor, really, of divine wisdom, often in words taken straight from Ramakrishna. Wisdom conveyedthroughwanderingfolly quickly establisheditself as a central rigure in the Bengali theatre. Aestheticised traces of it persistevenin Rabindranath's thakurda (grandfather) figures.'9" The pagal of Girish Ghosh appears,at first sight, to embody pure irresponsibilityor playfulness, justified on the ground that everythingis determined by Han: 'predestination'here has producedimplicationsdiametricallyopposed to the puritanwork-ethic.Only Harinama is needed, otherwise one should behave like a five-year-oldchild. But paga( figures like Nasiram, or Chintamani in Kalapahar, do, in fact, preside over and in-

spiresubstantialmoralchange-though action itself is pushed along, significantly,by women: plebeian trickster-figures, or deferentially-assertive wives. 197 Inwardturning piety and activism, in other words, do not necessarily remain binaries in.the Ramakrishqa-Vivekanandatradition. The withdrawalinto oneself that Ramakrishna had inspiredundercutan activism thought to be based on arrogance,but could serve at timesas a prelude,throughinne purification, for a higher kind of outgoing action. In SatischandraChattopadhyayasN Annapurna (1904), Gadadhar himself appears as a 'mad' pujari, alongside a thakurda who

distances himself from worldly concerns throughdance and devotionalsong. A clerk sings about his office woes and recallsthe happierexperiencesof Ramprasadwith his employer.The heroine, Annapurna, eventually changes the heart of her drunkard husbandthroughenduranceand deferential assertion. But Gadadharhimself is now a figure deeply moved by scenes of poverty,

and the playends with a widowedAnnapurna erectinga temple wherethe poor would be fed day and night. Satischandrais clearly writing in the shadow of Vivekanandawho, as we shall see, had exalted the Hindu widow,consideredrituallyimpureby tradition, into the ideal Hinduwoman-retaining all the marksof austerewidowhood,but immersedin social service.Annapurna,which means bounteous provider of food, is, again, one of Durga's many names-and the Swadeshi movement would soon erect Durga-Annapurnainto a central image of the motherland. A minor play thus epitomises a whole complex transition. A visitor to Belur Math today is greeted by a signboardthat lists the currentphilanthropicwork of the RamaknshnaMission. The poor,however,arephysicallymuchmore distant than at Dakshineswar, and no plebeianbazaarhas beenallowedto obstruct the spaciousentranceto the Math. The contrast pointS towards a two-way transition. With Vivekananda,sophisticated son of a prominent Calcutta attorney who quickly acquired international and national fame after his Chicagoaddres, the Ramakrishna cult movd fromthe clericalmarginsinto the centre of high-bhadraloklife. Rustic and homely parables,along with the dasatya of

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chakrithenem, droppedout of Vivekananda's discoursewhiuch took the form of lectures (Ramakrishna,incidentally, had destested oratory)'9 and eays in English or chaste, Sanskritised Beng

The distancing produc-

ed by English education and urbanmiddledass life was often associated,however,with a leep awareness of the west as, simultaneously,stimulus and threat. Among the more sensitive of the 19th century bhadralok, it had led also to repeated efforts to ameliorate the conditions of the underprivilegd and oppressed: women, lower castes, the poor. Vivekanandarevived,at the heartof what had begun as inward-turningbhakti, the traditionsof such bhadralokactivism.Firsthand experienceof mass poverty,ignorance, and casteoppression,obtainedthroughtours across the sub-continentin 1890-93, added to this revival a distinctive, sharper edge. Ramakrishna,poor himself, had considered povertya part of naturalor divine law,and had displayeda 'peasant'cynicismaboutdogooding efforts by rich and learned folk as instances of arrogance and futility: Youhavereada coupleof pagesin English, andso consideryourselfmightilylearned.. . [and]... think you can do good for the world. Can you end droughts, famines, epidemics?199

Vivekananda cultivated contacts with precisely such people-princes, dewans, well-established men-as potential fundgivers throughout his tours of India, and fund-raisingremaineda major objectiveof his lectures in America and Europe ("I give them spirituality, and they give me money"20).The money he hoped to use for far-reachingplans of elevatingthe daridranarayan, God manifested in the poor. Organisedphilanthropywould be combined with populareducationin true high-Hinduism and modern science, via devices like magic-lanterns. Such, Vivekanandavisualised, would be the primary tasks of his band of young educatedsanyasis, and, in practice,training this elite came to be foregroundedover the more challengingobjectiveof mass education.20'What was entailed was a transformation within his own group, that could be achieved only after intense debate. In the words of the official historian of the Ramakrishna Mission, "the conflicting aims of religion and social service seemed irreconi-

cilable indeed". Vivekananda's "greatest triumphlay in re-orientatingthe outlook of his brotherdisciples from ideas of personal salvationto a sympatheticcomprehensions of the needs of the world".202He had to fight, in a way,againstan entireHindutradition in whichcharitymightat times be considereda part of the dharmaof the king or householder,but wher the sanyasi's principal ideal was individual moksha, not improvementof the world. Basic religious-philosophical concepts, consequendy,had to be givennew meamnig Karmabeame, for Vivekananda,not traditional caste-based rituals and obligations Economic and Political Weekly

determined by previous birth, but nontraditional social service. The jnana of Vedanticmonism was sought to be transformed, through a real tour de force, into a messageof strengthand strenuousefforts to help others. The monistic unity of all beings, Vivekanandaargued,implied that "in loving anyone, I am loving myself'.203 Vedanticjnana was simultaneouslyexalted in unambiguousfashionoverquietisticemotional bhakti, and the Tantric elements in Ramakrishna sought to be suppressed altogether,in a fiurmly structuredframework of adhikar-bhedawhichnow defmeda clearly demarcatedHindu religion.240This was the kind of Hinduism which Vivekananda thought could be projected abroad as intellectually powerful enough to challenge and overcomethe-arrogantclaims of Christian missionares-claims inseparable,often, fromimperialistracism.Throughits propogation, Vivekanandaemerged as the first major exemplarof that familiar 20th century figure,the Indianguru who vins fame and disciples in the west. Adhikar-bheda apexedby Vedantaseemedto havethe potential, also, for unifying all Hindus through the incorporation of diversities within a single hierarchy.Niveditawould soon define Vivekananda'sachievement at Chicago to have been the transformationof "the religious ideasof the Hindus"into "Hinduism", for throughadhikar-bheda,"therecould be no sect, no school, no sincere religious experienceof the Indianpeople.. . that might rightly be excluded from the embrace of Hinduism:'205

The

catholicity

of

Ramakrishna,modulatedand transformed through this construction of a crystallised 'Hindu' identity, thus became for Vivekananda the paradoxicalground for a claim to superiorworth:"Ourreligionis truerthan any other religion, because it never conquered, because it never shed blood!' Vivekanandain the same lecturewent on to stressthe need for "ironmusclesand nerves of steel",and even visualised "the conquest of the whole world by the Hindu race... [a] conquest of religion and spirituality.'206 Vivekananda'srhetoricsounds powerful and self-confident, yet just beneath its surface fissures often lurk, manifesting themselvesrepeatedlythroughimplicitor explicit contradictions. It is in terms of such tensions, which Vivekanandawas too clearsightedand honest to be able to brushaside, that we can best understand why an apparentlywholesale inversionof the ideas of Ramaknshna,accompaniedby the entryof themesquite unknownto the master,still remainedin need of an ultimateanchoragein the quietistic bhakti of the Dakshineswar saint. The tensionsareclearestin Vivekananda's discourses about women and lower castes. His lettersrepeatedlyassociate degradation of women with caste oppressionas the two central evils of Hindu society. Vivekananda had nothing of Ramakrishna'sobsessive terrorsabout the woman'sbody, and he was careful to substitute kama, for kamini,

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avoiding the implication that lust was somehow peculiarly feminine27 Early lettersfromAmericaenthusiasticallyacclaimed the free, yet responsible and socially committed western women he had met, several of whom had become his ardent disciples: "free as birds in air", whereas '" ..look

at

our girls, becoming mothers below their teens...

