Eknathji Ranade

Eknath Ramakrishna Ranade (1914–1982), usually called Eknathji, was an organiser rather than a preacher, and is remembered chiefly for building the Vivekananda Rock Memorial at Kanyakumari and the service organisation that grew out of it. Born at Timtala in Amravati district, he took an MA with honours in philosophy and a law degree from Sagar University in 1945. He had joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as a volunteer in 1926 and rose through it, serving as its general secretary from 1956 to 1962. In Calcutta in 1950, as regional organiser for Bengal, Odisha and Assam, he set up a Vastuhara Sahayata Samiti to help people displaced from East Pakistan by Partition.

In 1963, the centenary of Swami Vivekananda's birth, he published a selection of Vivekananda's writings and conceived a memorial on the offshore rock at Kanyakumari where Vivekananda had meditated in December 1892. The proposal was initially refused by the Union education and culture minister Humayun Kabir. Ranade responded by assembling the signatures of more than 300 members of Parliament and winning endorsements across the political and religious spectrum, including from people usually opposed to the RSS, until Prime Minister Indira Gandhi approved the project. He then served as organising secretary for the construction between 1963 and 1972 and raised the money through a mass-participation scheme, Jan-Bhagidaari, that invited every citizen to give at least one rupee.

In 1972 he founded the Vivekananda Kendra at Kanyakumari as a lay service organisation built on the twin principles of renunciation and service. He was deliberate about what it should not be: he refused to allow a guru culture, declined divine status for Vivekananda or himself, and adopted Omkara as the Kendra's guiding principle on the reasoning that this honoured all Indian teachers equally. He became its president in 1978 after serving as general secretary, and it now has more than 200 branches across India. His writings include The Sadhana of Service, The Story of Vivekananda Rock Memorial and The Kendra Unfolds. He died of a heart attack in Madras on 22 August 1982 and was cremated at Vivekanandapuram, Kanyakumari.[2]