Chicago, 11 September 1893. The Parliament of the World’s Religions is opening, and a young monk in an orange robe and turban, unknown and unscheduled until the last moment, stands up to speak.
“Sisters and Brothers of America…”
He gets no further. Several thousand people rise to their feet and applaud for minutes on end.
The monk was Swami Vivekananda, thirty years old, from north Calcutta. In the nine years he had left, he would bring Indian philosophy to the West, found the Ramakrishna Mission, and give a colonised country a new confidence in itself.
Naren
He was born Narendranath Datta on 12 January 1863, in the Simla neighbourhood of north Calcutta, into a family of lawyers. Naren was clever, restless, musical and athletic: a good singer, a keen wrestler, a reader of Western philosophy at the General Assembly’s Institution, now the Scottish Church College. He also had a question nobody could answer for him.
“Have you seen God?”
In 1881 he went to the Kali temple at Dakshineswar to meet its priest, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and asked him straight out whether he had seen God. Ramakrishna said yes, as clearly as he could see Naren, and more intensely. Naren did not believe him at first. Over the next five years, arguing all the way, he became his closest disciple.
Ramakrishna died in 1886. Naren and a handful of young disciples took monastic vows and lived in a broken-down house at Baranagar, often with nothing to eat.
Walking India
From 1888 Vivekananda wandered India on foot and by train, often with nothing but a staff and a begging bowl, from the Himalayas to the southern tip. What he saw, the poverty and the people, stayed with him. At Kanyakumari, at the end of 1892, he swam out to a rock in the sea and meditated there; the Vivekananda Rock Memorial stands on it today. He decided to go to America.
Chicago, 1893
Funded by friends and the Raja of Khetri, who gave him the name Vivekananda, he reached Chicago with no invitation to the Parliament and very little money. A Harvard professor who met him wrote a letter that got him in. His opening speech on 11 September made him the star of the Parliament, and he spent the next years lecturing across America and England on Vedanta and yoga.
The Ramakrishna Mission and Belur Math
Back in India in 1897 he was greeted as a hero from Colombo to Calcutta. On 1 May 1897 he founded the Ramakrishna Mission, combining spiritual life with service: schools, hospitals, famine and flood relief. In 1898 he consecrated Belur Math, on the west bank of the Hooghly, as its headquarters. Its main temple was designed to echo a church, a mosque and a temple at once.
His disciples included Sister Nivedita, born Margaret Noble in Ireland, who opened a girls’ school in north Calcutta and threw herself into Indian art, science and nationalism.
Thirty-nine years
Vivekananda had been ill for years. On 4 July 1902, at Belur Math, he spent the morning meditating, the afternoon teaching, and died that evening. He was thirty-nine.
Where to find him in Kolkata
- His ancestral house on Gourmohan Mukherjee Street, Simla, restored by the Ramakrishna Mission as a museum and cultural centre.
- Dakshineswar, where he first met Ramakrishna, and the room where Ramakrishna lived.
- Belur Math, across the river, with the room where he died. The ferry from Dakshineswar to Belur is the best way to go.