Ramakrishna Paramahamsa , livre ebook

While Ramakrishna Paramahamsa has been the subject of innumerable volumes devoted to his life and teachings over the past century and a half, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa: The Sadhaka of Dakshineswar illuminates this enigmatic religious figure and stands out amidst the multitude of voices that crowd his story. It traces the several contradictions of nineteenth-century Bengal that the man embodied: between his Vaishnav roots and Sakti worship; between bhakti and gyan; and between guru and sadhaka (spiritual practitioner).
Amiya P. Sen situates Sri Ramakrishna within the emerging social and cultural anxieties of the time as also the larger Hindu-Brahminical world that he was born into. This book also carries a brief but critical introduction to the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Ramakrishna's vibrant theology that will be of interest to lay readers as well as those especially interested in the cultural and religious history of modern Bengal.
Amiya P. Sen is currently with the Department of History and Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He is the author of several books, including The Indispensable Vivekanada: An Anthology for Our Times and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay: An Intellectual Biography.
Cover photograph courtesy Wikipedia
RAMAKRISHNA PARAMAHAMSA
The Sadhaka of Dakshineswar
A MIYA P. S EN
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2010
Copyright © Amiya P. Sen 2010
All rights reserved
The views and opinions expressed in this e-book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
ISBN 978-06-7008-225-4
This digital edition published in 2011.
e-ISBN: 978-81-8475-250-2
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For Asha, Bejoy, Chotu, Heeru, Jessie and the two anonymous cats — my indulgent hosts at Santiniketan
Contents
Copyright
Preface
ONE: Situating Sri Ramakrishna
TWO: The Early Life of Gadadhar
THREE: The ‘Sting of Kali’
FOUR: The Bride Marked with a Straw
FIVE: Lessons in Religious Plurality
SIX: Gathering Devotees and Disciples
SEVEN: The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
EIGHT: The Last Years
Appendix A: Chronology of Events
Appendix B: List of Major Biographical Works on Ramakrishna Paramahamsa from 1876 to 1947
Bibliography
Preface
This is the third biography that I have attempted over the last ten years or so, and on each occasion I have set before myself two basic objectives. First, what I have attempted are brief and critical introductions to the life and work of chosen individuals. Second, in these biographies, I have tried to situate the individual contemporaneously as well as within certain continuities in cultural thought and practice. In the case of a religious figure like Sri Ramakrishna, the latter would be quite important. It might as well be added that in reconstructing the lives and times of the saint, I have largely relied on my professional training in history.
This book has grown out of my dissatisfaction broadly with two genres of biographical accounts available on Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Official biographies I found quite unexciting—partly on account of their hagiographical slant but also for their insipid prose and the lack of analytical rigour. At the other extreme are works by Narasingha P. Sil and Jeffrey J. Kripal—well-documented, readable and yet justly accused of sensationalism. Personally, I also find the latter works somewhat suspect methodologically. Perhaps a degree of scepticism is only natural in relation to psychoanalytic studies on Ramakrishna by scholars not trained in that discipline. My first impression on reading representative works associated with the two genres was that while one targeted only the faithful, the other was out to debunk both religious imagination and faith. These are extreme and untenable positions from which this work quite consciously tries to veer away.
Thanks to Penguin Books India, it has been possible to add to this short biography a companion volume that puts together selected preachings and parables of Sri Ramakrishna, taken from contemporary sources and suitably rendered into English. One would hope that having read this work, the reader will be sufficiently inspired to read the other.
A large part of the present volume was completed during my tenure as Tagore Professor at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, in 2007–08, and I take this opportunity to thank all those colleagues and friends who showed an abiding interest in this work and extended every support. The responsibility for errors of fact or analysis rests entirely with me.
Amiya P. Sen
ONE Situating Sri Ramakrishna
The spiritual life and experiences of Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, better known as Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–86), reflect in some ways, the richness and the underlying unity of the Hindu-Bengali religious culture, as well as its inherent tensions. It is difficult to clearly define this culture for within it one finds eclectic borrowing, a creative religious synthesis, as also the formal boundaries that often separate one set of religious ideology and practice from another.
The family deity of the Chattopadhyay family was Raghuvira, or Rama, the epic hero of the Ramayana. But there appears to have been no objection to Ramakrishna’s initiation into sakti-mantra (hymns and mystic syllables associated with goddess worship) so that he could officiate as priest to the goddess Kali. Among contemporary and near-contemporary figures, we have several others such as Prahlad Chandra Brahmachari (1900–82) from Ramnathpur (West Bengal), a worshipper of Kali who also venerated Rama, his family deity. In his mystic trance, he would assume the form of the child Krishna ( bal Gopala). Brajabasi Kailashpati, guru to the radical sakti-worshipper Bamakhyapa of Tarapith (West Bengal), habitually wore a rosary of tulsi beads, sacred to Vaishnavs. And Ramakrishna’s own instructor in tantra, the learned and bewitchingly beautiful bhairavi Yogeswari, carried on her person a stone icon representing Narayan-Vishnu.
Such eclectic borrowing, however, was often subjected to self-imposed limits. In later life, Ramakrishna himself emerged as an important spokesperson for eclectic spiritual experimentation, but one that combined interfaith borrowing with an abiding respect for established theological boundaries. This was significantly different from the syncretic fusion of ideas and symbols taken from various religious traditions by the community of Brahmos under Keshab Chandra Sen (1838–84). On yet another level, the religious identity of the sadhaka (spiritual practitioner) had more to do with the way Ramakrishna came to be perceived by his devotees and admirers. Thus, though his most profound and ecstatic experiences were brought on by visions of the goddess Kali, some of his most intimate devotees claimed to have found in him a reincarnated form of the famed Bengali Vaishnav saint, Sri Krishna Chaitanya (1486–1533).
Another palpable side to Bengali religious culture was the mutual attraction combined with an unconcealed hostility between High Hinduism and traditional religious cults. To an extent, the dissemination of upper-caste Brahminical culture among the socially marginalized was the work of the ritually defiled ( patita ) Brahmin himself. One of the earliest texts connected with the popular Satyanarayan cult in rural east Bengal was written by Kavi Kanka, a patita Brahmin. Occasionally, even Brahmins were known to join the non-conformist community of Bauls, as for instance Matilal Sanyal (also known as Haude Gosain) who, though trained in upper-caste culture, took to the life of a wandering Baul singer and composer.
Traditional religious groups did not totally reject upper-caste beliefs or practices, but used them selectively. In Bengal, the Dharma cult, patronized mostly by the lower castes and the untouchables like Bagdis, Doms and Chandals, repudiated upper-caste beliefs but retained the institution of the priest. Among other dissenting groups such as the Kartabhajas, the Balaramis or the Sahebdhanis, the mediating role of the guru remained extremely important.
This is not to deny a history of persistent and defiant conflict. Socially marginalized castes and tribes did not submit easily to attempts to impose upon