We are horrible sinners, and our

degradation is due to our calling women 'despicableworms' 'gatewaysto heUl'and so forth'.'21The disciple here came perilously close to a direct criticismof his master.But passageslike these aregenerallyconfimedto privatecorrespondence.Publicspeechesconcentratedfire on missionaryslandersabout Indianwomanhood, and the futility and irrelevance of social reform movements.> Missionary propaganda, arrogant and at times racist, had the habit of harping on themes like child marriageor seclusion of women, and Vivekanandaevidently found pride it demeaningto national-cum-religious to publicly repeat such criticism, however much he might privatelydetest many such practices. The cult o f Sarada Debi as 'Divine Mother' which Vivekananda encouraged was perhapsone wayof tryingto resolvethis tension:womanhood of one particularkind was being exalted, but through a markedly traditionalist idiom. The other attempted solution was ascetic widowhood channelled into social service. Vivekananda, Nivedita thought, had "looked, naturallyenough, to widowsas a class to providethe firstgeneration of abbess-like educators" he had a "horror"about the "unfaithfulwidow",and emphasised "trustful and devoted companionship to the husband".210In India, thoughnot among westernwomen disciples, several of whom were young, unmarried, and unconventional, feminine entry into public space presumably required careful regulation, so as not to conflict with conjugal duty and decorum. The widow who still carried all the marks of traditional austerity provided the ideal material. The limits, even here, were revealed by Vivekananda'sbitterpublicquarrelin the US with Pandita Ramabai about the condition of Hindu widows-a quarrelwhich coincided in time with a gestureof financial support to SasipadaBanerji'shome-cum-schoolfor widows at Baranagar (April 1895).211Set-

ting up widows' homes and educating their inmateswasone thing:a militantlyreformist widowwho had turnedChristianas a matter of mature voluntary choice representeda very different proposition. Vivekananda's comments about caste reveala similar pattern. His letters are full of an awarenessand anger about caste oppression rareamong the bhadralok inteligentsia of 19th century Bengal, whereeven Brahmo rejection of caste had generally takenthe form of token gestureswithin the bounds of the reformed community.212 Such awareness,he said, had been brought to him by the "experienceI have had in the south, of the upper classes torturing the 1559

owe. . . Do you think our religionis worth the nanle? Ours is only 'Don't touchism'. Million live on mohua plants, while sadhus and hmins "suck the blood of these poor people"2Y3 ViVeknaiida's public lectures,

too, frequentlyurgedthe need to uplift the lowercastes, but this was normally situated now in the context of the danger of Christian and Hindu p

eytisation: an argume

that would come to acquire a centralplace in the discourses of 20th century 'Hindutva'.21 There was also a simultaneous, violent condemnationof the emergingantiBrhman movements in the south: ". . . it it

no use fighting among the castes... The solution is not by bringingdown the higher, but by raising the lower up to the level of the higher.... Tb the non-Brahmancastes I say, be not in a hurry... you are suffering from your own fault. Who told you to neglect spirituality and Sanskrit learning?"215The hidden interlocutor, once again, must have been the missionary and colonial apologist for whom caste oppression, along with the subordination of women, proved the essential unworthiness and inferiority of Indians. BartamanBharat(Modern India, March 1899),216 Vivekananda's most famous writing in Bengali, provides the supreme exampleof this radicallogic that abruptly turnsbackon itself as it encountersthe rock of patriotic-cum-Hindufaith. It elaborates an interestingconception of history,where priestly (Brhman), royal (Kshatriya),and mercantile(Vaishya)power here succeeded

instance, as opposed to the "unrestricted interminglingof men and women'" "Westernershold caste distinctions to be obnoxious, thereforelet all the distinct castes be jumbled into one' The rhetoric reachesits climax in the appeal ". . . forget not that the lowerclasses, the ignorant,the poor, the illiterate,the cobbler,the sweeper,arethy flesh and blood, thy brothers This has often been cited as the pinnacleof Vivekananda'sradicalism, but a retreathas really taken place from the earliervision of Shudrarevolution towardsthe submegence of caste or class dWerences,without basic internaltransformation,into a nationalistbrotherhood.The intended audience ("thy") is clearly the educated,while the peoplewith "araground their loins" are expected only to proclaim at the top of their voice: "The Indian is my brother... India's gods and goddesses are mine.' The concluding pages of Bartaman Bharat have become a standard college or high-school text: the earlier sections are much less familiar.The authorised Life of Vivekananda "by his Eastern and Western

admirers"summarisesmuch of Vivekananda's writings, but omits all reference to Bartaman Bharat. Bartaman Bharat ended with apparently

self-confident rhetoric-but the letter to Mary Hale where Vivekanandacalled himself a socialist concluded on a suddenly world-wearytone: "The sum-total of good and evil in the world remains ever the same... Let every dog have his day in this miserable world" tilrsuch time as "man each other, not just in India, but everywhere. give up this vanity of a world and governAll have their merits and deficiencies, but ments and all other botherations'2l8A profound pessimismin fact seems to repeatedly sharpest condemnation is reserved for the eras of priestlydomination. Stereotypesof undermineVivekananda'sutopian dreams. Hindu nationalist historiographyare ruth- The argumentthat he used, for instance,to appropriateVedantafor an ethic of social lessly overturned as Vivekananda indicates a preferencefor the Buddhist and Islamic service is in a way deeply cynical, for it eras, when the decline in Bradmainpower assumes that men will help others only if had enabledthe emergenceof powerfulemn- they realisethat this is just another form of pires: Rajput domination, in contrast, is self-love. Asked by an American woman representedas a virtualdarkage. The global missionaryin 1898whether he foresawany British empire obviously embodies the hope of eliminating child-marriage and cruelty to widows, Vivekananda sadly climax of Vaishya power, after which is replied in the negative. Vivekananda, the predicteda "risingof the Shudraclass, with their Shudrahood.. . when the Shudrasof missionary reports, seemed to have a every country. .. remaining as Shudras"strangeforebodingof ultimatefailure'even will gain absolutesupremacyin everysocie"with the Hindu world at his feet'!'sitting ty..: Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism and there at twilight, in the large, half-lighted otherlikesects arethe vanguardof the social hall,-it seemed like listening to a cry.'219 revolution that is to follow" ("I am a Vivekananda'swell knownoscillationbetsocialist",Vivekanandahad proclaimedto ween supremelyself-confidentactivismand MaryHale in the courseof a letteroutlining inward-turningworld-weariness has been a similar argument in 1896.217) But then, sought to be explainedin terms of an inner, very abruptly,comes an assertion that in psychological conflict going back to childBritish-ruledIndia "the whole population hood days.220 A more contextualised has virtuallycome down to the level of the reading,however,is also possible, to suppleShudra".The only real Brahmanstoday are ment-and not necessarily supplant-the foreignprofessors,the Kshatriyasare British psychological analysis. The utopian image the Vaishyasthe Britishmerchants. of a Bharatvarsharooted in an ideal HinofficiaWs, The whole tide of Vivekananda'sargument duism, that Vivekananda passionately tried now suddenlyreversesitself. What is brand- to adhereto, was contradictedrepeatedlyby ed as blind imitativenessbecomes the prinharsh facts of contemporaryHindu society cipal target,and a wh2olerangeof traditional that he was too clear-sightedand honest to practicesand norms are implicitly ealorisbe ableto ignore.He found no wayof resolved: the "Sita-Savitri-Damyanti"model, for ing these contradictions.What needs to be Economic and Political Weekly

