When they came - 3

Before getting back to the discussion on Sri Krishna, lets talk about another person who figures very prominently on the divine appearance list. The difference between the rest and him is that 1) He is the most recent 2) His leela or divine play has been well documented and corroborated by various sources.

Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa has been varioulsy refered as "Avatar", "Yugavatar", "great saint", "mystic", "sage" and "phenomenon" (the last one by Christopher Isherwood). However, my belief is that nobody, except for a very select few, knew who he truly was, he revealed himself only to his nearest and dearest whom he called as 'Antaranga' or the innermost circle. In his own language, he was "achin gachh" or that unknown plant, ever mysterious and beyond comprehension of ordinary mortal. Vivekananda certainly knew who he was, being his foremost disciple. The very depth of his feeling about Ramakrishna can be understood by anyone who has read his work "My Master". He went to the extent of saying that Ramakrishna is equivalent to a million Vivekanandas. Coming from a person who is known to be measured in his evaluation of anybody, be it friend or enemy, it is something worth pondering.

Ramakrishna came at a time when the social and political scenarios of India in general and Bengal in particular were going through a major upheaval. Only recently had Macaulay and Bentinck carried out their educational reforms, hoping to put a death nail on the indigenous culture and believing that a superior spirit of Christianity would be able to engulf and civilize the entire India by replacing the ancient religious orders. No doubt they were partially successfull, given the craze with which young Bengal, a product of British dominated Calcutta University, began hating traditions, ritualism and casteism and embraced Brahmaism and Christianity. Bengal was then the educational and cultural capital of India, apart from being the capital of British Indian empire and the danger of "India doing tomorrow what Bengal does today" was a very big possibility. There were people who stuck to Hindu traditions with all their mights, but they were hopelessly divided into thousands of sects - Vaishanvites, Shaivites, Shaktas and even into young and obscure sects. One couldn't tolerate another, let alone fight unitedly the dual menace of English education and missionery invasion into the Hindu religious life. So it seemed for a while that Macaulay was winning convincingly. The British education system at this point started a lot of false propaganda and fuelled the divide among castes and creeds. They with the help of a few over zealous European scholars (among whom was Max Mueller) came up with the fantastic but seemingly plausible Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), which hypothesized that an alien group of white skinned people, possibly from Europe or Central Asia, invaded India in about 1500 BC and overran the homegrown Dravidian culture, the conquests of the Aryans being depicted in Ramayana and Mahabharata, Rama being an Aryan and Ravana the archetypal dark skinned Dravidian (of course they did not consider the fact that Rama himself is depicted as "dark skinned"). Surprisingly even after Indian independence nobody tried to seriously question the Aryan Invasion Theory and no thanks to our socialist establishment and Marxist historians AIT found a way into our text books and generations after generations are being fed on this garbage of a theory which has no credible evidence. However more on this in a separate blog. Suffice to say that this propaganda caused a lot of damage and was definitely responsible for fuelling Racism in "Aryan" Europe, the culmination of which came with the Nazism and slaughter of 6 million Jews.
AIT is just one example for showing the deep hatred and prejudice which Europeans and colonial rulers had for India and Indian civilization. Sadly the English educated Indians began to follow their mentors, openly ridicule "Indianness and Hinduism" without understanding or comprehending any of them. People of great stature like Ram Mohan Roy made the same mistakes. After the failed mutiny of 1857 British rule was accepted as a destiny and foregone conclusion by Indians. Nationalism and patriotism was still at a conceptual stage. There was social disharmony and poverty became rampant. Bengal, the ertswhile rice bowl of India suffered from frequent famines owing to the negligence of the ruling elites. Superstition prevailed in the name of religious practices and opporession of poor by rich and mighty was the accepted norm.
Thus was set the stage for the arrival of another luminary, to reestablish "dharma" and to destroy "adharma".