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Dr.Sumi Vasudevan
Vivekananda was a great nationalist of India, who wanted to revitalize the nation
through the vitality of religion. He never claimed to be a philosopher or a social
reformer in the traditional sense of the term. He was in fact only a religious man.
He thought that if religion is interpreted in its correct sense and understood by
everybody, much of our miseries, mutual conflicts and social evils would be
automatically solved.
Vivekananda assumed the role of a world teacher and tried to infuse in to mankind
the essence of unity and equality. He belonged to the whole world and asked the
Indians to learn from the west their great concern for masses, reverence and
freedom for women and the capacity for making rapid progress. He was a true
democrat. He was of the opinion that no nation could gain physical freedom
without physical equality. His views on society and its growth were based on his
belief that man was not a mere machine, but something more, a divine being. His
views on society were humanistic. His humanism was based on his tremendous
faith in the powers of man. He has denounced the classcharacter of our
civilization, and as a remedy wanted to educate and uplift the masses on the basis
of equality.
Vivekananda was a spiritual personality, his view on society and social justice are
more realistic and pragmatic than any other modern thinkers. He strongly pleaded
for a democratic set up of social justice. He flayed social injustice and dreamed a
harmonious order in a society founded on the lofty ideals of freedom and equality.
He was much shocked to find that India, the land of the vedas, where equality was
the basis of society right from the dawn of human civilization, had been divided by
the walls of casteism -the source of all inequalities. He considered this inequality
as fictitious and monstrous. To him this attitude of inequality is the primal sin.
As a devout Vedantist, Swami Vivekananda upheld the doctrine of equality of all
men irrespective of caste, creed, faith, birth and colors .In this sense he was a true
democrat. He said, no nation could gain physical freedom without physical
equality. To him all men are alike. He thought that social inequality is a curse up on
mankind. It is the root of all the miseries and degradations. It is the source of all
bondage, physical, mental and spiritual. Equality is essential not only in spiritual
field but also in material fields.
He wanted that every individual should have the same rights and insisted upon
freedom of thought and action in every way. Vivekananda says that equality of
opportunity does not imply dead homogeneity in society. He says the whole
universe is a play of unity in variety, and of variety in unity. The whole universe is
a play of differentiation and oneness, the whole universe is a play of the finite in
the infinite. What is necessary and can certainly be attained is the elimination of
privileges, the enjoyment of advantage by one over another. That is really the work
before the whole world. In all social lives, there has been that one fight in every
race and in every country. The difficulty is not that one body of men because they
have the advantage of intelligence should take away even physical enjoyment from
those who do not possess that advantage. The fight is to destroy that privilege.
In modern India, the movement for distributive justice in its true sense was Swami
Vivekananda. It is Vivekananda who made a revolutionary statement when he
remarked: It is mockery to offer religion to a starving man, a country where
millions of people live on flowers of the mohua plant and a million or so of
Brahmins suck the blood out of these poor people. Swami diagnosed four
principles evils, viz, priest craft, poverty, tyranny and ignorance from which
millions of Indian people were to be saved. He held that equitable distribution of
wealth is to be achieved not by force but by consent and limitation of wants by the
individual.
Dr.Sumi Vasudevan
Associate Fellow
Santhigiri Research Foundation
References