Swamiji referred to India as ‘Punyabhumi.’ He made this statement not only while sitting in India but also after preaching Vedanta in various Western countries for about three and a half years. He reached Colombo on January 15, 1897. In his first speech after returning to Bharat, on January 16, he said, “If there is any land on this earth that can lay claim to be the blessed Punya-Bhumi, the land to which souls on this earth must come to account for Karma, the land to which every soul that is wending its way Godward must come to attain its last home, the land where humanity has attained its highest towards gentleness, towards generosity, towards purity, towards calmness, and, above all, the land of introspection and of spirituality — it is India.”
Swamiji sought to understand why this Punyabhumi Bharat, which was prosperous in almost everything at one time, remained in the hands of foreign powers for a long time. To find this answer, Swamiji has beautifully explained these reasons in his Swadesh Mantra. At the very beginning of the Swadesh Mantra, he says, “O India! With this mere echoing of others, with this base imitation of others, with this dependence on others, this slavish weakness, this vile detestable cruelty — wouldst thou, with these provisions only, scale the highest pinnacle of civilization and greatness?”
He highlighted the servile weakness in Indians. He also explained the hatred, cruelty, and cowardly attitude of the people of India towards each other as one of the causes of subjugation. Swamiji was feeling the servile weakness of Indians. In a letter written to Haridas Viharidas Desai from Chicago in November 1894, he expressed his concern: “If any man tries to move forward, here everybody is ready to help him. In India, you may try tomorrow by writing a single line of praise for me in any one of our papers (Hindu), and the next day they would all be against me. Why? It is the nature of slaves. They cannot bear to see anyone of their brethren putting his head the least above their rank…”
Swamiji also said that India had long been in the chains of subjugation despite everything, mainly due to the forgetting of six reasons. To get out from this situation in the Swadesh Mantra, he exclaims to the countrymen, “O India! Forget not that the ideal of thy womanhood is Sita, Savitri, Damayanti; forget not that the God thou worshippest is the great Ascetic of ascetics, the all-renouncing Shankara, the Lord of Uma; forget not that thy marriage, thy wealth, thy life are not for sense pleasure, are not for thy individual personal happiness; forget not that thou art born as a sacrifice to the Mother’s altar; forget not that thy social order is but the reflex of the Infinite Universal Motherhood; forget not that the lower classes, the ignorant, the poor, the illiterate, the cobbler, the sweeper, are thy flesh and blood, thy brothers.”
When studying the history of India’s freedom struggle, the names of many revolutionaries, stories of heroism, and accounts of fighting for the country’s freedom by sacrificing their lives come up. However, the man whose role is very significant in the history of India’s freedom struggle is Swami Vivekananda, even though he did not fight directly in the field. Although he did not engage in direct combat, he sowed the seeds of the freedom struggle in the minds of thousands of revolutionaries. It is also known from the statements and writings of British officers that, at that time, three books were found in the archives of the revolutionaries: the ‘Shrimad Bhagavad Gita,’ Bankimchandra’s ‘Ananda Math,’ and Swami Vivekananda’s ‘Bartaman Bharat’. He gave the mantra to worship Motherland Bharat to liberate the country, which had been oppressed and subjugated for hundreds of years. In 1897, he said, “For the next fifty years, let Mother India be the only God to be worshipped by the Indians”
He considered Punyabhumi Bharat to be the only truth of life. In this context, he used to say that if India dies, truth will die. He frankly stated that only the brave and strong can achieve freedom. Therefore, he repeatedly called upon the youth to free India from the shackles of subjugation. What kind of youth? He wanted a hundred fearless youths. He believed that India’s independence was inevitable if a hundred pure, idealistic youths came together. He wanted the youth to spread the fire from the Himalayas to Kanyakumari, from the North Pole to the South Pole. Swamiji used to say, “Strength and manliness are virtues; weakness and cowardice are sins.”
Even as a monk, Swamiji did not hesitate to say that the subjugated people had no religion. His aim was to make India independent at any cost to establish a dharmarajya in India. Swamiji never thought of compromising with the oppressive British. Swamiji’s words were like sanjivani sudha to the freedom fighters. To answer the question of his disciple this time, he said, “Under the present circumstances, that worship is of no good to you. Playing on the flute and so on will not regenerate the country. We now mostly need the ideal of a hero with the tremendous spirit of Rajas thrilling through his veins from head to foot — the hero who will dare and die to know the Truth — the hero whose armour is renunciation, whose sword is wisdom. We want now the spirit of the brave warrior in the battlefield of life, and not of the wooing lover who looks upon life as a pleasure-garden!….. Most of them are full of morbidity and affected with exceptional weakness. The country must be raised. The worship of Mahavira must be introduced; the Shakti-pujâ must form a part of our daily practice; Shri Ramachandra must be worshipped in every home. Therein lies your welfare, therein lies the good of the country — there is no other way.” (Translated from bengali)
Swamiji’s books and papers, such as Jnanayoga, Rajyoga, Bartaman Bharat , and Paribrajak, were among the main sources of inspiration for the revolutionaries. Subhas Chandra Bose said, “He was so great, so profound, so complex. A Yogi of the highest spiritual level in direct communion with the truth who had for the time being consecrated his whole life to the moral and spiritual uplift of his nation and of humanity, that is how I would describe him. If he had been alive, I would have been at his feet.” On January 14, 1912, Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote in his ‘Maratha’ newspaper, “Swami Vivekananda is the real father of Indian Nationalism.” Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, the editor of ‘Hitavadi’ magazine and one of the pioneers of India’s freedom movement, said on Vivekananda that, those words remained ever grafted on his mind and made him realize, for the first time, what true patriotism meant.
One of the irrefutable proofs of Swami Vivekananda’s great contribution to India’s freedom struggle is the report of the Sedition Committee published in 1918. If we read this report, we can understand how much the British government was afraid of Vivekananda. They wrote that Vivekananda became stronger after his death. In this report, the British government wrote, “Vivekananda died in 1902; but his writings and teachings survived him, have been popularized by the Ramakrishna Mission and have deeply impressed many educated Hindus. From much evidence before us, it is apparent that this influence was perverted by Barindra and his followers in order to create an atmosphere suitable for the execution of their projects.”
Sister Nivedita says, “India was Swamiji’s greatest passion…. India throbbed in his breast, India beat in his pulses, India was his daydream, India was his nightmare. Not only that, he himself became India. He was the embodiment of India in flesh and blood. He was India, and he was Bharat – the very symbol of her spirituality, purity, wisdom, power, vision, and destiny.” We can clearly understand this truth by studying Swamiji’s life and philosophy. Hence, Sannyasi Vivekananda devoted himself not only to the goal of his ‘atma-mukti’ but also dedicated his entire life to the great task of the ‘liberation of the nation and the liberation of living beings’ , as given to him by his Guru, Sri Ramakrishna.
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