Women will be the saviours
Speaking generally
By Chanchal Sarkar

ONE deeply interesting book by a Buddhist scholar, an Indian, has a statement about Swami Vivekananda saying how he shook the earth. The tremors are still vibrating. I felt them the other day when I went to the Sarada Math in Delhi to have a look at its bookshop.

A great wish of Vivekananda was to see women, honed and burnished by tapasya and meditation, also acquire the discipline of service found in the West to serve people. It took many years after Vivekananda’s death in 1902 to start up Sarada Math in Dakshineswar on the shore of the Ganga opposite to Belur Math in 1953.

Some months ago the lady Prabrajika Mokshaprana who was head of the Math from 1973 to 1999 died. Her life is almost a role model for sanyasins from India and abroad and from other religions. One of the Presidents of the RK Mission Swami Birajananda (direct disciple of Swami Vivekananda) had written to Mokshaprana, "In the Math prepare yourself to receive women of all creeds and beliefs". After a class held for the newly arrived devotees Mokshaprana found a woman from the South shedding tears. Asked, she said she didn’t understand Bengali. Mokshaprana set about teaching her. Children in the school at the ashram were very dissatisfied at not having the "red sari didimonies" — the sanyasins — they didn’t think much of the lay teachers.

I am deeply impressed and inspired by the discipline and spirit of service of the sanyasins who are also deeply tied to meditation — the ideal set by Vivekananda.

The VHP-RSS-BJP are, apparently, admirers of Vivekananda but they do not know him, nor do they understand the breadth of his mind or his concept of religion which soared far above one of them, Hinduism. It is a thousand pities if we have to accept the interpretation of Hindutva from the RSS-VHP-BJP.

Women will be the ultimate saviours of India, not the men. And so I hope the life and outlook of Prabrajika Mokshaprana will move more and more women. In charge of the Delhi bookshop is an Australian woman. The Math had a centre in Sydney and she had entered the order there.

Her family, she said, still could not understand her powerful attraction to the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda-Sarada ideal.

Maulana Edhi

We are at a time when all that matters is greed and more and ever more consumer goods. Yet there are people who uphold the highest ideals of human living. Among such are Nobel Prize winners but nearest our Asian world are the winners of the Magsaysay Awards. When we look back at them they make our hearts warm, perhaps we associate with them more than with the Nobel Prize winners because those are, at times, people of a much higher level of intellectual activity. To be frank, though, there are also the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Magsaysay people look back on their awardees from time to time and latterly I have been thinking back to two people — Maulana Edhi of Karachi and the Dalai Lama.

Maulana Edhi is a phenomenon. At a young age he started an ambulance service in Karachi, now there are hospitals, an aerial medical service, and also orphanages. I remember visiting him in Karachi in his simple office. He hadn’t the least touch of pride or self-importance, just a man from Saurashtra with a black and white Maulana beard in a simple small office in a crowded part of Karachi with steel cabinets dealing with his organisations. He showed me his room with a simple metal bed and a large refrigerator full of ampules for the hospitals. Outside his office was a box for donations. He was a man it was impossible not to like. He told me, with a smile, that he belonged to the comany of the greatest people of India — Gandhiji was a Gujarati, he said, and so was Jinnah and so was he, he said!

When I visited him his wife had gone out somewhere but just before I left she returned, a sweet faced woman, Bilquis, who shared his work. Edhi had offered to marry several other nurses but they didn’t accept him but Bilquis did. Someone told me that if Maulana Edhi stepped on to the road asking for donations he was covered with backnotes in minutes. It is the Maulana who is the true representative of our subcontinent and not General Musharraf or Atal Behari Vajpayee.