Why 11 September Is The Day To Remember Swami Vivekananda And Subramaniya Bharathi
Their words and legacy can inspire all right-thinking people whenever they are in need of inspiration. However, 11 September offers a special opportunity to pay tribute to two great Indian minds – Swami Vivekananda and Subramaniya Bharathi.
This day, September 11, is a special day for Indians in general and Tamils in particular.
A hundred and twenty four years ago, on 11 September, 1893, a young Hindu hesitatingly stood on a platform in America. He was praying in his heart to Saraswati, the Vedic-Buddhist Goddess of learning, and then, he uttered the words, ‘sisters and brothers of America’. And with these simple words, history of India, and with it, the destiny of crores of people on earth changed forever. The words in themselves could have been just customary, but the spirit that manifested when the young unknown monk from India spoke to them, touched the hearts of the audience who gave a standing ovation. Vedantic humanism, the most universal expression of what decades later Albert Einstein would call the cosmic religious feeling, had arrived on the world stage. And it was this day 124 years ago.
One should be aware of the historic context in which the words were uttered to understand their full impact. India was a colony of Britain. By 1890s, the missionaries and colonialists had relentlessly spread the propaganda which depicted India as a den of murderous superstitions, and had stereotyped Indian religion as the most demeaning of all expressions of religion humanity ever had the misfortune to suffer. And, from that land, a monk addressed all humanity as the ‘sisters and brothers’ – a declaration of universal brotherhood of all humanity.
In that very crisp address of less than 500 words, Swami Vivekananda provided us with certain everlasting frameworks for future dialogues with organised religions and also the need for all humanity to be the custodians of theo-diversity.
He pointed out that the Hindus have shown the world not just tolerance but ‘universal acceptance’: “We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” He went on to point out that this had been demonstrated historically:
I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation.
The mention of Israelites in India is very interesting. Within a year at Memphis on 17 January 1894, he was delivering a lecture ‘The Destiny of Man’. Here he made an attack on what we today know as anti-Semitism – “For 1,900 years you have been trying to crush the Jews. Why could you not crush them? Echo answers: Ignorance and bigotry can never crush truth." He concluded this lecture by saying: "Let us help, and not destroy."
What happened in the world parliament at Chicago on 11 September, soon gave India the much needed inspiration. Vivekananda became the icon of a resurgent India. The universal Vedantic humanism of Sri Ramakrishna-Vivekananda became the bedrock of the Indian freedom movement and social reform movements. Whether it was women’s liberation or social justice and harmony, one can find behind every positive social reformer in India the inspiration of Swami Vivekananda.
11 September And Tamil Nadu
Swami Vivekananda had a special relation to Tamil Nadu and nurtured in him a special love for the Tamil people and their culture. He always had his hope in the ‘youth of Madras’. At the same time, he repeatedly warned against the fissiparous tendencies that were developing in the form of Aryan-Dravidian race theories. Here, one needs to quote in detail Swami Vivekananda, whose words are today sadly more relevant than even at the time of their utterance:
The super-arrogated excellence of birth of any caste in India is only pure myth, and in no part of India has it, we are sorry to say, found such congenial soil, owing to linguistic differences, as in the south. ...Sufficient for us to note the extreme tension of feeling that is evident between the Brahmins and non-Brahmins of the Madras Presidency. ... Then anyone who claims to be a Brahmin should prove his pretensions, first by manifesting that spirituality, and next by raising others to the same status. On the face of this, it seems that most of them are only nursing a false pride of birth; and any schemer, native or foreign, who can pander to this vanity and inherent laziness by fulsome sophistry, appears to satisfy most. Beware, Brahmins, this is the sign of death! Arise and show your manhood, your Brahminhood, by raising the non-Brahmins around you – not in the spirit of a master – not with the rotten canker of egotism crawling with superstitions and the charlatanry of East and West – but in the spirit of a servant. For verily he who knows how to serve knows how to rule. The non-Brahmins also have been spending their energy in kindling the fire of caste hatred – vain and useless to solve the problem – to which every non-Hindu is only too glad to throw on a load of fuel. ... In the midst of this ignorant clamour and hatred, we are delighted to find Pandit D. Savariroyan pursuing the only legitimate and the only sensible course. Instead of wasting precious vitality in foolish and meaningless quarrels, Pandit Savariroyan has undertaken in his articles on the “Admixture of the Aryan with Tamilian” in the Siddhanta Deepika, to clear away not only a lot of haze, created by a too adventurous Western philology, but to pave the way to a better understanding of the caste problem in the South. ... A gentle yet clear brushing off of the cobwebs of the so-called Aryan theory and all its vicious corollaries is therefore absolutely necessary, especially for the South, and a proper self-respect created by a knowledge of the past grandeur of one of the great ancestors of the Aryan race – the great Tamilians.
