| His life was an
open book, and one studying it should be convinced that spiritual enlightenment is not
something far and foreign to human beings but is some thing, which is within the bounds of
each one's realization. It was the culmination of spiritual consciousness and the constant
awareness of it that made the Saint of Dakshineswar what he was. Let us see how a simple
village urchin developed into a Paramahansa, and how one who could not even be a school
master, attained the status of a teacher of humanity."* A saint is born when the country needs him. The impact that India had with the
West due to the advent of the British took a definite form from the beginning of the 19th
century. Through contact with the West, India had a deep current of democracy,
nationalism, the press, women
franchise, Western education based on different types of discipline and ascientific'
outlook. The first result of the impact was to forget India's indigenous culture and
religiosity but the reaction came quickly and Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the first to stand
against the uprooting of Indian culture and religions and sink into an outright sense of
defeatism.
* Paramahansa Sri Ramakrishna by R.R. Diwakar,
(Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1956), P.XIV. |
