In 1898, Jagadis Chandra Bose acquired a new friend. Margaret Noble (1867–1911), an Irishwoman, had first met Swami Vivekananda in London in November 1895. She became Vivekananda’s disciple even before he left London in December 1896. Noble went to India in January 1898, and in March she was initiated into the Order of Ramakrishna, the monastic order founded by Vivekananda the year before. She took the name “(Sister) Nivedita”. According to Romain Rolland, Vivekananda’s French biographer, she was the first Western woman to be accepted into an Indian religious order.
Nivedita first met Bose near the end of 1898. She was “horrified”, she recollected, to find that there were those “about him” who took every opportunity to prevent Bose from pursuing his work. Presumably, though she does not name names, she was referring to the British authorities and others both in Presidency College and the government. She was “amazed”, she wrote, to see this “great scientific man” working so entirely alone. But Nivedita became more than just an admirer. Soon after she came to know Bose, she became, in effect, his editorial assistant.
Yet, despite her logistical involvement in Bose’s life from 1898 till her death in 1911, Nivedita may have seriously misunderstood the...Read more
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