But the trust Swami Vivekananda had on Tamils was not all in vain. Tamil Nadu produced some of the greatest minds for centuries to come, who carried on the fire lit by Swami Vivekananda.
Subramaniya Bharathi (1882-1921), the great Tamil poet-genius who emphasised equally on national liberation and radical social reforms, is today in Tamil Nadu the face of women liberation, social equality as well as patriotism. He derived his inspiration from Swami Vivekananda. He used the same non-racial framework Swami Vivekananda used in approaching the so-called Aryan problem. Rejecting the racial interpretation of the term, he used the term ‘Arya’ in many of his songs to mean what it has always meant in Indic languages – virtuous.
So he calls Agastya – the great legendary rishi who according to tradition gave Tamil its grammar, as ‘Aryan’ and calls Bharat Mata ‘Arya Rani’. This is in line with traditional Tamil poetry where Shiva Himself is called ‘Aryan’. Bharathi took pains to explain what he meant by the ‘Aryan heritage’ of the nation:
The triple wealth of knowledge, character and material prosperity ... when we say ‘Arya inheritance’ we mean the knowledge wealth of the Hindus. Our Vedas, our Sastras, our society, our languages, our poetry, our sculpture, our music, our dance forms, our temple towers, our traditional buildings, our huts ... the common name for all these is ‘Arya inheritance’; Shakuntala of Kalidasa, Tulasidas Ramayana in Hindi, Kamba Ramayanam, Chilapathikaram, Thirukural, the hymns of Aandal - the collective name for all these is ‘Arya inheritance’; The great temple of Tanjavur, Thirumalai Nayakkar Mahal at Madurai, the compositions of Thiyagaraja, the cave temples of Ellora, Taj Mahal in Aghra, the flute of Saraba Sastri - all these we call the ‘Arya inheritance’. So the ‘Arya inheritance’ is the collective civilization of entire Hindustan. We shall live if we keep this inheritance alive.
Both Bharathi and Swami Vivekananda sought to remove the pseudo-scientific racial meaning given to the term ‘Arya’ by colonial Indology and pointed out forcefully that the term Arya in traditional Indian context never had a racial meaning. Unfortunately, the world did not heed their advice. And the mischief colonial Indologists played in India revisited Europe in the form of the Nazi plague.
Bharathi is known prominently in Tamil Nadu not only for his patriotic songs but also for his fearless expressions on issues of jati and women’s liberation. Again, his inspiration here came from the Sri Ramakrishna-Vivekananda lineage. He had met Sister Nivedita, the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda at Calcutta when he was returning from the Indian National Congress session of 1905. This meeting was a profound and life-changing experience for him. His wife, Chellamma, felt this change in Bharathi firsthand and had described it in detail in her biography of her husband. The granddaughter of Bharathi writes about this transformation:
“Sister Nivedita asked Bharati why he had not brought his wife to the Congress and he apparently answered, “We do not usually bring our wives to meetings; moreover, of what use would it have been to bring her to the Indian Congress”? Nivedita explained to Bharati the greatness of women and the importance of recognizing that women are free beings, like men, and that woman should be treated as the equal of man. At that very moment, Bharati’s vision of a “New Woman” (pudumai penn) was born in his poet’s heart. And who else could this new woman be, but his own wife, the embodiment and personification of his pudumai penn? In this sense, Chellamma became Bharati’s goddess. Chellamma was immediately aware of the profound change that had happened in Bharati. (Source)“
Interestingly prior to this life-changing event, Bharathi, who is today the face of women’s liberation in Tamil Nadu, had even castigated women who were advocating women suffrage in Western countries, points out eminent Tamil writer Dr Lakshmi Subramaniam (Ambai). To this day, it is the imagery of Bharathi’s pudumai penn or new woman which every Tamil-learning child internalises as the self-image for a liberated life journey. Traditional social stagnation and patriarchy had made as feminine virtues an innate fear and shyness. Bharathi sang:
Dogs need to be shy and ever docile;
Intelligence, virtue, Independence so brave
are the virtues women of class nurture.
Bharathi can be considered in a way the Cinderella of modern pan-Indian poetry. Outside Tamil Nadu, he is known mainly through Amar Chitra Katha and the morning hymn of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Ekatmata Stotra). He sang of science as well as technology. He spoke of the cosmic vision unveiled by science. Sitting in the backwaters of a colonised Asian nation, he was speaking of the whirling galaxies and electrons. He sang of life as a web with no end on both sides. In all these, he saw his own self expanded in all glory. In pure sense of Advaita, he sang of no barrier between himself and all existence. He sang of Krishna as his child, consort and servant. It was on another 11 September, that of 1921, that Subramaniya Bharathi became immortal. He had not seen his fortieth birthday, just like Swami Vivekananda.