August in India means slogans on sacrifice, communal harmony, social and political hygiene, identity politics, not to mention India’s volatile geopolitical position in South Asia. A nation of over a billion people celebrates freedom. But ‘freedom’ continues to suffer from the inadequacy of the language used for its expression.

What is it a freedom from? Freedom from British rule, caste and gender oppression, social hierarchies, internecine hatred or hunger, class divisions, or from the circle of life and rebirth? Or a hundred other kinds of freedoms going by exotic names or no names at all, all of which turn the sublime object of freedom into a mirage. One rarely experiences that sublime state of being free.

Among many others, two people who decisively altered the footprints of history — Joseph Priestley and Sri Ramakrishna — are also indelibly associated with the month of Augustus. Their lives and works are possibly capable of restoring the sanctity of the language and state of freedom.

Joseph Priestley. Photo: Wiki Commons  

In 1833, English electromagnetist Michael Faraday wrote on Priestley’s 100th birth anniversary that he was an example to be followed “in that freedom of mind, and in that independence of dogma and of preconceived notions, by which men are so often bowed down and carried forward from fallacy to fallacy.”

Oxygen from the lab

On August 1, 1774, Priestley’s historic experiment produced ‘dephlogisticated air’ or oxygen (O2), at his laboratory in Bowood House, in Wiltshire, an experiment sponsored by the second Earl of Shelburne. In his paper published by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Priestley described his method of heating mercuric oxide by the passage of sunshine through a lens. The colourless, odourless and tasteless gas made his lungs feel ‘peculiarly light’. He believed in its purest form it could possibly become a commodity of luxury consumption.

Priestley, who had also discovered the monoxide and dioxide of carbon, came to be regarded as a surrogate father of the aerated drinks industry. Although the Swedish pharmacist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, had successfully isolated oxygen two years before, Priestley triumphed though his collaboration with the French biochemist, Antoine Lavoisier, in a decade leading up to the French Revolution. As the English and French braced for the battles of Mysore and Seringapatam in the subcontinent, and for the Napoleonic Wars in the continent, Priestley and Lavoisier undertook a life-changing journey, which directly led to independence from the Aristotelian four-element theory and subsequent discoveries in photosynthesis.

Priestley’s crusade

Over a decade before he liberated oxygen, Priestly wrote The Rudiments of English Grammar, which rivalled even the Dictionary of the English Language written by his contemporary Samuel Johnson. Priestley’s crusade was to free English from the clutches of Latin. He also led a spiritual revolution in Unitarianism, the revivalist offshoot of English Protestantism, which spread across Britain, America, Europe and later India, in the late-18th century. A leading member of the first Unitarian Church in Britain, established in London the same year that he extracted oxygen, Priestley grinded on to unshackle the human spirit from rituals and fashions of religion.

A version of Unitarianism — or dissenters of the Holy Trinity — struck roots in India, spearheaded by Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore, and Keshub Chandra Sen, among others. Brahmoism, a Christianised form of Vedanta launched to free Bengal from social evils, had degenerated into warring camps by the end of the 19th century.

Sri Ramakrishna. Photo: Wiki Commons  

Around the same time, at Dakshineshwar, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, who was barely tutored in passages from the Upanishads, let alone English logic and science, unleashed a unique experiment of living in freedom. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, the embodiment of existentialist freedom, Ramakrishna had not witnessed a world war or been part of civil rights campaigns. However, he had seen human suffering, day in and day out, and suffered in turn to witness the infinite divine energy that he called ‘satchidananda’ or infinite-consciousness-bliss. In his idiosyncratic way, Ramakrishna personified the bliss of experiencing the transmutation of natural forms — from milk to curd to clarified butter or from wood to fire to boiled rice. And he also oversaw the transformation of the young orphan Narendranath Datta into the fearless reformer, Swami Vivekananda. Much before phenomenology, and what neuroscience calls neuroplasticity, Ramakrishna preached the broadening of the human mind in nondualist ways of seeing and experiencing the Upanishads, rather than be enslaved by the temptations of Western epistemology and utilitarianism.

Yoga of science

Although practically illiterate, Ramakrishna, and his wife Sarada Devi, united the dualist practices of Indian theism with a nondualist scientific temperament. Ramakrishna called this new union Vigyana Yoga, loosely translated as the yoga of science. His was not the scientism of the Enlightenment, parodied as the flying island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Ramakrishna experimented with Christianity and Islam, adopted techniques of Tantra, and even attempted to experience life as a gopi by trying to grow breasts. He wept like a child over the material fantasies that incarcerated the human spirit and over the tyranny of socially engineered thought, today understood as the regulation of the human mind by neuropeptides or ideological groupthink. His ecstatic states of unconsciousness or samadhi were later explained by French essayist Romain Rolland as impenetrable to psychoanalysis. American scientists and psychologists Leo Schneiderman, Walter G. Neevel and Bardwell L. Smith saw them as adventures into the hyperconscious. Seen by many as insane, epileptic or at best eccentric, Ramakrishna lived the message of Vedanta, aham brahmasmi, the self as the manifestation of supreme energy.

Ramakrishna’s life inspired Carl Jung to adopt Indian spiritualist techniques in Western psychotherapy. Perhaps Ramakrishna’s experiences also inspired the last letter of the Indian student philosopher, Rohith Vemula, who wanted to be a storyteller of science like Carl Sagan. “I loved Science, Stars, Nature,’ he wrote, ‘but then I loved people without knowing that people have long since been divorced from nature.” On the night of August 15, 1886, Ramakrishna breathed his last.

Priestley and Ramakrishna stood against institutionalised religion, institutionalised science, institutionalised freedom — indeed the institutionalisation of human identity. So did Vemula. As the idea of India totters on the brink of losing all the diverse meanings of freedom, it is time that it took in a heady draught of Ramakrishna’s Vigyana Yoga and Priestley’s ‘dephlogisticated air,’ lest freedom itself turn into a commodity of luxury consumption.

The writer is founding editor of Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing, and Associate Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University.