July 18, 1992

recognisedas tragedy may best be grsped in terms of a grid of alternative actioparameters, none of which Vivekananda could adopt without ambiguity or self-doubt. Vivekanandacondemnedcaste and gender oppression, and found many Hindu practices-including reveringthe cow as Mothrutterly ridiculous.221Yet existing social reforminitiativeshe consideredsuperficial, with some justice, because confined to the educatedelite-and demeaning to national pride. Public condemnation of many evils he denounced in private was inhibited for him by the fear of strengthening western slanders about a subject race. Vivekananda,at the same time, could not share the facile nationalist faith that such internalproblemsweresecondaryand wuld sort themselves out after the winning of political freedom. His countrywide tours had given an unusual depth of meanng to a patriotism that embracedthe entihesubcontinent,and found memorableexpression in the invocations to 'Bharat' with which Bartaman Bharat ends. But Viveknanda had little faith or interestin existing forms of Moderate Congress political activity, repeatedlywarnedagainstattaching'4political significance"to his ideas,222and seems to have looked upon the British Empire,at times,as an opportunityto spreadHinduism abroad (on the analogy of Christianity underthe Roman Empire).223 Deep concern with poverty remained unrelated in Vivekanandato any awarenessof colonial exploitation:there is a virtual silence about that already well-establishedstaple of nationalist

polemic,

the drain of wealth

theory.224 Vivekananda,then, was not quite the 'patriot-prophet'who would soon be reveredas patron-saintby a whole generation of Swadeshienthusiasts,revolutionary terrorists, and nationalists in general. Nivedita, who did more than anyone else, perhaps, to promote this image of Vivekananda, herself recognised its partiallyconstructed character: "Just as Shri Ramakrishna,in fact, without knowingany books, had been a living epitome of the Vedanta, so was Vivekananda of the national life. But of the theory of this he was unconscious'225

Vivekanandathe apostle of anti-British nationalismtoday belongs essentiallyto the past: what has become ominously relevant is the other, closely-related image of the Swami as one of the founders of 20th century Hindutva, of a united, muscular and aggressiveHinduism. He had no particular prejudiceabout lslam,226but there is little doubt that like verymanyHindu nationalists of his times, or later, the Bharat of Vivekananda's dreams was essentially Hindu. The closing appeal for fraternalembracein BartamanBharatsomehow forgets to mention Muslims. Much more important is the crucial role of Vivekanandain crystallising a Hindu identity that is able to play simultaneously on the twin registersof catholicity and aggression:a patternthat has become

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standardin the discourses of today's RSSVHP-BJPcombine. And yet a gap remains, for Vivekananda could never reconcile himself totally to the harshrealitiesof caste and genderbppression,of mass povertyfor which he refused to affix the responsibility solely on the British, and of "hundredsof The Tiplicane LiterarySociesuperstitions". ty address (1897) which claimed that Hinduism was "truer than any other religion" simultaneouslydemandedthat such things be "weededout".237It was quite impossible for Vivekananda to accept everything in Hindu society in a kind of aestheticised celebrationof difference,as multi-coloured flowers in a garland.228 Facedwith such insurmountabletensions, Vivekanandacame to perpetuallyoscillate betweenexuberantcalls to action and moods of introspection, in a pattern that is particularlyrelevantfor us because it helps us to understanawhy an ultimateanchr-agein Ramakrishna remained so indispensable. Bartaman Bharat had been preceded by monthsduring which Vivekanandahad immersedhimself in the songs of Ramprasad, trying "to sa.urate his own mind with the conception of himself as a child!' After a mystical experience at Kshir Bhawani in Kashmir,Vivekanandatold Nivedita in October 1898:"It is all 'Mother'now!... there is no more patriotism. I am only a little -child'229 This, evidently, was not the Mother of Anandamath or Swadeshi nationalism, patriotic icon calling sons to the path of self-sacrificingaction. It was Ramakrishna'sDivine Mother,who wantsnothing more than child-like surrender,an abjuration of the active responsibleadulthoodthat Vivekanandahimself had tried so hard to promote; in some ways, perhaps, it was Ramakrishnahimself. The introspectivemood camneto dominate the last two yearsor so of Vivekananda's life, finding expressionin words utterly moving and unforgettable: This is the world, hideous,beastlycorpse. Who thinksof helpingit is a fool. . . I am only the boy who used to listen with rapt wondermentto the wonderful words of

peal of the initial message. Vivekananda's famepreservedand vastlyectendedthe reach of the apparently very different image of Ramakrishna.It is noteworthy,for instance, that Mahendranathbroughtout four out of the five volumes of his Kathamritabetween 1902(the year of Vivekananda'sdeath) and 1910-years, preciselyof Swadeshinationalist militancyinspired to a considerableextent by Vivekananda'sposthumousimageas patriot-prophet. A significant number of revolutionaryterrorists, it may be added, beginning with two of the accused in the Alipur Bomb Case of 1908, sought shelter withinthe RamakrishnaMission in the wake of political frustration or failure. Such recruits provoked occasional government suspicion, but the Mission kept itself determinedly aloof from nationalist politics.231 It offeredspace for philanthropicand educational work, but also for quiet devotional piety.Vivekananda'sreturnto Ramakrishna, it seems, had createdsomethinglike a recurrent pattern. The Ramakrishnaheritage which flourishes today in Bengal incorporates, consequently,an enormous varietyof appropriations around a central core of claimed affinity. At one extreme, fleets of cars draw up everyeveningoutsidethe palatialInstitute of Cultureof the RamakrishnaMission in south Calcutta,wherelearnedreligious-cumphilosophical discoursesprovide solace for the rich. The Mission itself carries on valuable educational and philanthropic work, and enough has survived, within it, of the original catholicity to keep it-so far-away from the contemporarypolitics of aggressiveHindutvatypified by the VHP. But little remainsof moregrandiosedreams of uplifting

the daridra-narayan

on a

country-widescale, or of a 'Shudra'revolution. Fewevenof Vivekananda's close associates ever seem to have taken to heart his occasional passionate onslaughts against Brhmanical tyrannyand genderoppression. At another,relatedbut somewhatdistinct level, crowdsof variedsocial origin throng at Dakshineswar,and portraits of Ramakrishna adorn countless middle or lower That is my true nature; Ramakrishna... middleclass homes, an object of deep devoworks and activitis, doing good and so forth tion for many humble men and, perhaps, areonlysuperimpositions. Now I againhear even morewomen. The clericalambiencewe his voice, the same old voice thrillingmy noted as crucialfor Ramakrishna's initialapsoul ... I havelong givenup my placeas a peal neverreally disappeared,even though leader... Behindmyworkwasambition... behindmy guidancethe thirst for power. Vivekanandahad movedinto a highersocial Now theyare vanishingand I drift. I come! world. Of 37 members, for instance, of a RamakrishnaSamiti functioning in Barisal Mother,I come!. .. I come,a spectator,no town in 1910-set up at the initiative of more an actor.Oh, it is so calm!.. 230 clericalstaff withoutany affiliaQuietistie,inward-turning bhakti,tolerant goverrunment and non-proselytising,had thus been trans- tion at first with Belurand combining a litformed,with conflicts but no majorrupture, tle philanthropywith collective readingsof into a crystallisedand assertiveHindu iden- the Kathamrita-24 came from clericaland tity with activist programmes. But insur- relatedprofessions.At a laterstagethe clerks mountable contradictions-fundamentally, tried to "enlistcertainrespectableand symperhaps,the limits set to bhadralokidealism pathetic gentlemen of the town", and so a few pleaders and school-teachers were inby hierarchiesof caste, gender and class within a colonial situation-blocked the cluded in the ExecutiveCommittee232 The worldof clerks in Bengal, of course, realisation of such programmes,and both the expansion of outlookcand the eventual has changed vastly since Ramakrishna's return to origns helped to deepen the ap- times. Beginning with the Burn Company

