VIVEKANANDA’S VEDANTIC SOCIALISM
PROF. K. VENKATA REDDY
Swami Vivekananda is generally approached as a
patriot-monk
par
excellence. He is simply credited with revealing the soul of India to the Western
world. He is mostly regarded as a spokesman of Hinduism. The spiritual
dimension of his personality seems to have obviously got the better of the
social. It looks as though the “Vivekananda” was drowned under the heavy weight
of the “Swami”.
Although he was a man of religion and
meditation, Vivekananda was all for activity that would lead to increase in production and
the removal of poverty. He always said with his Guru, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa,
that, “religion is not for empty stomachs.” He shocked people out of their
self-complacency and plunged them into action. Thus, he influenced the course
of life in modern India by stimulating the Rajasic qualities in the Indian
people, and getting them to set about the task of betterment of their material
conditions of life rather than get lost in a soporific religion that produced
contentment with their existing life of poverty and degradation. In
Vivekananda’s opinion, religion had to be the principal and leading force in
implementing all social changes in India.
No doubt, Vivekananda took pride in the
country’s inheritance from the past, but he was not an obscurantist revivalist
with undiscriminating admiration for all that had come down from the past. To
him, India meant the people and the people meant the masses. Removal of
poverty, eradication of illiteracy, restoration of human dignity, freedom from
fear, availability of spiritual and secular knowledge to all, irrespective of
their caste and class and the ending of all monopolies, religious, economic,
intellectual, social and cultural – all these formed a part of what he derived
from his practical Vedanta or Vedantic socialism.
Through his re-interpretation of Vedanta, and
his deep concern for the masses and their problems, Vivekananda gave the
country a new lease of life. Raising his voice against colonial and feudal
oppression, Vivekananda searched, at the same time, for an answer to the question of India’s historical destinies, of
the ways and means of transforming it into a wealthy, strong and independent
state. He insistently repeated that India could be roused and rebuilt with the
help of small groups of enthusiastic patriots, strong and courageous with
“muscles of iron and nerves of steel and gigantic wills”.
Though not in politics, Vivekananda did exert
a visible influence on the political development and on the modern India that
has emerged from this development. In a sense, he was politically far ahead of
his time in the importance he attached to the masses, the indignation he
displayed on their exploitation, the genuine concern he had for the uplift of
women and the backward classes and, above all, in his strong desire for the
country to get the benefit of Western science and technology for its
development without falling into the trap of slavish imitation of the Western
ways of life. The revolutionary ideas he propounded had a tremendous influence
on subsequent political thinking and action in India, especially on the mass dynamism of Mahatma
Gandhi and the socialistic ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru.
Vivekananda was not against reforms, but he
believed that India needed radical reforms. In his book, “On India and Her
Problems”, he wrote: “Remember that the nation lives in the cottages. But,
alas, nobody ever did anything for them. Our modern reformers are very busy
about widow-remarriage. Of course, I am a sympathiser in every reform, but the
fate of a nation does not depend upon the number of husbands the widows get,
but upon the condition of the masses”. Vivekananda went a step further and
said, “So long as millions live in hunger and ignorance, I hold every man a
traitor.” He sincerely believed that the only hope of India was from the
masses, for the upper classes were physically and morally dead. He believed
that a time would come when the masses would rise, throw off the dominance of
the upper classes and establish their absolute supremacy.
With his own concept of Vedanta, Vivekananda
gave the country the secularist ideal that now forms a part of the Constitution
of modern India. It was he who first proclaimed on world platforms that all
religions were but different paths that led to the same goal. His idea of
secularism was, in fact, an advance of what is found in modern India. He wanted
not just mutual tolerance but mutual respect and, what is more, mutual
recognition of the basic truth that underlies all individual religions.
Vivekananda’s understanding of Vedanta made
him a total opponent to the practice of untouchability. Denouncing, as he did,
the practice of untouchability, Vivekananda anticipated, by several decades,
the more effective campaign that Gandhi and Ambedkar carried on against this
social evil. He found neither religious sanction nor secular logic behind the
terrible practice of untouchability and he went all out to condemn it.
Vivekananda’s Vedantic socialism centres
round his progressive ideas on education which are more modern than those of
professional educationists who moulded the education of modern India. From the
beginning of his mission, he stressed the importance of universal literacy as
an essential condition for mass uplift and development. Furthermore, he had
conceived of so many decades back what we now call informal education. Also,
the credit for pioneering the programme of universal adult literacy should go
to Vivekananda. He also laid great stress on industrial training and technical
education which have now become a part of the educational system of modern
India. What he wanted was man-making education. He believed that education
should aim at developing the mind rather than stuff it with bookish knowledge.
He wanted education to include
all aspects of life, not only the intellectual but also the physical, social,
cultural and spiritual, and lead to the building of character and the adoption
of a fearless and self-reliant attitude towards life.
Though he laid great stress on the
traditional values of chastity and family life for women, Vivekananda was
totally against their subjection. While drawing attention to the prominent
place occupied by women in intellectual field in ancient India, he blamed the
priestcraft for relegating women to a backward position by denying them equal
rights with men in education and in knowledge of the scriptures. He
passionately pleaded for the extension of all educational facilities to women.
Vivekananda’s Vedantic socialism is also
reflected in his endeavour to give India’s traditional religions a new
orientation of social service. By establishing the Ramakrishna Mission, he gave
an altogether new direction to the role of monks and Sanyasins in Indian
society. As a result, for the first time in Indian history, we have the Hindu
monks who do not isolate themselves from society, but actively concern
themselves with its service and betterment. They have set up educational institutions, hospitals, dispensaries,
orphanages and other social institutions for alleviating human suffering. They
are also in the forefront in the work of relief and rehabilitation whenever the
country suffers natural disasters such as drought, floods, cyclones and
epidemics.
Thus, with his reinterpretation of Vedanta,
Swami Vivekananda played a key role in the shaping of modern India. Socialism,
secularism, mass uplift and mass power, abolition of untouchability, universal
literacy, informal education, women’s liberation and inculcation of social
service as a part of religious worship these constituted the quintessence of
his “Vedantic socialism”. His sociological views played a positive role in the
development of the patriotic and national self-consciousness of the youth of
India. Vivekananda’s clamant call to the Indian youth – “Awake, arise, and
stop not till the goal is reached” – is resounding all through India, rousing
their social consciousness and kindling their damp spirits.