Because Sharada’s life has been—and continues to be—the focus of a daunting body of devotional literature in both English and Bengali that is now well into the thousands of pages, it is impossible in the context of an essay such as this to deal in any exhaustive way with this corpus and its historical, textual, and religious complexities. For-tunately, however, the task is made considerably easier by the fact that the texts, in their constant attempt to create a stable and relatively simple hagiographical identity from the confusion of conflicted sources, tales, and memories, return again and again to certain key moments in Sharada’s life; not surprisingly, it is precisely these stable stories that end up playing the central roles in her eventual deification. Among these, we might isolate the following: her birth in 1853; her marriage to Ramakrishna in 1858; Ramakrishna’s worship of her as “the sixteen-year-old goddess” („oØa±ç-pâjÅ) in 1872; her childless widow status after Ramakrishna’s death in 1886, and its resolution in the bracelet vision; her adoption of Radhu in 1900; her move into the newly built Calcutta Udbodhan house in 1909; and her death in 1920.
Sharadamani was born on 22 December 1853 into the family of Ramachandra Mukherjee and his wife Shyamasundari Devi in the village of Jayrambati, just a few miles down the road from Ramakrishna’s natal village of Kamarpukur. Four more children would follow little Sharada, all boys: Prasanna, Barada, Kali, and Abhay.
When Sharada was just five years old, she was married to Ramakrishna.
It was not an auspicious start for the little girl. Ramakrishna’s family was arranging the marriage with the specific intention of curing Ramakrishna of his recurring states of madness. Not surprisingly, they had considerable difficulty finding a willing family. For some rea-son—I am aware of no text that tells us why—the Mukherjee family agreed to offer their five-year-old girl to the madman from Kamar-pukur. When, however, they learned that the wedding jewelry had in fact been borrowed and had already been returned (Ramakrishna had to sneak the ornaments off the child while she slept), Sharada’s uncle arrived to take her back home in protest. Tellingly, Ramakrishna’s mother worried that the marriage might be annulled.
The little girl would see her “crazy husband” only rarely and sporadically for the next thirteen years, until, having turned eighteen, she finally decided to see for herself if the rumors of his madness were
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true and, accompanied by her father, walked the sixty miles to Dakshineshwar sometime in March of 1872. What happened shortly after this would become one of the most important elements in the narrative construction of Sharada’s divinity: Ramakrishna’s worship of her as the goddess in the ÷rç VidyÅ Tantric rite of „oØa±ç-pâjÅ or
“worship of the sixteen-year-old.” The texts are confused about both the time4 and the place of this ritual, but the textual consensus seems to place the event at Dakshineshwar during PhalahÅrinç KÅlç-pâjÅ in June of 1872 (MK 227), in other words, just a few months after Sharada’s arrival. On this summer night, Ramakrishna invited Sharada to a pâjÅ in his room around 9:00 P.M. The young wife arrived to discover all the items in place and no image on the ritual seat; she, it turns out, was to be the image. Ramakrishna sat her on the ritual seat and proceeded with the three-hour rite, worshiping her as a sixteen-year-old goddess.
The ritual ended after midnight, with both Ramakrishna and Sharada in semiconscious states.5
The traditional biographers make much of this ritual; indeed, it is astonishing to see just how overdetermined the event becomes in the later tradition. The biographers suggest, for example, that the event signified: Ramakrishna’s final triumph over sexuality; the successful conclusion of Ramakrishna’s spiritual practices; the awakening of Sharada’s consciousness of her own divinity (HM[G] 48); the estab-lishment of a new model for married couples (HM[G] 47); and the unique situation of a prophet or saint giving special status to his wife.6 Perhaps even more important for the tradition is the texts’ insistence that, by reason of this rite, Sharada came to share in the fruits and powers of Ramakrishna’s spiritual practices (a necessary move, since she seemed to have practiced none in her own life) and took her place as the eventual spiritual head of what would become an important religious movement (the texts leave no doubt that “his mantle fell on her” [GHM xviii–xix]). With a single ritual, the tradition could thus deify Sharada (for had Ramakrishna not worshiped her as the god-dess?), explain why this goddess had performed no sÅdhana, and le-gitimate her already established role as the Master’s successor.
After falling ill a year after the pâjÅ, Sharada left the temple compounds altogether: “Realizing that then at Dakshineshwar, she could be of no use to others and that on the contrary she would be adding to their anxiety, she left for Jayrambati” (HM[G] 53). The texts say nothing about Ramakrishna trying to stop her.
She would, however, eventually return to spend her days in a tiny octogonal cubicle in the temple music tower, sleeping, praying, and, most of all, cooking for her famous husband and his numerous male guests. Careful about keeping purdah, she was up at 4 A.M. to bathe and back in the tower before anyone could see her. Such a strict
routine led to constipation (vegadhÅrana), which in turn gave her stom-ach problems (MK 304). Imprisoned within such a schedule and her tiny walls, Sharada would sometimes spend up to two months with-out even seeing Ramakrishna, despite the fact that he lived just a few yards away in the same temple complex and she was cooking all of his meals (MK 193).
Given all of this, it should not surprise us that Sharada once compared her marriage to Ramakrishna to that of UmÅ to the “hemp-addict” ÷iva (HM[N] 134). It may have been divine, but it was hardly ideal. Things only got worse when the saint died in 1886. Now a widow, she was virtually ignored by the disciples, who had never considered her anything but the “guru’s wife,” and was abandoned by her legal guardian, who stopped her monthly temple pension, gave her Ramakrishna’s village hut, and effectively left her to her own meagre means. There in Kamarpukur she suffered in obscurity and poverty (SK 138–139) until, through the campaigns of two persistent women, her mother and Golap-Ma, she was brought back to Calcutta in April of 1888. Significantly, even then there was considerable hesi-tation about a widow living among the men, for “men at large had not yet come to recognize her spiritual status” (GHM xxv). This judgment from an utter absence of religious experience was not reversed, or even challenged, until Sharada’s attendants began to talk about ex-traordinary states of consciousness that they had allegedly witnessed on a pilgrimage with her at Vrindaban. The deification process had begun through unusual states of consciousness reported and defined exclusively by others (and by women, I might add). Here, as else-where, Sharada was strangely silent.
