Person · educator & Vivekananda disciple · India
Sister Nivedita
Also known as Sister Nivedita, Margaret Elizabeth Noble, Nivedita
Irish-born Margaret Elizabeth Noble, who met Vivekananda in London in 1895, followed him to India in 1898, took the vow of Brahmacharya from him as Sister Nivedita, and spent the rest of her life running a girls' school in Calcutta's Bagh Bazar and writing on Indian art, nationalism and women's education. Her Web of Indian Life (1904) presented India to the English-speaking world through a nationalist lens; she worked closely with Jagadish Chandra Bose, Rabindranath Tagore and the revolutionary movement around Aurobindo. She died at Darjeeling in 1911 at forty-three. Her samadhi beside Vivekananda's at Belur Math is one of the few granted to a non-Indian.
- Date
- 1867–1911
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
She designed the Ramakrishna Mission's logo and the proposed Indian national flag (1904) that preceded the current one — a thunderbolt and lotus in red and yellow with Vande Mataram across the bottom. Her Bagh Bazar school taught the first generation of Bengali middle-class girls who went on to teach and to work in public life. The Calcutta plague of 1899 found her nursing in the city, which was how she first entered Bengali public affection.
About the place
Placed at Calcutta where she ran her school and died in 1911.
Connections (4)
- Disciple ofSwami Vivekananda
Margaret Noble met Swami Vivekananda in London in 1895, followed him to India in January 1898, and took the vow of Brahmacharya from him at Belur Math on 25 March 1898 as Sister Nivedita (the Dedicated One). The relationship was decisive for both: Vivekananda shaped Nivedita's turn from Western Theosophy to active Vedanta, and Nivedita's writing — Web of Indian Life, Cradle Tales of Hinduism — did more to introduce Indian cultural nationalism to the English-reading world than any other single author of the period.
- Associated withBelur Math
Sister Nivedita's samadhi stands beside Vivekananda's at Belur Math on the Hooghly's west bank, which is unusual: she is one of only three non-Indians buried on Ramakrishna Math grounds and the only woman. She lived her Calcutta years in walking distance of the main shrine — at Bosepara Lane in Bagh Bazar, where her girls' school ran — and crossed to Belur regularly for the Order's monastic rhythm. Her 1911 Darjeeling death and the Math burial were the Order's own choice.
- Based atKolkata
Sister Nivedita's Girls' School at Bosepara Lane in Bagh Bazar, Calcutta — founded 1898 and ran until her death in 1911 — was the first substantial Western-style school for Bengali middle-class girls, and the centre of her Calcutta life for thirteen years. Through the school and her literary work she entered the Bengal renaissance's inner circles — Tagore, J.C. Bose, Aurobindo — and became the one non-Indian woman whom nationalist Bengal treated as fully native. Her school's building still stands as a Ramakrishna Mission site.
- Died atMountain railways: Darjeeling
Sister Nivedita died at Darjeeling on 13 October 1911 at the age of forty-three, during a hill-station retreat after years of hard work in Calcutta that had broken her health. Her last words were reportedly 'The boat is sinking but I shall yet see the sun rise.' She was cremated at Darjeeling the next day with the Buddhist and Hindu rites her will had specified, and her ashes were taken to Belur Math where her samadhi beside Vivekananda's is now a Ramakrishna Mission pilgrimage.