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clerks' strike in October 1905, Bengal'soffice employeesbegandevelopingtradeunion organisationsof their own. From the 1950s onwards, the clerical world of Dalhousie Square has been one of the strongest bastions of the Left and tradeunion movement in WestBengal. Nor are offices today marked by any stringently-enforceddisciplineof time: symbolically, perhaps, a portrait of Ramakrishnahas becomea common feature of manyoffices and banks.But Leftpolitical predominance has obviously not been accompaniedby any equivalentcultual hegemony, and a depressing and dismal struggle for existence still characterisesmuch of lower middle class life. Agni-sanket (1984), by the best-selling novelist Sanjib Chattapodhyaya,may provide us with an appropriateconcludingnote.. The context is disillusionmentwith the Left Front government, the focus, once again, clerical life, Kamini, Kanchan and the miseriesof lowermiddleclass life havecome togetheronce more. Drudgeryin office and home remains the lot of the less fortunate, while the successful few climb up by shatteringkinshipobligations.For both, women and sex are somehow to blame: "Thewhole world is turning aroundthe woman'sbody. On all sides the manholes are open' Social conservatism has become utterly blatant. Watching girls being 'teased' in crowded buses,the clerk-heroruminates:"Wherehas that veil gone? Where that respect? No leader talks of moral ideals, or of our anThe authorpresentsno real, cient traditions"' positivealternatives,neitherVivekananda's patriotic social service nor even Ramakrishna'squiet bhaktiand grihasthasanyas. But a good woman changes the heart of the local rowdy,who leaves her as a dying gift a picture of Ramakrishna. The hero dreamsabout a "white-beltblack-shirt"terroristgang to punishevil-doers,a taxi-driver blames Kaliyugafor soaring prices, and, in an apocalyptic fantasy-ending,the burning body of the clerk goes around destroying A deeply depresssymbolsof corruption.213 ing, claustrophobicworld,wherefailureand povertyonly help to consolidate hierarchies of caste and gender-over which Ramakrishna presides, icon that gives, perhaps. a little comfort, but not hope.

Notes [Earlier drafts of parts of this essay have appeared as 'The Kathmrita as Text: Towardsan UnderStandingof Ramakrishna Paramahansa (Occasional Paper No 22, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi 1983), and 'Ramakrishna and -the Calcutta of His Times' ('The Calcutta Psyche'), India International Centre Quarterly,Winter, 1990-91).The present text owes much to the searching criticisms and correction of Tanika Sarkarl I I am using the 1980-82 reprints of 'M' (Mahendranath Gupta)'s 5-volume Sri Sri Ramakrishna-Kathamrita(first published, Calc4tta, 1902, 1904, 1908, 1910, 1932). Henceforward KM. The translations are mine.

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2 Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Drobomyeer Kashibas. 3 Biographical sketch of Mahendranath Gupta, appended to KMI. 4 Life of Sri Ramakrishna Compiled from VariousAuthentic Sources (n a, Mayavati 1924, Calcutta, 1964)pp 290-91. Hencefor1 wardLfe. 5 The major canonical biography is Swami Saradananda, Sri Sri RamakrishnaLilaprasanga (Calcutta, 1911-1919,1979). Henceforward L. All intimate disciples of Ramakrishna were of educated bhadralok origin, with the solitary exception of Latu, the Bihari servant of Ramchandra Datta. 6 Thus the Ramakrishna described in the KM (its author, incidentally, never formally joined the Ramakrishna Mission) did not wear saffron, used polished slippers or shoes, slept on a bed under a mosquito net: visitors were often surprised by his appearance and dress (KM lIl, p 1). Later iconic representationsof Ramakrishna invariably present him in the garb of a conventional sanyasi. The one contemporary photograph that exists is hardly ever used in the canonical literature(I have seen only one reproduction of it, in Brojen Banerji and, Sajanikanta Das, Sri Ramkrishna Samasamayik Drishtite, Calcutta, 1952). This shows RAmakrishna in a dance of ecstasy with Brahmos at Keshabchandra Sen's house in September 1879: he is not markedlydifferent in dress from the other bhadralok apart from a rather shabby rusticity. 7 1 feel now that my initial paper on Ramakrishna,entitled Kathamritaas Text: Understanding of Towards an Ramakrishna Paramahansa, despite its title, was insufficiently aware of these dimensions. I am grateful for the comments and criticisms of Hiteshranjan Sanyal and Dipesh Chakrabarti,as well as others attendingthe seminar at the Calcutta University History Department where I presented the above paper in January 1985. 8 Each volume of the KM begins with an analysis of 'Three Kinds of Evidence''direct and recorded on the same day', 'direct but unrecorded' and 'hearsay and unrecorded' and the text claims to be based on the first type. Vivekananda's praise of the author for having kept himself 'entirely hidden, unlike Plato with Socrates, -is quoted, along with testimonies from Ramakrishna'swife and some other prominent disciples. 9 KM 1, p 30 (March 5, 1882). 9a For an argumentstressingthis dual nature of paradox particularly in religious discourse,see Megan McLaughlin, Gender Paradox and the Otherness of God (Genderand History, 1112, Summer 1991). 10 L 1, pp 264-65. IOa See, for instance, Asok Sen, Agrarian Structure and Tenancy Laws in Bengal, 1850-1900, in Sen, etc, Perspectives in Social Sciences 2 (Calcutta, 1982). 11 KM I, p 219 (October 22, 1885). 12 KMI, p S1 (October 27, 1882).The passage

is repeatedwith minorvariationsin KM 1,pp 127-28(June15,1884);K(M11,p 166 (October11,1884);KNI{II, p215 (October Economic and Political Weekly

18, 1885); KM IV, p 50 (January 5, 1884); and KM V, p 202 (December 6, 1884). 13 Life, p 250. 14 1 am borrowing the term 'crystallisation' from W Cantwell Smith, 'The Crystallisation of Religious Communities in Mughal India' in his On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies (Hague, 1981), Chapter9. 15 L 1, pp 370-73, gives a longish account of Ramakrishna's contacts with Sambhu Mallik, but completely omits the conversation quoted six times in KM. 16 The contrasts between KM and L are particularly relevant here-see Walter G Neevel (Jr), 'The Transformation of Ramakrishna' in Bardwell L Smith, Hinduism: New Essays on History of Religion (London, 1976). 17 "...a difficult borderland and... frontiers that had to be crossed"-terms used by Raymond Williams while discussing writers like George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D H Lawrence in an analysis of a somewhat similar problematic (The Country and the City, Paladin 1973, p 316). 18 L 1, Purbakatha o Babyjivan, p 41; Life, p 5. 19 L 1, pp 122-24. 20 Life, pp 45-57. 21 The cash payment amounted to Rs 7 per month, together with stipulated quantities of food and cloth, KM II, p ix (for text of deed of endowment); L II; Dibyabhave o Narendra, p 350. 22 Life, pp 250-58, 269-70, 297-303, 307-10, 370-75, 430-50, 470-71. 23 Life, p 7; L 1, p 40. 24 Khl V, p 45 (June 10, 1883). 25 KM 11, p 49 (June 4, 1883). 26 KM 11, pp 2-3 (October 16, 1882). 27 KM 1l, p 16 (August 5, 1882). 28 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevskis' Poetics (Leningrad 1929, Moscow 1963;trans, Manchester 1984), pp 210, 205. 29 KM 1, p 59 (October 28, 1882). 30 KM III, pp 19-20 (August 24, 1882). 31 KM 1, p 74 (December 1882). 32 KM I1, p 75 (November 28, 1883); KM V, p 62 (August 18, 1883); KM 1, p 150 (October 19, 1884). 33 The phrase used by T S Eliot to emphasise the contrast between the literature of the times of Shakespeareand Donne and that of Milton and his successors. See also Raymond Williams, Country and City, for a similar disjunction in the evolution of the pastoral. 34 KM 1, p 71 (December 14, 1882); KM 11, p 33 (April 8,1883); KM IV, p 84 (March 23, 1884); KM V, p 104 (January 2, 1884), 135 (February 22, 1885). 35 KM 1, p 21 (February 1882). 36 KM 111,p 59 (December27, 1883);KM IV, 146 (September 14, 1884). p 37 KM 1, p 216 (October 22, 1885); KM 111, p 75 (June 30, 1884). 38 KM 11, p 39 (April 15, 1883). 38a Partha Chatterji, A Religion of Urban Domesticity: Sri Ramakrishna and the Calcutta Middle Class, Subaltern Studies Vill, forthcoming. 39 KM IV, pp 74-75 (February 24, 1884). 40 KM 11, p 46 (June 2, 1883). 41 L 1, Sadhak-bhava, pp 111-14; Life, pp 68-557.

