Thakur Sri Ramakrishna by Rajiv Mehrotra

Author:Rajiv Mehrotra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House, Inc.
Published: 2012-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

Sri Ramakrishna walking towards Kali temple.

(Sketch by Nandlal Bose)

Who knows what Kali is.

The six philosophies cannot explain her …

Raja Rammohan Roy

Sri Ramakrishna continued his evolution in human form with myriad insights and experiences. His was not a single transforming moment of enlightenment, but a continuing sadhana along the different paths available to humankind. This was a time when parts of urban Bengal came under the influence of the imperial British intellectual traditions.

In 1774, a boy was born to an orthodox, aristocratic Bengali Brahmin family, that, at the age of sixteen, he offended mightily by publishing a book against image worship. This boy was Rammohan Roy. Like many upper-class Indians educated by the British, he had misunderstood the mind of India at its most fundamental.

English missionaries, their ignorance of the Vedas inexhaustible, held that ‘Hinduism’ was a primitive polytheistic tangle of cults and idolatry, far inferior to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

These intellectual young men of India, uncomfortably straddling two cultures, aped their conquerors indiscriminately. As the conquered do, they absorbed their values, cloned themselves on their fashions and hoped to acquire, thereby, the powers of the ‘superior race’. Beset by a severe inferiority complex engendered by their supercilious masters, they were despised by the British because of their hopeless efforts at imitation, and condemned by orthodox Hindus as traitors to the traditions of their people.

Rammohan Roy had shown great sympathy for Islam and Christianity. He went to Tibet in search of the Buddhist mysteries. He extracted from Christianity its ethical system, but rejected the divinity of Christ as he denied the Hindu incarnation. The religion of Islam influenced him to a great extent in the formulation of his monotheistic doctrines. But he always went back to the Vedas for his spiritual inspiration.

The founder of the Brahmo movement and the Brahmo Samaj (1828), Raja Rammohan Roy (given the title of Raja by the Emperor of Delhi in 1830) was dedicated to the ‘worship and adoration of the Eternal, the Unsearchable, the Immutable Being, who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe’. The Samaj was open to all without distinction of colour, creed, caste, nation or religion.

But Raja Rammohan Roy had an enquiring, intelligent mind. While in alliance with British colonial authorities and Indian free thinkers, he challenged the ossified, misunderstood, misused Hindu practices of sati, caste and the oppressive illiteracy of women, yet he believed India should return to the original purity of ancient Vedic concepts of virtuous behaviour and the worship of the Eternal.

However, the need to be accepted by the British was such that the rituals of the Brahmo Samaj sounded almost like a Protestant church service, thereby alienating the majority of Indians who needed the colour and variety of their own traditions.

While Sri Ramakrishna did not meet Raja Rammohan Roy, who died on a visit to England, he did briefly meet his successor, Devendranath Tagore, father of the redoubtable Rabindranath – the icon of modern Bengali culture. Raja Rammohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, while carrying in its centre the essential spark of Indian mysticism, swung West in many of its forms and beliefs.

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