In today’s turbulent time and age, when women across our world are responsibly discharging their duties as Presidents and Heads of State, industrialists and entrepreneurs, social activists and sarpanches, we acknowledge and applaud this spectrum of socio-political change witnessed over the last one hundred years. International Women’s Day, marked this week, is also the perfect occasion to recall the contribution of women thinkers-philosophers and educationists like Sister Nivedita who wrote voluminously on ‘education’ and ‘education for women.’
Not a coincidence that Prof Sugata Bose, hailing from the illustrious family of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, recently lauded Sister Nivedita’s role in harmonizing different streams of thought of Swami Vivekananda and Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. Sister Nivedita played a pivotal role in ensuring that philosophical foundations laid by these iconic personalities were implemented as action plans. What is significant today, and a pointer to the multiple crises affecting our modern education system, is her emphasis on ‘national education’, ‘nation-making’ and ‘education for women’.
Published in 1923 is the compilation of her papers and essays titled ‘Hints on National Education in India’, an invaluable resource for those drawing upon the past to build a new future. In ‘Paper on Education ~ V’, Sister Nivedita spelt it out: “The reconstitution of a nation has to begin with its ideals. This, because in a nation three primary elements have to be considered, first the country, or region, second, the people, and third, the national mind. Of the three, the last is dominant, and all-directing.
By working through it, we may modify or even re-create either or both of the other two while their influence upon it is comparatively feeble and indirect. Mind can re-make anything, however inert or rebellious, but a rebellious mind, what can reach? It follows that in national reconstruction there is no other factor so important as education. How is this to be made national and nationalising? What is a national education? And conversely, what is un-national? And further what kind of education offers the best preparation for the attempt to solve the national problems? What type of education would be not only national, but also nation-making?” With her focus on national education, she wrote, “A national education is, first and foremost, an education in the national idealism.
We must remember, however, that the aim of education is emancipation of sympathy and intellect. This is not often reached by foreign methods. By this fact of the attainment of the universal, must the education ultimately stand justified, or condemned. To emancipate the greatest number of people most easily and effectively, it is necessary to choose familiar ideals and forms, and in every case, it is necessary to make progression absolutely continuous, so that there be no sharp incongruity amongst the elements of early experience. Such incongruity begets confusion of thought, and this confusion is educational chaos. “A national education then, must be made up of familiar elements. The ideals presented must always be first clothed in a form evolved by our own past. Our imagination must be first based on our own heroic literature.
Our hope must be woven out of our history. From the known to the unknown, from the easy to the difficult, must be the motto of every teacher, the rule of every lesson. The familiar is not the goal; knowledge is the goal: trained faculty is the aim. An education that stopped short at the familiar would be a bondage instead of an emancipation; a mockery not a reality. The familiar is merely the first step. But as the first step, it is essential. Geographical ideas must be built up first through the ideas of India. But they must not stop there.” Each phrase embodying the thoughts of Sister Nivedita is relevant and important in our age when Artificial Intelligence is the new cloud on the horizon of knowledge.
“It must never be forgotten that nationality in culture is the means, not the end. There is a level of achievement where all the educated persons of the world can meet, understand and enjoy each other’s associations. This level is freedom. Intellectually speaking, it is mukti. But it can be reached only by him whose knowledge is firm ~ rooted in love for mother and motherland,” she wrote, with characteristic flourish. In an earlier ‘Paper on Education ~ IV’, she had emphasized that “education in India today, has to be not only national, but NATION-MAKING. We have seen what a national education is ~ a training which has a strong colour of its own, and begins by relating the child to his home and country, through all that is familiar, but ends by making him free of all that is true, cosmopolitan, and universal.
This is the necessary condition of all healthy education, in all countries, whatever their political position or stage of development. These general statements are as true of England and France, as of India, as true in happiness as in adversity.” On ‘The Future Education of the Indian Woman’, Sister Nivedita was clear in the clarion call she made. “In making the school as much an essential of the girl’s life, as it has always been of the boy’s, we are establishing something which is never to be undone. Every generation as it comes will have to carry out the great task of the next generation’s schooling. Much in the problem of Woman’s Education as we today see it, is difficulty of the time only. We have to carry our country through an arduous transition.
Once the main content of the modern consciousness finds its way into the Indian vernaculars, the problem will have disappeared, for we learn more from our Mother tongue itself, than from all our schools and schoolmasters. In order to bring about that great day, however, the Mother Herself calls for vows and service of a vast spiritual knighthood. Hundreds of young men are necessary, to league themselves together for the deepening of education in the best ways amongst women. Most students, perhaps, might be able to vow twelve lessons in a year to be given either in home or village, during the holidays this should hardly prove an exhausting undertaking yet how much might be done by it.” Sister Nivedita presented the constructive elements within the ambit of idealism.
“What is the type of woman we most admire? Is she strong, resourceful, inspired, fit for moments of crisis? Have we not Padmini of Cheetore, Chand Bibi, Jhansi Rani? Is she saintly, a poet, and a mystic? Is there not Meera Bae? Is she the queen, great in administration? Where is Rani Bhowani, where Ahalya Bae, where Janhabi of Mymensingh? Is it wifehood in which we deem that woman shines brightest? What of Sati, of Savitri, of the ever-glorious Sita? These ideals moreover are constructive. That is to say, it is not their fame and glory that the Indian child is trained to contemplate. It is their holiness, simplicity, sincerity, in a word, their character.
This, indeed, is always a difference between one’s own and an alien ideal. Impressed by the first, it is an effort that we seek to imitate: admiring the second, we endeavour to arrive at its results. There can never be any sound education of the Indian woman, which does not begin and end in exaltation of the national ideals of womanhood, as embodied in her own history and heroic literature.” It is not glorification of the woman, for Sister Nivedita spoke about efficiency and duty: “Woman must undoubtedly be made efficient. Sita and Savitri were great in wifehood, only as the fruit of that antecedent fact, that they were great women. There was no place in life that they did not fill graciously and dutifully. Both satisfied every demand of the social ideal.
Perfect wives as they were, if they had never been married at all, they must have been perfect just the same, as daughters, sisters, and disciples. This efficiency to all the circumstances of life, this womanhood before wifehood, and humanity before womanhood, is something at which the education of the girl must aim in every age.” There was a moral ideal for Sister Nivedita who had witnessed the Swadeshi movement in Bengal and felt the pulse of a new nation being born. She wrote, “the moral ideal of the India of today has taken on new dimensions ~ the national and civic.
Here also woman must be trained to play her part. And again, by struggling towards these she will be educated. In order to achieve the ideal of efficiency for the exigencies of the twentieth century, a characteristic synthesis has to be acquired. lt is no longer merely the spiritual or emotional content of a statement that has to be conveyed to the learner, as in the mythologico-social culture of the past. The student must now seek to understand the limitations of the statement, its relation to cognate ideas and the steps by which the race has come to this particular formulation. The modern synthesis, in other words, is scientific, geographical, and historical, and these three modes of knowing must ~ since there is no sex in truth ~ be achieved by woman as by man.”
(The writer is a researcher-author on history and heritage issues, and a former deputy curator of Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya)