July 18, 1992

42 SurendranathDasgupta, History of Indian Philosophy, Vol 111 (Cambridge, 1%1); Debiprasad Chattopadhyay, Lokayata (New Delhi, 1959, 1975), Chapter 1. 43 Carlo Ginzburg, The Chees and the Worms (Penguin, 1982). 43a Madeleine Biardeau, Hinduism. The Anthropology of a Civilisation (Delhi, 1989), pp 73-75. 44 Sibaprasad Bhattacharji, Bharatchandra o Ramprasad (Calcutta, 1967), p 218; Sasibhushan Dasgupta Pharater Shaktiaitya (Calcutta, Sadhana o Shakta-SF. 1960), p 230. 45 Max Weber, The Social Psychology of World Religion, in HH Garth and C Wright Mills, from Max Weber,Essays in Sociology (London, 1948, 1977), pp 271-75. 46 See, for example, KM 11,pp 271-77 (June 2, 1883); KAl II, p 61 (June 15, i883). 47 See, for instance, KAl 11, p 157 (October 11, 1884), where Ramakrishna recalls a conversation vith Kristodas Pal, or his meeting with Vidyasagar, KM 111, p 15 (August 5, 1882). 48 See note 59 for reference to the culturally specific meanings of pagal (usually translated 'mad') in Bengal. 49 Life, p 176. 50 See for instance, Ramakanta Chakrabarti, Vaisnavismin Bengal (Calcutta, 1985), Chapter Xi, and passim. 51 KM 1, p 214 (October 22, 1885). 52 Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Anandamath (1882)-Bankim Rachanabali I (Calcutta, 1360/1953). 53 Benedict Anderson, A Time of Darkness and A Time of Light, in A Reid and 0 Mann, Perceptions of the Past in South East Asia (Heineman, 1979, 1982), p 226. 54 For a more detailed discussion, see my Renaissance, Kaliyuga and Kalki Constructions of Timeand History in Colonial Bengal (Paper presented at International Roundtable of Historians and Anthropologists, Bellagio, August 1989). 55 Carolyn Steedman, ed, The Radical Soldier's Tale (London, etc, 1988)-Part 1, p 103. 56 Mahatma BijoykrishnaGoswami in JivanVrittanta(Calcutta, n d), p 387. 57 Madeleine Biardeau, Hinduism, pp 33-34. 58 See, for instance,the section entitled Balakbhava in Satyacharan Mitra, Sri Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa: Jibani o Upadesh (Calcutta, 1897), pp 150-2. 59 See below, for the figure df the pagal in late 19th-early 20th century Bengali literature. For a study of the pagal in religious life, see June McDaniel, The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (Chicago, 1989). 60 Asish Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, etc, 1983), pp 7-8, 11-16, 52-53. 61 Life, pp 32, 323-25, 338, 345 and passim. 61a KM 1, Ch 21 (October 20, 1884, pp 178-86), is an account of a visit of Ramakrishna to the Marwaris of Barabazar. 62 Ramachandra Datta, Sri Sri.Ramakrishna Paramahwansa Dever Jivan-Vrittanta (Calcutta, 1890), pp 86-9. 63 Mahendranath's near- uniqueness is indicated by the nickname of 'master'

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(teacher) he came to be known by in Ramakrishna'scircle. Evidently there were no other teachers around. 64 For details about Ramakrishna'srelations with Brahmos, see Brojen Banerji and Sajanikanta Das, op cit, and Sankariprasad Basu, Vivekananda o Samakalin Bharatvarsha (Calcutta, 1979), chapter 13. 65 KM, passim. Bankimchandra,for instance, horrified Ramakrishna by declaring with provocative cynicism that food, sleep, and sex were the principal goals of human life. Vidyasagar remained polite, but never followed up Ramakrishna's one visit to him. 66 For some details, see my Kathamrita As Text, pp 24-26. 67 KM 1, p 22 (February 1882); p 131 (June 15, 1884); KMV p 7 (April 2, 1882). 68 KM 1, p 52 (October 27, 1882). 69 KM V, p 109 (March 9, 1884). 70 KM V, p 44 (June 2, 1883), p 4 (April 2, 1882). 70a For Ramakrishna. as we have just seen, the many burdens of the kerani include, notably, trying to educate his son and meeting the costs of the sacred thread investiture ceremony. 71 See my Kalki-avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early 20th century Bengal in Guha, ed, Subaltern Studies VI (Delhi, 1989), as well as Calcutta in the Bengal Renaissance (in Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed, Calcutta the Living City, Vol I Delhi 1990), and Kali-yugerKalpana o Aupanibeshik Samaj (in G Chattopadhyay, ed, Itihas A nusandhan 4, Calcutta, 1989). 72 W G Archer, Bazar Paintings of Calcutta (London, 1953); Mildred Archer, Indian Popular Paintings in the India Office Library (London 1977). 73 1 am borrowing this term from Robert Darnton, 'The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature in PreRevolutionary France (Past and Present, No S1, May 1971). 74 In its initial phase, that is to say: today some of its practitioners are more interested in the Saidian project of deconstructing a colonial discourge assumed to be all-pervasive. 7S For an xample, see my Kalki-avatar of Bikrampur, op cit. 76 These, along with natural calamities, are the prncipal featuresof Kaliyuga in 'Vana Parva'('MarkandayaSamasya!, 187-90)of the Mahabharta. I am using the English aion of Prapc Roy (Calcutta, n d), volume III, pp 397-413, along with the standard 19th century Bengali version of KaliprasannaSinha-Gopal Haldas, ed, Mahabharata (Calcutta,.1974), volume 11, pp 194-200. 77 Thus Pasupati Chattopadhyaya's Kalir Bamun (Calcutta, 1922)hits out at a lowercaste 'Sanskritising' movement.

