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K.R.N.
Swamy on the ancestral house of Swami Vivekananda in Calcutta.
His 103rd death anniversary falls on July 4
OF the hundreds of eminent Indians Calcutta nurtured in the past two centuries, perhaps it is most proud of Swami Vivekananda and Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s ancestral mansion in the Jorasanko area of Calcutta is comparatively well-preserved as is his memorial. But, till the restoration started in 1993 and ended in 2004, the family house of Swami Vivekananda in the same city was in a shambles. The house is located in Simla Palli, a locality in north Calcutta. During Swamiji’s time, the mansion was surrounded by a garden and beyond that there was a large open space. But in later years, owing to the city’s growth and the overcrowding of buildings, the approach road to the building got narrowed into a lane, now known as Gour Mohan Mukherjee Street. The dilapidated structure was being used by unauthorised occupants ever since the property was divided between Vivekananda’s relatives in 1885 following the death of his father. Happily for the R. K.
Mission, in the book, Vivekananda by His Eastern and Western
Disciples, published from Mayavati in 1914, there is a fairly good
description of the original building as it remained in the first
decade of the 20th century. Bricks were brought from West Bengal’s
Bankura district and limestone from Madhya Pradesh as in the original
building and experts belonging to the Archaeological Society of India
supervised the work. The resultant building was an enormous, 28-room,
21,600 sq ft mansion, the virtual copy of the one built by Vivekananda’s
wealthy great-grandfather. |
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