Sarada Devi: The Room Was Nine Feet Across

Where she lived at Dakshineswar, and this is the part that should be looked at directly.

The room

The nahabat is a music tower, a small structure at the temple compound built to house the musicians who play at the hours, and the ground floor room she was given is around nine feet across.

She lived there for years.

With her possessions, her cooking, her few clothes, and a curtain, in a room a fit adult can cross in four steps.

What she did

She cooked.

Ramakrishna's diet was particular and difficult, his stomach was bad for years, and he could not eat what most people ate. And the visitors came in a continuous stream and were fed, and the numbers grew as his reputation grew, and somebody was cooking for all of them.

She rose at three in the morning. She did the day's work. She stayed largely out of sight, because a young wife did, and because the arrangement at Dakshineswar meant that visitors were coming to see him.

A great many people who spent years at Dakshineswar barely saw her.

What to notice here

Two things, and the second one is uncomfortable.

One. The tradition venerates her enormously and it is not empty. She is Sri Ma, the Holy Mother, and the position she holds in the Ramakrishna movement is not honorific: she is worshipped, her birthday is a major observance, and the order's own theology places her as the Divine Mother in the same sense the Shodashi Puja placed her.

Two. And she spent those years doing unpaid, invisible domestic labour in a nine foot room, starting at three in the morning, for a household of men who were having a religious experience.

Both of those are true at once and the second does not become acceptable because of the first.

And it was the ordinary condition

Which is the point.

She was not treated worse than other women of her class and period. She was treated exactly like them, and that is the observation: the woman the entire movement now worships lived the standard life of a Bengali brahmana wife in a small town in the 1870s, and the standard life was cooking from three in the morning in a room the size of a shed.

A reader can draw the conclusion for their own household, and this article will only note that the labour that keeps a religious household running has usually been done by somebody whose name is not on the building.

She did not complain about it

And a modern reader should be careful with that.

Not complaining is a virtue when it is chosen and a trap when it is expected, and the difference is whether anybody would have listened if she had.

Her later recorded conversations, when she did have people who listened, are full of ordinary human complaint about ordinary human difficulties, which the section on Radhu takes up, and it is a better picture of her than the silent one.

Ramakrishna died of throat cancer on 16 August 1886. She was thirty two.

The widow's regime

And the first thing that happened is the thing this entry most wants you to know.

A Bengali brahmana widow in 1886 entered a system with rules. White cloth without a border. No ornaments. No fish, no meat, no onion, no garlic. One meal on certain days and none at all on ekadashi, including no water. Head shaved in some communities. Exclusion from every auspicious occasion. A social position close to invisibility, for the rest of her life, beginning the day her husband died.

She began to remove her bangles.

And the tradition records that Ramakrishna appeared to her and told her he had not gone anywhere, that he had only moved from one room to another.

She kept the bangles and the bordered cloth.

What that meant in 1886

It was a refusal, in public, of a regime that every widow around her was subject to.

And the point is not whether a reader accepts the vision. The point is that she declined, that she had a reason she could state, that she held it for thirty four more years in a society that would have preferred otherwise, and that thousands of women watched her do it.

The previous batch's entry on the ten Mahavidyas notes that the tradition contains a goddess who is a widow, Dhumavati, worshipped as she is. Sarada Devi is the same argument made by a living woman in a Bengal village.

She became the head

The young disciples had lost their teacher and had no institution, no money and no plan.

They turned to her, and the accounts of the following years show them referring decisions to her, seeking her permission, and treating her sanction as the thing that made an action legitimate.

Vivekananda wrote to her for her blessing before going to America and said her approval mattered more to him than anything else, and it is a matter of record that he did not go until he had it.

She gave initiation

And this deserves stating flatly.

A woman with no education, no Sanskrit and no institutional position gave diksha to hundreds of people, over decades, in Bengal, from the 1890s.

She gave mantras. People came from a long way for it. Men took initiation from her, including men who went on to lead the order.

Which was not a normal thing for a woman to be doing and was not particularly argued about, because she did it without announcing a position and the results were self evident to the people who received it.

Amjad

The best known single incident, and worth telling properly.

Amjad was a Muslim man of the locality at Jayrambati, from a community labelled criminal, who did rough work.