(Calcutta, 1885). 81 Jayanta Goswami, p 1036. 82 KM III, p 143 (April 12, 1885);KM1, p 73 (December 14, 1882). 83 KM II, p 201 (March 1, 1885). 84 KM I, p 121 (June 15, 1884). 85 E P Thompson, 'Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism' (Past and Present, No 38, December 1967); Michel Foucault,Discipline and Punish (Paragure, 1979). 86 Mikhail Bak htin, The Dialogic Imagination (Texas,1981),passim. The dual burden of disciplinary time and foreign language is neatly summed up in a 'funny' story that can still be heard in Bengal about the clerk's life, perpetuallyrushing from home to shopping to office and back: 'Running, running, office come-tobuo to Sir late hoy' [Sir, still I am late]. I owe this reference to Sukumari Bhattacharji. For some interesting evidence about a hostility to 'naukri' based on aversion towards disciplinarytime persistingamong artisans till today, see Nita Kumar, The Artisans of Banaras Popular Cultureand Identity, 1880-1986, Princeton 1988, chapters 2, 4, and passim. 87 For some details, see my Swadeshikfovement in Bergal 1903-08 (New Delhi, 1973) chapter V. 88 KM IV, p 11 (February 25, 1883), p 68 (February 2, 1884), KM V, p 104 (December 26, 1883). 89 KM II, p 63 (June 15, 1883). 90 KM 111,p 83 (June 30, 1884), pp 160-61 (May 9, 1885). 91 For the centrality of 'willed submission' to bhakti, see Kumkum Sangari, 'Mirabai and the Spiritual Economy of Bhakti', (Economic and Political Weekly, XXV 27-28, July 7-14, 1990). 92 Extractsfrom IshwarchandraGupta'sessay are given in Jogendranath Gupta, Sadhak Kavi Ramprsad (Calcutta, 1954). 93 Vishnupuranagcited in Kumkum Sangari, op cit. I am grateful to Kumkum Sangari for drawing my attention to this important paradox. See also W C Beane, Myth, Cult and Symbols in Shakta Hinduism (London, 1977), pp 237-39, and Madeleine Biardieu, op cit, p 105.' 94 Here there is a significant contrast with the egalitarian dimensions of Christian apocalypse. 95 Megan McLaughlin, op cit. 96 For some examples, see my Kalki-avatar of Bikramour. 97 Ibid. 98 Aghorchandra Kabyatirtha,KalirAbasan, be Kalki-avatar Geetabhinoy (Calcutta, 1902). 99 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Conjugality and Hindu Naturalism in late 19th century Bengal (forthcoming paper). 100 KM III, p 19 (August 24, 1882),.and many similar passages; KM IV, p 201 (October 5, 1884). 78 Jayanta Goswami, SamajchitreUnabinghsha Salabdir Bangla Prahasan 101 KM IV, p 201, op cit. 102 See Tanika Sarkar, 'Bankimchandra and (Calcutta, n d), summarises the plots of the Impossibility of a Political Agenda' a large number of plays and farcesaround these themes. (forthcoming paper). 79 Durgacharan Roy, Debganer-Martea 103 KM 1V, p 101 (June 20, 1884). 104 For details of this Doyhata incident, see Agaman(Calcutta,1889). Kalki-avatar of BikrampuJr,op cit. 80 PrNnkrishna Kerani-carit Gangopadhyay.

105 Haribhakti (Calcutta 1909-10),a Vaishnava tract in simple language, argued that in Kaliyuga repetition of Harinama alone had to be sufficient for salvation, for the path of contemplation ('jnana') was blocked by 'worriesabout rice, dal, oil and salt... others get nervous about being late for office, and can think only of the angry face of the boss..' The theme of a compensatory easy way due to dimunition of time in Kaliyuga is already present in the Vishnupurana (c 100-500 AD)-W C Beane, op cit, p 238; Kumkum Sangari, op cit. 106 KM 1, p 23 (February 1882); KM II, p 69 (September 26 1883); KM jIl pp 60-1 (December 27, 1883). The third reference draws an analogy between the (inferior) devotion of the baby-monkeyand the more ritualised vaidhi form of bhakti: the kitteni, in contrast, embodies ragasuga. For the 13th century origins, see Jitendranath Bandopadhyay, Panchopasana (Calcutta, 1960) p 103: then, too, Tenkalai was the less ritualised variant. 107 KM 1, p 57; Jitendranath Bandopadhyay, pp 15-17. 108 I remain grateful to the late Hiteshranjan Sanyal for drawing my attention to this problem. 108a i MvoussaiefMasson, ThieOceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India (Dordrecht, 1980),pp 37-43. Masson thinks that Freud'suse of the term 'oceanic feeling' in his Civilisation and Its piscontents (1930) was derived from Romain Rolland's study of Ramakrishna. 109 RogerChartier,'Cultureas Appropriation: Popular Cultural Uses in Early Modern France' in S Kaplan, ed, Understanding Popular Culture(Mouton, 1984);Chartier, Cultural Uses of Print in Early AModern France (Princeton, 1987), Introduction. 110 L 1, Purba-katha o Balyc-jivana, pp 27-29, 40, 48-49, 51, 116. 111 L 11, Gurubhava-Uttarardha, p 44. 112 L I, Sadhak-bhava, p 82. 112a Life, pp 139 40, 176, 189-205; L 1, Sadhakbhava, pp 206-74. 113 Thus his sacred thread had 'flown off by itself, as if in a summer storm' KM 11, p 2 (October 16, 1882). Discarding the sacred thread is right and proper for a sanyasi-but then Ramakrishnahad never formally taken sanyas, either. 114 KM II, p 113 (September 21, 1884). 115 L 11, p 44. 116 Sudhir Chakrabarti, Sahebdhani Sampraday TaderGan (Calcutta, 1985), pp 52-53. 117 Sir John Woodruffe, Sakti and Sakta (Madras 1918, 1965),Chapter 27; Heinrich Zimmer,Philosophies of India (New York, 1951, 1956) Part 111 Chapter V; Chintaharan Chakrabarti, Tantras Studies on their Religion and Literature.(Calcutta, 1963); N N Bhattacharji, Hisory of the Tantric Religion (Delhi, 1982). Dakshincara and Varnacara refers to the 'righthand' and 'left-hand' varieties of Tantric ritual. Kundalini is the 'serpent power' which supposedly lies coiled on the lowest extremity of the spinal cord, and has to be aroused. See Bhattacharji, Chapter 11. 118 See, for instance, Motilal Roy, JivanSangini (Calcutta, 3rd ed, 1968), pp 39-48,

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and passim. 119 So much so-that the Kathamrita was used by Zimmer, op cit, to illustrate his presentation of Tantricism,while Ramakrishna's 'lucid' exposition of Kartabhaja tenets is taken to be authoritative in Ramakanta Chakrabarti, Vaisnavism in Bengal, (Calcutta, 1985), Chapter XX. 120 For the Kartabhaja, apart from Sudhir Chakrabarti and Ramakanta Chakrabarti, op cit, see Debendranath De, Kartabhaja Dharmar Itibritta (Calcutta, 1968, 1990).(I owe the last referenceto Ratmabali Chatterji). 121 KM IV, p 169 (September 19, 1884); KM 11, pp 30-31 (April 8, 1883). 122 KM V, p 181 (March 23, 1884). 123 Walter Neevel has argued that Ramakrishna's ideas can be understood "more adequately in the categories of TIntric thought and practice than in the concepts of Sankara'sadvaita which the biographers primarilyemploy. 'The lTansformation of Ramakrishna' in Bardwell L Smith, Hin-

duism: New Essays in the History of Religion (London, 1976), p 76. Following Zimmer, Neevel emphasised the allegedly 'world-affirmative' aspects of 1kntra, as opposed to Vedantic-asceticrenunciation; this, he argues, links Ramakrishna with Vivekananda's social service. Zimmer, however, had pointed out that Tantric 'dionysian' affirmation was of the world 'just as it is' this could as well rule out ameliorative action. 124 Jitendranath Bandopadhyay, Panchopasana (Calcutta, 1960), p 270. Chattopadhyay, 125 Jogindranath Bamakshepa (Calcutta, 1918). 126 L 1, pp 204-05, Ramakrishna, we are assured, went immediately into samadhi. 127 KM V, p 181. I would like to acknowledge my indebtednesson this point to the ongoing work of Jeff Krapal, Chicago University research scholar and particularly his

RevealingConcealingthe Sociat A Textual History of MahendranathGupta's Kathamrita (BengalStudis Ramakrishnas Conference,1990)., 128 Hiteshranjan Sanyal, Bangla Kirtaner Itihas (Calcutta 1989), passim. 129 One illustrationof this would be Aodruffers Sakti and Sakta with its playing-down of Varnacara and argument that lbntra presentsVedic truths in forms appropriate for Kaliyuga. 130 KM 1, p 21 (February 1882). 131 KM 1, p 42 (October 27, 1882). 132 1 am borrowing these terms from Sudipta Kaviraj. 132a Consider for instance the foUlowing passage, "You Can reach Iswarathrough any dharma, pursued with sincerity. Vaishnavas,Shaktas, Vedantists, Brahmos will all attain Iswam, and so will Muslims and Christians:' KMI1, p 19 (March 11, 1883). What is missing is the sence of 'Hindu' as a cohesive identity or dharma. 133 Life, pp 207-08, 253-55.

