Mamata to inaugurate Sister Nivedita’s house today

Kolkata, Oct 23: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will inaugurate the restored house of Sister Nivedita on October 23 to commemorate her sesquicentennial birth anniversary. Sister Nivedita, then Margaret Elizabeth Noble, was born on October 28, 1867, at Dungannon in Ireland. It was at 16 A Bosepara Lane in Bagbazar that she opened her school for girls coming from middle-class families in November 1898 in the presence of Sri Sarada Devi and Swami Vivekananda. The century-old two-storeyed building was in shambles when the State Government acquired it and handed it to the Sarada Math. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) declared it as a Grade I heritage building. Sri Sarada Math proposes to set up a museum where many articles used by the Sister will be exhibited. The building is a historical place. It was here that Sister Nivedita set up her school and took the trouble of visiting every household requesting parents to send their daughters there. Sister Nivedita stayed in the house and carried out massive social work when the Plague broke out in Bagbazar and its neighbourhood. Swami Vivekananda and his followers often visited the house that became a centre of intellectual exercise and people like Rabindranath Tagore, Jagadish Chandra Bose and his wife Abala, Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, S K Ratcliffe, the then Editor of The Statesman and his wife, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Dinesh Chandra Sen were frequent visitors. The house played an important role in the socio-cultural movement in Bengal. UNI