Offtrack: Calcutta: Unlikely Shrine

Swami Vivekananda's childhood home is getting its due recognition -- finally.

Gour Mohan Mukherjee Street. If you happen to visit this middle-class neighbourhood in north Calcutta's Shimla, you would find nothing more jarring than the congested alleyways criss-crossing the area and the tumbledown buildings lining them. House No. 3 is no different. The dilapidated mansion with its crumbling walls and pillars, and ugly beams jutting from all sides would have you look the other way.

The dilapidated building has been altered so many times, there is very little left of the original. Thieves have also broken into it.

The dilapidated building has been altered so many times, there is very little left of the original. Thieves have also broken into it.

Not if you knew better though. Besides being the house where Swami Vivekananda was born -- in 1863 -- it was this building that framed his early thoughts. Young Naren grew up here. His pathshala (school) was run on these premises which, as his brother Mahendranath once reminisced, was also the scene of much makeshift cricket and marble-throwing contests among "the boys". Each of what used to be a room here has a delightful tale to tell: from Vivekananda having a vision of the Buddha and throwing clothes out to beggars from a window to him taking sly drags from his father's hookah and spending hours with his pet -- a goat -- every time his mother reprimanded him. The odd office-goer still religiously stops by the premises for a quick prayer on his way to work; so do a handful of rickshawpullers and children who drop in to touch their heads to the ground. Not because there is a deity -- Vivekananda would balk at deification -- but because they still consider House No. 3 a shrine.

A shrine that over a century of neglect has been rendered into an edifice of shame. Poor maintenance by the 54 families claiming descent from Vivekananda's sister and uncle apart, the house has been dragged to court and even broken into by thieves. The Ramakrishna Mission (RKM) took over the premises in the '60s to restore to it its due glory but for want of funds is still to embark on its plans. Much time and money was lost when the mission tried to get Vivekananda's descendants out of the house. It even moved the Calcutta High Court but eventually the matter was settled out of court with the families demanding a hefty compensation.

It is also a matter of shame that the house has received little state attention in the past. It was only recently that the Union Government offered Rs 70 lakh as part of a Rs 1.2 crore package to rebuild the house. The announcement, made at a public rally in Calcutta, only reminded the West Bengal Government that its earlier promise for a phased grant of Rs 8 crore was far from fulfilled.

Attention is long overdue. The ramshackle building has mutated so many times that there is very little left of the original. According to Mahendranath, the house was spread over two-and-a-half bighas. There was a thakurdalan -- a raised plinth running around an open courtyard -- facing the west which was held up by five brick pillars. Above the thakurdalan were two huge halls. The inner hall overlooked a pond while the larger hall would be lit up in the evenings with oil lamps since there were no lanterns in those days.

Vivekananda's descendants altered the character of the house entirely by inserting a floor into the 12-ft-high thakurdalan, splitting it through the middle with a passage. A whole floor precariously balances on slim sal poles, shutters ripped from the stained-glass windows now. The rooms, severely partitioned, are musty and the balconies bare. "Large chunks of the intricately carved cast-iron grill in the balconies were removed in a theft," says RKM representative Partho Maharaj.

The mission wants to restore the building to its 1887 grandeur. With help from the Archaeological Survey of India and Development Consultants Limited (DCL), it plans to turn the house into a museum and a centre for Vedanta studies with a meditation room, a library and a seminar hall. It has hired an architects' firm, Continuity, to remodel the structure. The architects had only a tattered 1886 floor plan to go by but managed to reconstruct a sketch from books written by Vivekananda and Mahendranath. And when the final proposal comes through, the nostalgic trip down Gour Mohan Mukherjee Street will hopefully be more inspiring than sad.