VIII

The young monk was also emotionally fragile. This was apparent when he for the first time came in close contact with adult women in the West. He had of course little problem in dealing with the elderly and the very young. His early patrons, Mrs. George Hale of Chicago and Miss Kate Sanborn of Massachusetts were maternal figures, while the Hale sisters--the two Marys and the two Harriets, daughters and nieces of the Hales--were like his own younger sisters with whom he could be friendly and mischievous--"elder brother, sage, and child combined," in Marie Burke's elegant prose.76

There was some uneasiness in respect of a mature devotee in the person of Josephine MacLeod of New York. A comparatively young woman, though a few years older than Vivekananda, Josephine was strangely and strongly fascinated by him. Her feelings toward him at first sight had more to do with how he looked--"the fiery missionary whose physique was like a wrestler's [the Swami's plump body covered by his gorgeous robe made him look bigger than he actually was] and whose eyes were deep black"77--than what he said ("He said something, the particular words of which I do not remember. . .".78) She also admired Vivekananda's "long, thick black hair" and even once "crept behind him with a pair of scissors and cut off a lock of it," to the utter befuddlement of the embarrassed ascetic.79 The impulsive Tantine (her nickname preferred by Vivekananda) so "identified herself completely with Vivekananda" that she even appropriated the Swami's mischievous humor and applied it on his monastic brother Swami Brahmananda (Rakhal Ghosh, 1863- 1922) at the Ramakrishna Math in Bangalore. She surprised the shy and unsuspecting Rakhal who tried his best to avoid seeing her on a daily basis by suddenly leaping in front of him and exclaiming: "Naughty boy, now how will you escape?"80

Swamiji's relations with Josephine were marked by a mixture of Platonic affection and harmless erotic friendliness, although from her standpoint, his physical appearance loomed larger than his spiritual or intellectual qualities. Recalling his lecture on the Bhagavadgita sometime in 1895, she wrote: ". . .I saw with these very eyes (she pointed to her own eyes) Krishna himself standing there and preaching the Gita. That was my first wonderful vision. I stared and stared. . . .I saw only the figure and all else vanished."81 M. Rolland perhaps rightly observed that she had little concern for "the God of Vivekananda" but "was very intimate with Vivekananda. . .looking after him and entertaining him." She "never tires of pointing out his beauty, his charm, the power of attraction which was radiating from him."82

In one sense, Vivekananda's relations with his women devotees and admirers could be characterized as madhura bhava--a kind of divine love having all the qualities of the erotic except the carnal--which could also describe his mentor Ramakrishna's relations with his young male devotees.83 On his own admission, Vivekananda was somewhat spoilt by one sister Jeany, who could "jump and run and play and swear like a devil and talk slang at the rate of 500 a minute" and who did not "much care for religion." Another woman, one Miss Phillips, got him quite excited about starting a monastery at her mountain resort.84 This kind of relationship--reminiscent of the Great Master's madhura relationship with Pratap Hazra, Girish Ghosh, Sivanath Shastri, Vijayakrishna Goswami, or Keshab Sen--seemed to have a quasi-erotic aspect85 which, in the Swami's case, seemed to be a surrogate for normal heterosexual relationship.

The Paramahamsa had sustained the interest of his male admirers in his erotic community of Dakshineshwar by his frenzied kirtans (erotic devotional songs), dance, nudity, and samadhi (trance). The Swami's attracti on consisted in his sharp repartee, fluent speech, colorful sermons, and above all his sheer personal charm. Ramakrishna had been the cynosure of the male eye; Swamiji became the apple of the female eye. While the Master was Kali the Divine Mother to his admirers and devotees, his great disciple turned on scores of women by his maiden speech at the World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago. "Ladies, ladies, ladies, packing every place, filling every corner, they patiently waited and waited. . .", the exuberant sannyasi wrote home citing from a newspaper report.86 This triumphant beginning of the conquest of heart by an Indian patriarchal monk with progressive rhetoric to inspire Western women would have transformed Swami Vivekananda into an American icon but for a concatenation of events which cruelly destroyed the ataraxia of a monk who had once seemed "inly-pleased" to many admirers.87

IX

The most notable development in the Swami's career in the West is the advent of Margaret Noble in his life at the apex of his world-wide reputation as a spiritual leader, which unfortunately coincided with his rapidly declining health.88 His odyssey with the Sister is a tragic story of the gradual disintegration of his personality after an initial desperate effort to project the profile of a troubled titan or a pained Prometheus. Both his monastic vows and his physical health militated against the Swami's search for stability. He could neither overcome nor transcend the sentiment that spontaneously erupted for a woman who was, in many respects, his alter ego--flamboyant, rhetorical, energetic, and possessed of immense personal charm and charisma.89

While with her Western upbringing Miss Noble was free and frank in making her mind known to the Hindu monk, the latter, with his social-cultural background, lack of experience, and the monastic taboo against kamini-kanchana, remained ambivalent, equivocal, and ultimately frustrated and angry. To quote Sisters Christine and Nivedita, he remained checkmated, like an ensnared lion!90 The repressed male within was awakened at a time when the body was degenerating hopelessly. The carefully cultivated and widely publicized image of a militant monk proved in the end utterly fragile resulting in his gradual descent into oblivion. The result was a transformation of his personality from a self-assured and self-centered Shiva into a passive helpless child of Kali--a spiritual puer aeternas. "No more _Hari Om!' It is all _Mother' now! . . .Everything is gone. Now it's only _Mother, mother!'. . . I am only a child," he had told Nivedita in the fall of 1898 in Kashmir after their emotionally turbulent encounter at the shrine of Amarnath.91

With all his cultural insights into the feminine character and with all his monastic training based on his guru's misogynic dicta, Swami Vivekananda failed as a man and as a guru to his most beloved female disciple who had actually fallen in love with the handsome Hindu. Her explosive frustration at Amarnath, where Vivekananda had taken her promising to dedicate her ritually to Lord Shiva but failed to do so, eloquently illustrates the Swami's predicament. "Are we Guru and disciple, or are we just a man and a woman?" Nivedita demanded to know. "Because if we are Guru and disciple, you ought to help me. But you never do. You speak to me as if [I] were not a woman but you don't carry out the other side. Then we are not just an ordinary man and woman, and you must remember that." And her mentor's response was a confession: "I can't do it, Margot. . . .I have not got these powers, Margot! Give me two years."92 This verbal confrontation between the guru and his shisya uncannily mirrored the mythical picture of Shiva being trampled by the aroused and angry Kali.