7, 1884);KMV. 134 KMIV,p 135(September p 14 (August 13, 1882). 135 Umeshchandra Bhattacharji,

Bharatdarshn-sara(Calcutta,1949),pp287-88; Jitendranath Bandopadhyay, PanChapterIV. chopasana,

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136 Madeleine Biardieu, op cit, p 45. 158 KM IV, p 31 (December 16, 1883); KM 1, 137 IWoobvious examples would be the Bauls pp 151-53 (October 19, 1884). of Bengal and the legend about Hindus 159 KM I, p 153 (October 19, 1884). and Muslims quarrelling over Kabir's 160 I am adapting the concept of 'distancing' body. from the work of the German social 138 For sonTe eaamples, see Sashibhushan historian Alf Ludtke, who has developed Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults the category of Eigensinn to analyse a (Calcutta, 1946), and Sudhir Chakrabarti, varietyof everydayworking-cass attitudc op cit. These involve a kind of withdrawal or 139 Kumkum Sangari, op cit. distancing into partially autonomous 140 Thus, 'varna-bhiveda' (caste distinction) spaces, and, despite the vast differences in are essential for mukti sadhan (quest for contexts and forms, I find Ludtke helpful salvation)... since the Supreme Lord has in suggesting a way out of the somewhat given different shakti (powers) to different rigid subordination/resistance binary. Aif Ludtke, 'The Historiography of Everyday jatis... What is bad to lose one's dharma. Life: The Personal and the Political' in The possibility of salvation remains so long as any dharma is devoutly followed?. Samuel and Jones, ed, Culture Ideology Lokenath Basu, Hindu-dharma-marma and Politics Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (Calcutta, 1856, 1873), pp 67, 2. (London, 1982); G Eley, 'Labour History, 141 KM II, p 2 (October 16, 1882). Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Ex-. 142 KM ll, pp 27-28 (April 8, 1883). perience, Culture and the Politics of the Everyday-A New Direction for German 143 Walter Neevel, op cit, L 1, II, passim. Social Hisotry?' (Journal of Modern 144 The photograph was published in Gurudas Barman, Sri Sri Ramakrishaacarit History, 61, ii, June 1989). (Calcutta, 1910), a never-reprinted 161 Max Weber,Sociology of Religion (Boston, biography, which lies today in the Rare 1969), pp 270, 167. Book Section of the National Library 161a KM 11, p 18 (March 11, 1883). (Calcutta). It has been reproduced, to the 162 Dineshchandra Sen, Brihat-Banga, Vol II best of my knowledge, only once-in Bro(Calcutta 1935), p 690. 163 KM II, p 63 (June 15, 1883). *jen Banerji and Sajanikanta Das, op cit. 145 Madeleine, Biardieu, pp 73-75. 164 There was an evident contrast between the Obscure Dasgupta, 146 Sashibhushan Vaishnava emphasis on lore and nonReligious Cults, passim. See also Daniel violence and Shakta animal sacrifices and Gold, The Lord as Gurw Hindi Sants in blood-imagery. the Northern Indian Tradition (Oxford, 165 Jogendranath Chattopadhyay, Bama1987). kshepa, op cit, p 39. 147 KM IV, p 191 (October 20, 1885), KM V, 166 Compare, e g, the 'mechanistic, and even p 121 (May 24, 1884). crass', Tantric-Sahajiya text translated by 148 Particularly,in the late 1870s, the journals EdwardG Dimock, The Place of the Hidbrought out by the Keshab Sen group. For den Moon (Chicago, 1966), pp 23548, details, see Brojen Banerjiand Sajanikanta with the richly emotive songs of RamDas, passim. prsad, or the Shyamasangitsincorporad 149 Girishchandra Ghosh and Ramchandra in the audio-cassettes of the 20th century Datta in particular upheld the avatar singer Pannalal Bhattacharji. thesis, aindthe KM records sharp debates 167 Sashibhushan Dasgupta, Bharate Shaktiaround this issue with Mahendralal sadhana 0 Shakta Sahitya (Calcutta, Sircar-if, particularly KM IV, pp 258, 1960), chapter 8; Asitkumar Bando264, 266-67, 275-76 (October 23-24 1885). padhyay, Bangla Sahityer Itibritta, III, 2 150 These amount to no more than super(Calcutta, 1966, 1981) chapter 3. natural visions seen by Ramakrishna and 168 As for instance in Dewan RamndulaiNandi not external transformations. of Tipura's 'sakli tomar acchakchamaye 151 See below. Taratumi169W C BeaneoMyth,Cultand 152 1 M Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: An Symbols in Sakta Hinduism (London, Anthropological Study of Spirit Posses1977), Chapter 5. sion and Shamanism (Penguin, 1971, 1975) 170 Asitkumar Bandhopadhyay, op cit. p 39. 171 KM 1, p 235 (October 26, 1885). 153 Ibid, pp 290-91. 172 KM IV, p 68 (February 2, 1884); p 201 154 Ramakanta Chakrabarti, op cit, Deben(October 5, 1884). dranath De, op cit. 173 Asitkumar Bandopadhyay, op cit, 11, I 155 Charles H Capwell, 'The Esoteric Beliefs (Calcutta, 1966, 198). of the Bauls of Bengal' (Journal of Asian 174 For some details, see nqySwadeshi MoveStudies, XXXIII, February 2, 1974). met in Bengal 1903-08(New Dclhii 1973) Asitkumar Bandopadhyay, Bangla chapter VI. Sahityer Itibritta III, 2 (Calcutta, 1966, 175 V N Volashinov, Marxism and the .1981). Philosophy of Language (Leningrad, 1930, 156 1 have been helped greatly while formuLondon, 1973). lating this contrast by Kumkum Sanpri's 176 Swami Gambhirananda, ed, Apostles of distinction, op cit, between Kabir'sreliance Shri Ramakrishna(Calcutta, 1967), p 124. on 'the intellecttualclarity and 'distances 177 Life of Swami Vivekanandaby his Eastern of analogy or allegory' and Mira's 'blurand Western Disciples (Almora, 1912, red and displacing realm of metaphor' 1963), pp 88-90. 157 See, for instance, the well known analysis 178 See,forinstance,the accountsof Yoganan-

July 18, 1992

in of LouisDumont,'WorldRenunaiation IndianReligions'(Contributorsto Indian Sociology.IV, 1960).

da (YogindranathChaudhuri),Saradananda (Sarat Chakrabarti),Sivananda (TaraknathGhosh) and 'li riyzananda 1565