She fed him. She served him herself, on the veranda, and after he had eaten she cleaned the place herself rather than have somebody else do it.

A relative objected, on both counts, the caste one and the religious one.

Her recorded answer: Sarat is my son, and so is Amjad.

Sarat is Swami Saradananda, one of the senior monks of the order.

She said it once, in a village, in Bengali, to a family member, and it has outlasted a great deal of formal theological writing on the subject.

Her last teaching

Recorded shortly before her death in July 1920, given to a woman disciple who asked what she should hold on to.

If you want peace of mind, do not find fault with others. Rather see your own faults. Learn to make the whole world your own. No one is a stranger, my child. This whole world is your own.

Sri Sarada Math

In 1954 the Ramakrishna order established a separate and fully independent monastic order for women, with its own governance, its own line of sannyasa, and its own institutions, not as a women's wing reporting to a men's order but as an autonomous body.

Which was the first of its kind in modern Hinduism, and it exists because of her.

This section is the reason a reader with an ordinary difficult life should read her rather than admire her.

The family

Her natal family at Jayrambati was large, poor, quarrelsome and dependent on her.

Brothers, sisters in law, nieces and nephews, with the ordinary catalogue of village family life: money disputes, marriages to arrange, illnesses, feuds, and a constant expectation that she would handle it.

And she did handle it. For decades, while also being the head of a religious movement, she ran a difficult extended household in a village with no resources.

Radhu

Her niece, the daughter of her brother Abhaycharan, and she brought her up.

Radhu had a mental illness.

The accounts describe unstable and difficult behaviour over many years, periods of derangement, demands, dependency, and episodes that consumed the household.

And Sarada Devi cared for her.

Not at a distance and not by arrangement. She kept her, travelled with her, managed her, arranged her marriage and then dealt with the consequences of it, and she did this for the rest of her life.

What she said about it

And this is why it matters.

She complained.

Her recorded conversations contain plain statements of how hard it was: that Radhu was her bondage, that she was tied by this, that she could not put it down. She said it to disciples, out loud, more than once.

She also said that this was the arrangement, that she had taken it on, and that she would carry it, and she did.

Why a reader should have this

Because the useful version of a saint is the one who found it hard.

A very large number of people reading this are looking after somebody: a parent with dementia, a sibling with a psychiatric illness, a child with a disability, a spouse after a stroke. The work is unending, it is mostly invisible, it does not resolve, and the person doing it is usually a woman.

And devotional writing tends to hand such a person the image of serene selfless service, which is worse than useless, because it adds guilt to exhaustion.

Sarada Devi did not do it serenely. She did it, and she said it was heavy, and both of those are in the record, and the second one is the part that helps.

And the practical part

Caregiver strain is a real and recognised condition, it is treatable, and the caregiver is entitled to help in their own right rather than only as the patient's attendant.

• Tele MANAS 14416, free, all hours, in Indian languages, and it will talk to the carer and not only about the patient
• A government hospital psychiatry department will see the caregiver, and the district mental health programme exists in most districts
• Elderline 14567 for issues involving an older person, including support for the family
• Childline 1098 where a child is involved

And three things that are worth saying to a carer directly

One. You are allowed to find it hard, and saying so is not disloyalty.

Two. The person you are looking after should be under medical care and not only devotional care, and the Bamakhepa entry in the previous batch sets out at length what happens to people with untreated mental illness in families that take them to a shrine instead of a doctor.

Three. Ask for relief before you need it. Rotas, paid help for a few hours, a sibling taking a week. Nobody hands it to a carer who has not asked, and Sarada Devi had a household full of people and still carried it largely alone.

