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Swami
Paramananda was born on February 5, 1884 as Suresh Chandra Guha-Thakurta,
the youngest son of a prestigious family, in the village of Banaripara. The
village is in the district of Barisal, which was then part of East Bengal in
British India and is now part of Bangladesh. His father, Ananda Mohan
Guha-Thakurta, was well known as a progressive, a champion for women's
education, a legacy he was to pass along to his sons. His mother,
Brahmamoyee Basu, bore eight children before dying of cancer in her early
forties, when Suresh was nine years old. Suresh was known for his
affectionate nature and cheerfulness. When Suresh was sixteen, his father
began to loose his eyesight. As a result, Suresh read devotional texts aloud
and one that was particularly compelling was a collection of "Sayings of Sri
Ramakrishna" a revered saint who had passed away fourteen years prior.
On his
seventeenth birthday, Suresh joined a group of older men from the village in
a journey to Belur to visit the monastery and temple founded by
Ramakrishna's disciples. There he met his teacher, Swami Vivekananda, who
was the foremost disciple of Sri Ramakrishna and the first swami to teach in
America. Paramananda was initiated a month before his eighteenth birthday,
becoming a monk (sannyasin) of the Ramakrishna Order and the youngest
disciple of Swami Vivekananda. The President of the RamakrishnaMath, Swami
Brahmananda, would call Suresh "Basanta Kokhile" [spring-bird], or simply "Basanta"
[spring] and that became his new nick name. He trained under the mentorship
of Swami Ramakrishnananda, also a direct disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, and
founder of the Madras Math, a thousand miles south of Calcutta.
Swami
Paramananda was sent to America in 1906 at the age of twenty-two. He lived
and taught at the previously established New York Vedanta Society. In 1909,
Paramananda established the Vedanta Centre of Boston. He lectured throughout
the United States, Europe and Asia for thirty-four years, until his passing
in 1940. He founded four major centers still thriving today, two in the
United States and two in Calcutta, India. The American ashramas are in
Cohasset, Massachusetts and La Crescenta, California. Like his teacher,
Swami Vivekananda, Paramananda believed in equality between men and women.
He established disciplined communities of nuns under the supervision of
Sister Devamata (1867-1942) his American first disciple, whom he ordained to
teach Vedanta from the platform in 1910. Throughout the entire history of
the community, women were accorded positions of leadership in all areas of
the work. The first Indian woman to join the community was Gayatri Devi
(1906-1995), who was brought by Paramananda in 1926 to be trained as one of
his assistants. Srimata Gayatri Devi became the spiritual leader of the
centers upon Swami Paramananda's death in 1940 and the first Indian woman to
be ordained a teacher in America. |