JOIN USRemembering Vivekananda's sojourn in New England
In summer, Massachusetts's coastal destinations like Salem, Cape Ann, Gloucester and Rockport come alive when large crowds of tourists swing by to enjoy the great outdoors, wildlife and local seafood delicacies.
These neighbourhoods of New England, only 40 miles from Boston, also have a rich history of driving early trade between the newly formed republic and the overseas port cities. In the late 18th century, Salem was home to the East India Marine Society and its vessels regularly voyaged to Indian ports.
Annisquam, a quiet village overlooking a finger-shaped bay called Lobster Cove in Gloucester, attracts a small number of curious visitors to its village church originally established in 1728 as a Universalist Church. They are drawn to Swami Vivekananda's early sojourn in New England and the role played by this church.
On one Sunday morning, I waited for Annisquam Village Church's Sunday service to be over to have a glimpse of the sacred pulpit where Swami Vivekananda delivered his first public lecture titled “The manners and customs of India” on August 27, 1893, on an invitation from Prof. John Henry Wright of Harvard University. Based on the church's estimate, probably up to 200 guests were accommodated for the talk. This was before his famous Chicago lecture in the World Parliament of Religions on September 11, 1893.
In 1893, while the Gloucester Daily Times and The Cape Ann Breeze briefly reported Swami Vivekananda's public lecture, a letter of novelist Mary Tappan Wright to her mother provides greater details of Swamiji's arrival at the church, activities in Miss Lane's boarding house on Arlington Street where distinguished guests from Boston and elsewhere stayed to attend Swami Vivekananda's lecture.
Pastor Rev. Sue Koehler-Arsenault was kind enough to give me a tour of the church. Outside the church's main prayer hall, a plaque was installed on July 28, 2013, to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda. This beautiful church pulpit once had a wooden lectern that was used by Swamiji and is now stored in the basement of the church. Thanks to Rev. Sue for turning the lights on for me and explaining the importance of this heritage wooden lectern.
Before Swami Vivekananda's visit, Sanskrit texts did reach the coast of New England. Intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who pioneered the transcendental movement in America, studied Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu scriptures since the 1820s. Yale University got its first Sanskrit chair in 1841 followed by the inclusion of Sanskrit in the curricula of several east coast universities by early 1880.
Now Vedanta Societies of Providence, Rhode Island regularly hold interfaith services in Annisquam Village Church.
I spent the remaining of the day exploring other important places in Gloucester where Swamiji stayed and delivered lectures on his second visit in 1894. The trip set me thinking about how a 30-year-old Hindu monk influenced New England intellectuals and changed the course of interfaith dialogue between India and the West.
Jaydeep Sarkar is a New York-based writer with a deep interest in Asian art, architecture and cultures of maritime and land Silk Roads.
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