Sharada did not help matters much by refusing to give up her bangles and red-bordered saris, something every widow was supposed to do to mark her now permanent state of mourning and asceticism.
Such a refusal produced its predictable result: the villagers criticized her for being a “merry widow.” Torn between her own desires for the ornaments and the social demands of her culture, Sharada had a vision of Ramakrishna, who told her that he was not really dead but had simply moved, “as if from this room to that one” (MK 135). Sharada could keep her bracelets, since as a divine being Ramakrishna was not really dead. With a single blow, the vision thus resolved Sharada’s personal crisis—even if it did not answer the villagers’ criticisms—and hinted, even if by indirection, at her own essentially divine nature.
Sharada, it turns out, as the nonwidow of the ever-living God, had to be recognized as the Goddess. The bracelets, once a social scandal and the mark of Sharada’s attachment to the world, had become a powerful, if contested, sign of her husband’s (and now her own) divinity.7
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Alive or not, however, Sharada was clearly depressed about her physically absent husband, her own controversial widow status, and her utter lack of children (MK 383). Sharada went on a number of pilgrimages at this time, no doubt in an attempt to deal with her pain and suffering,8 but these, it seems, ultimately resolved little. She was still a widow, and there were precious few social paths out of such a situation. From scattered but telling textual evidence, we might con-clude that her condition continued to deteriorate. We are told, for example, that she had no connection at all with the household at this time, and that “nobody would dare approach her”; why, we are not told (SK 139). Another striking passage in the SmŸtikathÅ describes a Sharada who had to be carried from place to place, “like a statue,” by Golap-Ma and Yogin-Ma (SK 11). Saradeshananda, of course, reads such a condition as a product and sign of her advanced meditation, but given what we know about Sharada’s state at this time after her husband’s death and before any new social identity had had a chance to form, we might see these statue scenes as psychophysiological re-sponses to what, by any measure, was a desperate and, in many cases, hopeless situation.
At some point, however, Sharada had a vision that would at last pull her out from this statue-like existence. Ramakrishna appeared to her, showed her a young girl dressed in red, and said, “Take refuge in this one and remain [here]. Now many, many children9 will come to you.” Some time after the vision, her sister-in-law, then completely mad, walked by. Behind her crawled her crying little girl, Radhu.
Sharada’s heart was broken by this pathetic scene, and she decided then and there to adopt the child as her own. As she took the child in her lap, Ramakrishna appeared again and said, “This is the girl. Take her as your refuge and live. This is yoga-mÅyÅ”(MK 268–269). Sharada finally had her child, and a reason to live.
The texts suggest through their religious language and use of vision that this adoption of a girl who embodied the power of mÅyÅ effectively held Sharada “down” from mok„a, but clearly other psycho-logical forces were also at work; indeed, it seems just as likely that the adoption of Radhu held Sharada “up” from a rather severe state of depression. Whether we read the event as a hook to pull her up from the depths or a prop to her hold her down from the heights, one thing is beyond question: Sharada did, in fact, adopt a little girl whom she would keep by her side for the rest of her life. Sharada was finally a mother. But things were hardly what she expected. Radhu, it turns out, was as mentally deficient as her biological mother. Radhu’s mother, moreover, became jealous of Sharada and often abused her. Radhu only made things worse, spitting food on Sharada (MK 321), beating
her with a comb (MK 343), making scenes in front of the devotees, and going mad during her own confinement and pregnancy. Nothing was easy for poor Sharada.
Radhu was born in 1900. Sharada raised the girl, staying mostly at Jayrambati until 1909, when a house was built for her in Calcutta.
Since the Udbodhan Press was located in its ground floor, the struc-ture came to be know as the Udbodhan House. Here, protected by
“the Mother’s gatekeeper,” the regal Swami Saradananda (who con-ceived of the building in the first place), Sharada would receive her many Calcutta devotees. It is significant that virtually all of the scenes recorded in the MÅyer KathÅ take place within this carefully guarded, minutely controlled devotional space. It could even be said, I think, that the construction of the Udbodhan House eventually resulted in the construction of Sharada as the Great Goddess of the Ramakrishna tradition. Here Sharada’s movements could be regulated and her visi-tors could be controlled, even chosen, all within the official space of a growing, prospering, publishing religious movement.
It is clear that Sharada resented, if in her typically gentle fashion, the control both the city customs and the male monks held over her at Udbodhan and much preferred to stay in the more relaxing atmo-sphere of the village, where things were not run by the ticking of a clock. The texts often contrast the two locations, probably faithfully reflecting Sharada’s own shared feelings. Saradeshananda, for example, describes Jayrambati as a malaria-infested place where Sharada had to work hard but could live “like the daughter,” that is, freely, and Udbodhan as the place where Sharada did not have to work but where she did have to live “like the daughter-in-law” under the watchful, loving eye of Swami Saradananda (SK 13, 236–237).
Sharada would move back and forth between Udbodhan, where her Calcutta devotees could meet her, and her natal village of Jayrambati, where she could take care of her family, until her death on 20 July 1920 at Udbodhan. The bangles she had fought so hard to keep after Ramakrishna’s death and which had become a powerful, if ever controversial, symbol of her nonwidow status stayed with her until the very end, even if they had to be tied to her wrists with strings to keep them from falling off her bony frame (SK 197).