Where to go

• Jayrambati, Bankura district, her birthplace, with the Matri Mandir
• Kamarpukur, five kilometres away, Ramakrishna's birthplace, and the two are visited together
• Dakshineswar, Kolkata, and the nahabat, which you can look at
• Udbodhan at Bagbazar, Kolkata, the Mother's house, where she died
• Belur Math, across the river
• Sri Sarada Math, Dakshineswar, the women's order

When

• Her birth anniversary, in December, celebrated on the tithi
• Durga Puja at Belur Math, which follows the order's own arrangement

A daily practice from this entry

• Sri Ma, or Jai Ma
• Her last instruction, which is short enough to keep: do not look for fault in others, look at your own, and make the world your own
• And the household question she never got to ask: who in this house is doing the work that nobody sees, and when did anybody last offer to take it

Who: Sarada Devi, born Saradamani Mukhopadhyay on 22 December 1853 at Jayrambati in Bankura district, Bengal, to very poor brahmanas, with no schooling and only a little reading learned slowly as an adult. She died at Bagbazar in Calcutta on 21 July 1920.

The marriage: she was married at five, in 1859, to Gadadhar Chattopadhyay of Kamarpukur, aged twenty three, who is Ramakrishna. The marriage was arranged because his family thought it would settle him, since he was already exhibiting the states that made them think he was unwell. Child marriage was ordinary then and is a crime now under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006: Childline 1098, police 112. She went to him at Dakshineswar at eighteen in 1872, at the most extreme point of his practice, when a great many people in Calcutta regarded him as deranged.

25 May 1872: on the night of the Phalaharini Kali Puja he seated her on the asana meant for the deity and performed the Shodashi Puja to her as the Divine Mother, then placed the fruits of his entire sadhana at her feet. The marriage was never consummated and both observed brahmacharya for life, and her own recorded statement is that he never once looked at her as a woman.

The nahabat: the music tower room she was given at Dakshineswar is about nine feet across, and she lived there for years with her possessions, her cooking and a curtain. She rose at three in the morning, cooked for Ramakrishna, whose diet was particular and whose stomach was bad for years, and for the continuous stream of visitors, and stayed largely out of sight, so that many people who spent years at Dakshineswar barely saw her. Two things are true at once: the tradition venerates her enormously and not emptily, and she spent those years doing unpaid invisible domestic labour in a nine foot room for a household of men who were having a religious experience. She was not treated worse than other women of her class and period; she was treated exactly like them, which is the observation.

1886: Ramakrishna died of throat cancer and she was thirty two. A Bengali brahmana widow then entered a regime of white unbordered cloth, no ornaments, no fish or meat or onion or garlic, one meal on certain days and none at all with no water on ekadashi, exclusion from every auspicious occasion and near social invisibility for life. She began removing her bangles and the tradition records that Ramakrishna appeared and told her he had only moved from one room to another. She kept the bangles and the bordered cloth. Whether or not a reader accepts the vision, she declined the regime in public, held it for thirty four more years, and thousands of women watched her do it.

What followed: the young disciples had no institution, money or plan and turned to her, referring decisions to her and treating her sanction as what made an action legitimate, and Vivekananda did not sail for America until he had her blessing. She gave diksha to hundreds of people over decades from the 1890s, a woman with no education, no Sanskrit and no institutional position giving mantras to men who went on to lead the order. She fed and personally served Amjad, a Muslim man of a community labelled criminal, cleaned up after him herself, and when a relative objected on both caste and religious grounds said: Sarat is my son, and so is Amjad. Her last recorded teaching was that if you want peace of mind you should not find fault with others but see your own faults, and learn to make the whole world your own, since no one is a stranger. In 1954 the order established Sri Sarada Math, a fully independent women's monastic order with its own governance and line of sannyasa, the first of its kind in modern Hinduism, and it exists because of her.

Radhu: her niece, whom she brought up, had a mental illness, with unstable and difficult behaviour over many years, periods of derangement, demands and dependency. Sarada Devi kept her, travelled with her, managed her, arranged her marriage and dealt with the consequences, for the rest of her life. And she complained: her recorded conversations state plainly that Radhu was her bondage, that she was tied by this and could not put it down, said out loud to disciples more than once, alongside her saying that she had taken it on and would carry it. That is the useful version of a saint, because a very large number of readers are looking after somebody and devotional writing usually hands them an image of serene selfless service, which adds guilt to exhaustion. Caregiver strain is real, recognised and treatable, and the carer is entitled to help in their own right: Tele MANAS 14416, a government hospital psychiatry department, Elderline 14567, Childline 1098. You are allowed to find it hard. The person you are caring for should be under medical and not only devotional care. And ask for relief before you need it, because nobody offers it unasked.