(Harinath Chattopadhyay) in Gambhirananda, op cit, pp 148,.171, 202, 305; as well as the biography of a lay devotee, Sartchandra Chakrabarti's SaadIu Nag Mahasay (Calcutta, 1912, 1934). 179 The garbhadan. ritual demanded intercourse immediately after the first menses, and there was a massive agitation, particularly in Bengal, against the yeformistcum-government proposal to raise the age of consent to 12 years in 1891. Amiya Sen, Hindu Revivalism in late 19th Century Bengal (unpublished thesis, Delhi University); Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Conjugality and Hindu Nationalism, op cit. 180 Gambhirananda, p 171. 181 Thus KM II, pp 161-62(October 11, 1882); KM 111,pp 161-62(May 9, 1888), related a story about a gunr who convinces a disciple that family affection is illusory, by giving him a medicine that apparently kills him: his mother and wife, though apparently full of sorrow, refuse the guru's offer that he could returnto life if they are prepared to die in his place. The story is not directly about the evils of kamini at very significantly, no male all-but, relative is put to the same test. 182 L 1, Gurubhava-Purbardha, pp 31-36. 182a A somewhat similar phenomenon. has been noticed among early methodist women: Henry Abelove, 'The Sexual Polities of Early Western Methodism' in J Obelhenrich, etc, ed, Disciplines of Faith (London, 1987). 183 Ibid, p 33; L II, Gurubhava- Uttarardha, p 238. 184 More specifically, by Brahmos and those influenced by them. Shri 185 Naliniranjan Chattopadhyay, Ramakrishna 0 Bang Rangamancha (Calcutta, 1978). 186 Vivekananda to Ramakrishnananda, August 23, 18%-Patrabali II (Calcutta, 1949, 1960), pp 127-28. 187 Asutosh Bhattacharji, ed, Nati Binodini Rachana-Sangraha (Calcutta, 1987). 188 Abhaya Dasgupta, ed, Sri Sri SaradaDevi Atmakatha (Calcutta, 1980), pp 12, 15, 18, 30-31,34, 39, 67-68, 73, 75, 77, 79,93, 109. 189 Chandrasekhar Chattopadhyay, Sri Sri Latu Maharaj Smriti-Katha (Calcutta, '1 nr-iD 33 45. 93. 95. 119-21, 370. p A 190 TWo early biographies emphasised Ramakrishna's Tantric connections: Satyacharan Mitra, Sri Sri Ramakrishna Jibani 0 Upadesh (Calcutta, P 1897), and Bhubanchandra Mukhopadhyay, Ramakrishna Charitamrita (Calcutta, 1901). Kalibrishnananda Giri, Sri Ramakrishner Sri-guru Bhairabi Yogeswari(Calcutta, 1936) refersto a controversy about the role of Bhairabi in the mid-1930s. 191 LUfeof Swami Vivekanandaby his Eastern and Western Disciples (Almora, 1912, 1963), pp 153-55. 192 Swami Gambhirananda, History of the RamakrishnaMath and Mission (Calcutta, 1957), pp 3941; Ramachandra Datta, Sri Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansadevfer Jivan-Vrittanta (Calcutta, 1890, 1910); Ibid, Tattva Prakashik (4th ed,

1S66

Kankurgachi, 1912). The evils of ehakri figure prominently in Ramachandra Dutta's play Lilamrita (Calcutta, 1900). 193 Sarada DevL Atmakath4 op cit, pp 67-68, 93, 106. 194 "'if you can give up bell-ringing, well and good, otherwise I will not be able to join you... The only karma I understand is service to others, everything else is evil karma. Hence I bow to the Buddha. Do you understand? A big gap is emerging between your group and myself..." Vivekananda to Sashi (Ramakrishnananda), n d. 1895-Patrabali I (Calcutta, 1948, 1954), p 444, 446. The translation is mine: the official translation, in Letters of Swami Vivekananda (Mayavati, 1940, Calcutta, 1970), p 249, tones down the language considerably.

stucted the later to substitute kama for kamini in the material he was preparing for Max Muller, PatrabaIi, Il, p 100. 208 Letters to Haripada Mitra, December 28, 1893; to Sashi, March 19, 1894, Letters, pp 61, 81. 209 See for example, From Colombo to Almora, CW, III, pp 151-53, 198, 207 ff. 210 Nivedita, The Master As I Saw Him (Calcutta, 1910, 1%3), pp 142-43, 282-86. 211 S N Dhar, A Comprehensive Biography of Swami Vivekananda,Vol I (Madras, 1975), chapter 9. 212 As Brahmoism remained confined to the educated upper-caste bhadralok, intermarriage, inter-dining, and giving up of the sacredthread remainedrestrictedto the Brahmans, Kayasthas and Vaidyas who had become Brahmos.

195 In plays like Prayaschittaand Muktadhara. 196 "... When you were a child, you merrily sucked your mother's breasts, and the mother did all the worrying-now, if you stop worrying, Hari will do the worrying for you. Nasiram, in the play with that name-Ray and Bhattacharji, ed, GirishRachanabali, IV (Calcutta, 1974). 197 Like Batul in Srivatsa-Cinta(1884)or Bhajahari and Prafulla herself in Prafulla (1889), ibid.

213 Letter to Sashi, March 19, 1894, Letters, p 81. 214 As in Shraddhanand'sactivities in the early 1920s, or earlier in Bengal, the 'dying race' theme developed by U N Mukherji (1 owe this reference to Pradipkumar Dutta).

198 This in fact was a constant refrain in his conversation. See, for instance, his encounter with Sasadhar Tarakachudamani, the Hindu-revivalist orator, in KM 111,72 ff (June 30, 1884). 199 Gurudas Barmer, Sri Sri Ramakrishna Charit (Calcutta 1910), quoting a conversation with Kristodas Pal, pp 206-07. 200 Letterto Sashi, March 19, 1894, Lettersof Swami Vivekananda, p 82. 201 "I have given up at present my plan for the education of the masses. It will come by degrees. What I now want is a band of fiery missionaries.' Letter to Alasinga, January 12, 1885, ibid, p 197. 202 Swami Gambirananda, History of the Ramakrishna Math and Mission, pp 123, 117-18. 203 Vedantism in Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda(9th ed, 1964, henceforward CW), 111, p 130. 204 TWoexamples, from many; "I thoroughly appreciate the power and potency of bhakti on men to suit the needs of different times, What we now want in our country, however,is not so much weeping, but a little strength. What a mine of strengthis in this ImpersonalGod... That you get alone in the Vedanta--and there alone" Reply to Jaffna welconie address, 1897-CWIII, p 130. "Allof religion is contained in the Vedanta, that is, in the three stages of the Vedanta philosophy, the Dvaita, Visisthdvaita, and Advaita; one comes after the other:' This he claimed to be "my discovery". Letter to Alasinga, May 6, 1895, Letters, p 227. 205 Nivedita, Our Masterand His Message, introduction to CW 1, p x. 206 From Colombo to Almora, CW 111, pp 274-75. 20f7 See, for instance, Vivekananda to Sashi, June 24, 18%6,where he explicitly in-

215 The Future of India, CW III, pp 294-98. 216 1 am using the official English translation in CW III. 217 Letters, pp 317-18. 218 Ibid. 219 Lucy E Guiness, Across India at the Dawn of the 7wentieth Century (London, 1898), p 147 (1 owe this reference to Tanika Sarkar). 220 Asish Nandy, Intimate Enemy (Delhi, 1983). 221 Life of Swami Vivekananda, p 489. 222 Letter to Alasinga, September 27, 1894, Letters, p 148. 223 Problem of Modern India and Its Solution (July 1899), CW, IV. 224 With one notable exception-a violently anti-British letter to Mary Hale, October 30, 1899, referringto "blood-sucking"and a "reignof terror",Ltters, pp 394-96. But Vivekanandaalmost certainlydid not consider drain of wealth to be the prime cause of mass poverty. 225 Nivedita, The Masier as I Saw Him, p 53. 226 Nivedita recallshis warmadmirtion about Mughal achievements, ibid, chapters 3, 5. 227 CW, 111,p 278. 228 That, roughly, is the dominant outlook of contemporary 'Hindutva' as embodied above all in the Viswa Hindu Parishad.See Tapan Basu, Pradip Dutta, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Sambudha Sen, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: The Politics of Hindutva (Longman, forthcoming). 229 The Master as I Saw Him, pp 124, 128. 230 Letter to Mary Hale, June 17, 190O,to Josephine MacLeod, April 18, 1900, Letters, pp 422-23. 231 Gambirananda, History of Ramakrishna Math and Mission, pp 88-90,202-04,213. 232 Government of Bengal, Home PoUlConfidential, 372/1910 (West Bengal State Archives). 233 Sanjib Chattopadhyay, Agni Sanket (Calcutta 1984), pp 57, 39, 60, 104 and passim.

Economic and Political Weekly

July 18, 1992