East-West encounter
PREMA NANDAKUMAR
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA IN AMERICA — New Findings: Asim Chaudhuri; Advaita Asrama, 5, Dehi Entally Road, Kolkata-700014. Rs. 325.
For two millennia and more the paths opened up by Upanishadic Vedanta in India had resulted in an unprecedented flowering of religion and spirituality, literature, art, architecture, polity and the sciences. More recently, shadows did fall upon the Vedantic spirit of India because of the English-educated Indian of the 19th century who got drunk by “everything English.” Fortunately, the innate strength and resilience of India’s Vedantic spirit stood the test well. In 1893, at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda stood up and began: “Sisters and Brothers of America …” The Age of Neo-Vedanta had begun.
Sumptuous volume
More than a hundred years after, we are still documenting how the U.S. became Swami Vivekananda’s prime karma-bhumi. Marie Louise Burke had achieved a massive recordation in Swami Vivekananda in the West. Asim Chaudhuri has supplemented it with Swami Vivekananda in America. His earlier work had focused on Chicago.
The present sumptuous volume takes us to all the other places in the U.S. that are associated with Swami Vivekananda and has plentiful information, some of which are revelatory. We also get to gather a basketful of fascinating details: Moses Farmer who exhibited the first electrical passenger railway car in 1847 in Dover; a critique of Sarah Bernhardt’s portrayal of Iziel in 1896; and the silence with which the Swami shut up bigoted critics in Detroit.
It is a rich repast of Vivekananda literature that also gives us the needed geographical-historical details of places like Minnesota, Iowa and Connecticut. The various houses come alive for us as Asim Chaudhuri says: “He (the Swami) had that rare capacity to brighten up an entire house with his presence.”
Enchantment
And the photographs! Most of them appropriately sepia-tinted, bringing to life the names one has come across in the biographies of Swami Vivekananda. The stark Metcalf railroad station in 1893 where he turned up with a luggage, “almost a Bodleian library”; Saratoga Springs Town Hall where the Swami spoke on economics, “The Use of Silver in India”; and the Prophet’s Pine at Ridgely.
The commitment of Chaudhuri to his subject is such that all the contemporary newspaper announcements, reviews and even occasional battles (as the one launched by the followers of Panditha Ramabhai) are brought together. It is astonishing that this repetitiveness is not tiresome. Such is the magic of Swami Vivekananda. The enchantment grips us as we read again, one hundred years and more after it was recorded: “As he stood, last night, upon the dais in his picturesque kafftan of bright red, a stray curl of jet-black hair creeping from under the many folds of his orange turban, his swarthy face reflecting the brilliancy of his thoughts, his large expressive eyes, bright with enthusiasm of a prophet, and his mobile mouth uttering, in deep melodious tones and in almost perfect English, only words of love and sympathy and toleration, he was a splendid type of the famous sage of the Himalayas …”
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