Perfecting the Mother’s Silence
Dream, Devotion, and Family in the Deification of Sharada Devi
Jeffrey J. Kripal
One day . . . when a certain young monk told the revered Sarat Maharaj, “Mother said such-and-such,” in order to support his own view on a particular topic, [Maharaj] said in a serious tone, “Look, many times even I cannot be certain whether it was MÅ or I who said something.” . . . Truly, when [the young monk] shared with MÅ the intentions of his heart for his own purposes, MÅ only consented to this out of love for this son;
in fact, he has passed his own words for MÅ’s own.
—÷rç ÷rç MÅyer SmŸtikathÅ
Introduction: Toward a Hermeneutics of Hiddenness
Sharada Devi (1853–1920), the wife of Ramakrishna Paramahaœsa (1836–1886), is known to her many devotees as “the Holy Mother.”1 But she is much more than a mother. She is Sharada the Devç, the Great Goddess of the Ramakrishna tradition, variously identified as a form of KÅlç,2 DurgÅ (MK 59, 71), Ädya±akti (MK 99) AnnapâræÅ (MK 369), Sarasvatç (MK 54), or simply, as her honorific title suggests, “the Goddess” (devç). Sharada herself, or at least that textual form of her that we have in print, seemed to share such a Great Goddess mythol-ogy, for she could speak confidently of all these goddess-figures as
“my parts” (MK 350). The later iconic tradition, moreover, has more than supported such a claim with numerous god-posters, such as the
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All translations from the Bengali are my own; I am grateful to Narasingha Sil for help with difficult passages.
one I purchased in Calcutta in 1990 depicting the “three forms” (tina râpa) of KÅlç, DurgÅ, and TÅrÅ descending “into the one body” (eka aÙge) of Sharada Devi—a perfect poster representation of the Great Goddess figure in Hindu mythology.
Poster perfect or not, however, such grand mythological claims and brightly painted visions appear extreme from a strictly historical perspective. Sharada, after all, was as ordinary and delightfully hu-man a wohu-man as one is likely to find in religious literature—or in real life. Consider, for example, the following humorous scene. A female devotee enters the room and sees two women sitting before her:
Sharada and her attendant, Golap-Ma. The devotee knows that one of them is “the Holy Mother,” but she cannot tell which one. Realizing this, Sharada and Golap-Ma decide to have some fun. Each insists that she is “the Mother.” This confuses the poor woman to the point of exasperation, until Golap-Ma ends the game by castigating the visitor for not being able to recognize the real Holy Mother and her obvious display of divinity (MK 233).
But what really was there to see? Certainly this devotee was not the only one to mistake Sharada for an ordinary woman. Even Sharada’s own family claimed to see nothing. And Yogin-Ma, another of her female attendants, often complained about Sharada behaving like an ordinary, worldly minded woman, spending all her time taking care of Radhu, her mentally retarded3 adopted niece, and her always bick-ering family members. Sharada herself was critical of her family and often voiced a common-sense skepticism in regards to her own divin-ity. When a disciple, for example, made a comment about how people in the future would perform sÅdhana to attain her, she replied, “What are you saying? Everyone will say, ‘My MÅ had such a bad case of rheumatism, and she used to limp so” (MK 187). It was thus all more than a little puzzling to Sharada why so many people, even doctors and lawyers (MK 279), would come and visit this limping village woman with aching knees and a mentally handicapped “monkey”
(MK 328) for a daughter: “Look, I often think to myself, ‘I am just the daughter of Ram Mukherjee, and there are many women of my age at Jayrambati [her village]. How am I different from them?. . . . And why are these people coming like this?’” (MK 279). The texts generally approach such disarmingly honest questions with what we might call a “hermeneutics of hiddenness.” This interpretive strategy works by accepting Sharada’s ordinariness as a divine illusion and her self-con-fessed confusion as an intentional act: “You know nothing! From her words it seems as if Radhu is indeed everything to her. [Thus] MÅ keeps herself so hidden” (MK 364; cf. MK 15). In short, she isn’t ordi-nary, we’re just blind and unseeing.
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Once this hiddenness is posited and the hermeneutics is in place, any doubts can be read as forms of ignorance and the tradition can then safely proceed, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, to read out of Sharada’s simple village wisdom, household chores, and undeniable charm the mythological truths it knows are there. Eventu-ally, of course, Sharada herself begins to believe and responds accord-ingly with symbolic visions and cryptic statements. But more often than not, she responds by saying little or even nothing, that is, she remains silent. By remaining silent, either through a quiet acceptance of other people’s interpretations or through an actual voiceless presence, a kind of religious tabula rasa is created upon which the devotees can paint practically anything. And paint they did.
Perhaps she enjoyed the attention. Perhaps she saw no reason to refuse those who came to her with their numerous physical ailments, emotional sufferings, and religious needs; they, after all, very much needed a mother’s love. Whatever internal motivations Sharada may have had, her silence, coupled with the devotees’ verbosity, was ex-tremely effective, for only here, in a submissive compassionate pres-ence that raised no objections and offered only an occasional humorous
“but,” could the ritual, mythological, textual, and technological means of the tradition transform her into the Great Goddess it needed. Hence, as we shall soon see—through a dream at night, a bunch of flowers, a kiss of those feet, a simple bow, the exchange of food, a photograph, a publication, the construction of a building, a title of respect, a lock of hair—Sharada’s silence is filled in, seen, interpreted, acted out, worshiped, created in speech and social etiquette, treasured, even photographed, until it is given a voice that can speak to the anxious conditions of British Bengal.
In the next few pages, I will sketch out some of the textual traces of this silence and what I will call its “perfecting.” After a synopsis of Sharada’s life and a discussion of what we might call the “narrative construction” of her divine identity through the selective interpretive memory (smŸti) of the hagiographical tradition (section 1), I will then turn to Sharada’s two questions: “How am I different from them?”
and “Why do these people come?” In addressing the former question, I will sketch in some detail the various psychological and social tech-niques by which Sharada was indeed “made different,” especially as these pertain to the dynamics of the dream (svapna) and its “perfect-ing” (siddha) in ritual, initiation, and devotion (section 2); and in ad-dressing the latter question, I will advance a thesis about the traditional familial nature of the Mother’s charisma and the powerful emotional-devotional responses it so effortlessly elicited from her many visiting children (section 3). By addressing these two questions, I hope to
develop a dialectical vision of the deification process that respects both the power of what the disciples brought to the deification process and the reality of what the they actually found in this being whom they so affectionately called “the Holy Mother.”