More than thirty years before the above incident, one night, a young lad of fourteen called Mal Shankara, born of Samvedi Brahmin parentage, was keeping a strict vigil over the festival of the god Shiva, as his father and other relations were overcome with sleep. The lad was intelligent and keenly observant of all that happened around him. But from early childhood his mind was steeped in idolatrous notions, the supremacy of the priesthood and the omnipotence of the gods of wood and stone. And so, naturally, he was lying prostrate in front of Shiva on this particular night called Shivaratri (or night dedicated to Shiva) bravely struggling against the overmastering inclination to fall asleep. Three days' fasting had preceded this night vigil.
The spirit indeed was willing, but the flesh was weak. The blessings of the powerful god for his reverent worship and willing abstention from food and sleep, so the lad might then be thinking, would more than compensate for the severe bodily discomfort. Besides, his father's word was law to him. He knew what was good for the little Mal Shankara's spiritual life. That was enough for the lad.
The boy was expecting great things from the god he was told was so powerful. As the solemn hush of the small hours of the morning fell upon the place, a mouse crept out of a hole, began to nibble at the offerings made to the god and what was still worse, began to run across the god's body as if in contemptuous defiance of his presence and powers, if he possessed any.
This trivial incident marked the turning point in little mai Shankar's life. It set him thinking. It shattered his illusions regarding the powers of the divinity. This momentary vision released his powers of thinking which tradition and parental authority had all but suppressed. And the boy was obedient to the vision, willing to follow wherever it led. That night was a red-letter day for the boy, and through him was to be the precursor of a glorious dawn of religious emancipation for the masses in Upper India, for, from the moment the mouse took liberties with the sacred body of his god, the boy realised quite subconsciously perhaps, that the god and in fact all the gods of the Hindu pantheon, fell from their pedestals, humiliated and exposed.
But he must not be in a hurry. Surely there must be an explanation. And who could be a better person to approach in reference to this unsavoury occurrence than his own father, plunged by this time in deep slumbers, in the same temple ? Quite nervously, with tremendous hesitation, the boy woke up his father, and asked him why the god should tolerate such gross familiarity. Only to be scolded
by the father for interrupting his sleep. These things were not to be disputed or debated. He was not to reason why. His was only to fast and keep the vigil faithfully. If he failed in that, he would be scolded or chastised. Some very bad calamity might soon overtake him. He must not venture into the sanctuary. That was for the hoary priests of the ancient gods. And he was only a little mite of a boy, with limited intelligence, quite uninitiated, his little brain quite inadequate to the understand ing of these deep mysteries. He must do as he was told. He must believe what he was told to. We have heard and our fathers have told us of old ! So it has been of old, and so must it remain for all eternity.
But the boy was not to be bamboozled with these verbal trickeries. The moment he made sure that the father had again gone to sleep, he ran home and having taken some light refreshments, soon went off to sleep. He was no more to be bothered with the empty flummeries, the pomp and circum stance, the elaborate ritual that was all devised to placate this helpless, speechless dummy, the despic able toady that could not even drive away a mouse ! Even young school boys in their earlier forms might feel inclined to laugh over the insignificant incident that we have described at some length. Only let them remember, let us all remember, that this incident has been epoch-making in the life of Mul Shankara. It made history for India.
Some thirty years later, a learned pandit that had drunk deep at the Helicon of Vedic lore, that was anxious to reform Hinduism and purge it of the excrescences that an ignorant and obscurantist priesthood had gathered round the pure gold of Vedic tradition, sounded forth a trumpet of defiance at the very head and centre of orthodox Hinduism, Benares. That Pundit was Swami Daya Nanda Saraswati. Our readers might be astounded to learn that this protagonist of reform ; this iconoclast that demanded the dethronement of the gods of the Hindu pantheon; this impatient idealist that was burning with holy zeal to fuse into the dry bones of lifeless ceremonies and dead orthodox formalities of a once sublime but now moribund faith, the sublime and transcendent passion for a living, loving, merciful, just and omniscient God—was no other than Mul Shankara, the disillusioned lad that was later converted to an exalted form of monotheism, and which faith, he was seriously convinced, was to be found in its pristine purity in the Vedas.