The partition of Bengal became a reality on 16 October 1905. Now a new province called East Bengal was created consisting of Chittagong, Dacca and Rajshahi divisions, Tripura, Maldah and Assam. Calcutta witnessed massive protests, with complete hartal. What took the British Indian Government by surprise was the spontaneous show of unity, thousands of people bathed in the Ganges as an act of purification. Under the leadership of Rabindranath Tagore, people tied ‘Raakhi’ on each other’s wrists, with the poet taking to the streets singing ‘Banglar Mati Banglar Jal’.

This powerful imagery of the anti-partition movement with its stormy political activities, secret revolutionary societies and public proclamations brought together Aurobindo Ghose, Surendranath Bandyopadhyay, Krishna Kumar Mitra, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipan Chandra Pal to name a few. Margaret Noble from Ireland, the disciple of Swami Vivekananda and famously known as Sister Nivedita, came in close contact with the Tagore family during these tumultuous years following 1905.

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Sister Nivedita’s dedication to the cause of Swami Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Mission needs little introduction to most Indians. October is the month of her birth and death anniversaries; we pay homage to the Sister who identified completely with her Master’s life, had the opportunity to travel with him across United States and UK, imbibing lessons from innumerable lectures and writings he left for posterity. What is lesser-known is Sister Nivedita’s contribution to the theories and practice of education; her deep understanding of the role edu- cation had to play in nation building.

She wrote ‘Hints on National Education’ as a series of papers, published in 1914 as a book. In its introduction, she wrote with characteristic passion, “We all know that the fu- ture of India depends, for us, on education. Not that industry and commerce are unimportant, but because all things are possible to the educated, and nothing whatever to the uneducated man.

We know also that this education, to be of any avail, must extend through all degrees, from its lowest and humblest grades. We must have technical education and we must have also higher research, because technical education, without higher research, is a branch without a tree, a blossom without any root. We must have education of women, as well as education of men. We must have secular education, as well as religious. And, almost more important than any of these, we must have education of the people, and for this, we must depend upon ourselves.”

Sister Nivedita, though born into an Irish Methodist family, associated herself with the spirit of India, Indians and the future of a free and united country. She emphasized, “We must recognise the still greater urgency of giving knowledge. There is no other way of making the unity of our country effective.” She wanted people to talk the same language, learn to express themselves in similar ways and therefore acquire a sense of national
solidarity. Universal education was a building block of this nationhood.

She was aware that in America the schools emphasised the learning of mechanical processes; while in Australia schools focused on agriculture. She explained, “in the matter of edu- cation, in different historical epochs, nations select different branches of training, as of central necessity to their children, only, in reality because they are paramount factors for the moment, in the national life.”

Scanning through Indian history, she said, “In Bengal, for instance, under the Sanskrit Renascence of the Guptas, knowledge of the Sanskrit language and literature became distinctive marks of a gentleman. A thousand years later, a man in the same position had to be versed in Persian also. Today, English is the test. Thus, a similar mental and social dignity is attained by changing means, at different epochs.”

Referring to Indian civilization, she noted the Hindu has always clearly perceived the mind behind the method which education has fundamentally to deal with. This has saved the Indian genius from being destroyed. “Just so long as the Brahminic system of directly training the minds of the young to concentration persists, will the Indian people remain potentially equal to the conquest of any difficulty that the changing ages may bring them,” she wrote, underlining the ‘sleeping power of the Indian mind’.

Here she introduced learnings from Swami Vivekananda. “The training of the attention ~ rather than the learning of any special subject, or the development of any particular faculty ~ has always been, as Swami Vivekananda claimed for it, the choen goal of Hindu education. Great men have been only as incidents, in the tale of this national effort, to achieve control and self-direction of the mind itself.” What had been achieved in the past, could now be achieved. “Our forefathers never neglected the culture and development of the mind itself,” she asserted. Education may not be reduced to schemes of instruction; the great bulk of our popular minds are preoccupied with this task which is geared towards earning individual livelihoods.

What Sister Nivedita proposed, and argued for, was a conscious unification of the mind “in order that we may be better able to compass thereby the common wealth, the good of the whole. This substitution of the common good for the particular good, with the result that a higher level of individual good is rendered possible, is a process whose practicability is evidenced in Europe herself.”

In Paper II, compiled in Hints on National Education, she presented her perspective. She wrote, “In a perfect education, we can easily distinguish three different elements, not always chronologically distinct. First, if we would obtain from a human mind the highest possi- ble return, we must recognise in its education the stage of prepa-ring it to learn, of training it to receive impressions, of developing it intensively, as it were, independently of the particular branch of knowledge through which this is done. Of the very existence of this phase of the educational process, many are unaware.”

Educationists have read, and re-read these lines, to realize the depth of Sister Nivedita’s thought and her spiritual evolution as she focused on how minds of students need to be nurtured, trained, and developed. With education, the Indian genius would blossom and flourish. The mystery and mystique of such educational train ing only sharpened her explanations as she studied the development of education in European countries and in India.

“Secondly, in all historic epochs, but pre-eminently in this modern age, there is a cer- tain characteristic fund of ideas and concepts which is common to society as a whole, and must be imparted to every individual who is to pass, in his mature life, as efficient. This is the element that is supposed in the common acceptance to be the whole of education. It bulks the largest. It costs the most labour.

It is the process that it is most obviously impossible to eliminate. And yet it is really only one of three elements. And strange to say, it is the very one which is least es- sential to the manifestation of what we call genius. Never was there a period in the world’s history, when this aspect of educa- tion was so large or imperative as today.” Sister Nivedita, foc- ussing on ‘genius’, makes clear her goals.

“The third element in a perfect human development sweeps away the other two. It takes note of them only by implication, as it were, in the higher or lower fitness of the mind itself. The man meets his Guru, and devotes himself to a perfect passivity. Or he surren- ders to some absorbing idea, which becomes the passion of his life. Or he takes up a pursuit, and lives henceforth for it, and it alone. The phase of the one has succeeded to the phase of the many. Regarded as a mind, the man has become a full human organism. He now stands a chance of contributing to the riches of humanity as a whole,” she wrote.

In Sister Nivedita’s perspective, it was the third element which was predominant in India; the other two would occur by accident, while in the West “numbers one and two was observed and analysed, allowing number three to occur by accident!”

“Yet all three have their science, and certainly the last is not without it. Egoistic response to stimulus, constant mental activity, much restlessness and intel- lectual change of appetite, loud self-assertion, argumentativeness, and desire to manifest power, are apt to be the charac- teristics of a healthy second stage,” she noted, “But when the Guru comes, or the idea that is to dominate the life is apprehended, there may be a keen initial struggle, but after it there is a period of profound apparent quiet.”

(The writer is a researcher- writer on heritage and history, and former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya)