Divine Dowager

Of the three principal personalities of the Ramakrishna Order—Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (birthname Gadadhar Chat topadhyay) himself, his famous disciple Swami Vivekananda (premonastic name Narendranath Datta), and his wife Sarada mani Chattopadhyay—the last mentioned of the holy trinity occupies a unique place. Sarada’s childhood and adolescence were spent in her parental home even after marriage at five; from her adult teens she lived with her husband who chose to remain a celibate as part of his ascetic exercises. The uniqueness of her story consists primarily in her own strength of character and personality that compensated her loss of natural motherhood by transforming herself into a mother to innu merable devotees and disciples who became her surrogate children.

In the process, Sarada became some sort of a Dowager guru figure of the monastic order (that was founded by Vivekananda after the Paramahamsa’s death) and was even endowed with divinity like her celebrated spouse. In tome after tome, mostly in Bengali and a select few in English, we come across a veritable goddess who descended on earth to enact her divine play—lila. As Sarada the young pubertal female was desexualized by her ascetic husband, so Sarada the mature widow was, and continues to be even to this day, dehumanized by hagiographers as well as by lay devotee scholars.

Sil’s pioneering biography demonstrates, on the basis of a number of eyewitness accounts in Bengali hitherto inaccessible to nonspecialists, as well as the emerging feminist studies in India and abroad, how Sarada, a barely literate rustic woman and the demure wife of a popular godman, discovered sources of personal empowerment and fulfillment by appropriating the hegemonic patriarchal norms of her society. This volume shows how she emerged as the Dowager leader of a preeminently male monastic order—guru, mother, and mentor—all in one, and claims that Saradamani’s life thus has a unique appeal for women of all times and cultures.

L C 2003004610

ISBN 1-57591-073-X

Printed in the U.S.A.

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