The Parliament's Own History Records Applause for Several Minutes After Vivekananda's First Words on 11 September 1893, His Letter Says Two, and the Standing Ovation Comes From Later Accounts

Swami Vivekananda spoke on the afternoon of Monday 11 September 1893, the opening day of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, and John Henry Barrows’s history of the Parliament prints his reply in under 500 words. The words “sisters and brothers of America” are in that history, but in Barrows’s own sentence just above the speech, where he says they brought “a peal of applause that lasted for several minutes.”

Barrows, a Presbyterian minister, chaired the Parliament’s general committee and presided over many of its sessions. Much of what is told about that afternoon comes from elsewhere: Vivekananda’s letter of 2 November 1893, a biography by his disciples, and recollections written years later. What follows sorts the claims by who made them and when. “Swami” is the title a Hindu monk takes, and Vivekananda belonged to the Ramakrishna order.

Who sent him and who paid

He sailed from Bombay on 31 May 1893 on the P&O steamer Peninsular. The Life of Swami Vivekananda, a biography by his Eastern and Western disciples whose first edition came about a decade after his death in 1902, says the Raja of Khetri, ruler of a small Rajput state, had his private secretary Jagmohan Lal outfit the monk, give him a purse and buy him a first-class ticket. Ruth Harris, a historian at Oxford, calls the Raja, Ajit Singh, a steadfast patron and says the turban Vivekananda wore at Chicago was his gift.

Most of the money, the same biography says, came from Madras. A committee of his followers there, headed by Alasinga Perumal, collected the major portion of the funds from the middle classes, because Vivekananda had told them the money should come from the people. A London interview of 1896, reprinted in his Complete Works, gives a third account: “The Raja of Mysore and some other friends sent me to America as the Hindu representative.” Each account names different patrons, and none sets out the sums.

Too early for the Parliament, too late to register

Marie Louise Burke, a member of the Vedanta Society of Northern California who collected contemporary newspaper reports and the papers of people who knew him, concludes that he reached Chicago on 30 July, six weeks before the Parliament opened. At the Exposition’s information bureau, the Life says, he learned that no one would be admitted as a delegate without proper references, and that the time for admission had passed. It says he came to regret listening to his young Madras backers, who did not know the steps required.

By his letter of 20 August he had spent about twelve days in Chicago, going to the World’s Fair almost daily. Boston came next, Burke says, because he had been told living was cheaper. On the train he met Kate Sanborn, a lecturer and author, who took him to her farm at Metcalf, Massachusetts, and introduced him to John Henry Wright, professor of Greek at Harvard. Wright invited him to Annisquam on the coast for the weekend of 25 to 28 August. Mrs. Wright wrote to her mother on 29 August that he was “a most gorgeous vision” and that they had talked religion all day and all night.

A letter of 2 November from Vivekananda says Wright urged him to attend and “undertook to arrange everything.” Burke’s summary of the Life holds that without Wright’s insistence it is doubtful he would have gone at all. It gives Wright a line for the moment the monk said he had no credentials: asking for them was “like asking the sun to state its right to shine!” It also has Wright telling the committee that chose delegates that here was a man “more learned than all our learned professors put together.” Burke prints a note from Vivekananda to Wright dated 2 September, found among Wright’s papers, thanking him for “letters of introduction.”

He was also lecturing. On 6 September the Daily Saratogian reported the American Social Science Association’s meeting in Saratoga Springs, New York, where “Vive Kananda, a Monk of Madras, Hindoostan” spoke on Muslim rule in India, and he spoke there again on silver. As far as Burke can tell, he gave eleven lectures in the roughly three weeks after his 20 August letter.

Back in Chicago, the Life tells it, a merchant forgot to give directions, Vivekananda lost Barrows’s address, slept in an empty box in the railway freight yards, and next morning begged along Lake Shore Drive until Mrs. George W. Hale took him in and went with him to the Parliament’s office. Of the story of how he met the Hales, Burke writes that it “has become a legend,” and she does not repeat it. She places him during the Parliament as a guest of John B. Lyon at 262 Michigan Avenue, where the Life also says the delegates were lodged.

The morning he did not speak

The Parliament opened at 10 a.m. in the Hall of Columbus, inside the Memorial Art Palace that is now the Art Institute of Chicago. An eyewitness quoted by Barrows counted four thousand listeners and described the Hindu monk among the Eastern delegates as “clad in gorgeous red apparel,” with a yellow turban. Vivekananda’s letter puts the hall at six or seven thousand. The Parliament’s present-day website says he addressed 5,000 delegates.

Why he stayed silent until afternoon, the letter explains. His heart was fluttering, his tongue nearly dried up, and the other Indian delegates had prepared speeches while “I was a fool and had none.” According to the Life, the chairman called on him several times and he answered, “No, not now.”

Others held the morning. When Pung Kwang Yu, the Chinese imperial commissioner, rose, Barrows records, the welcome was “surpassed in the case of no other speaker on the platform,” and he quotes an eyewitness: “men and women rose to their feet in the audience, and there was wild waving of hats and handkerchiefs.” Anagarika Dharmapala, a Buddhist from Ceylon, closed the session and hoped Barrows’s name would “shine forth as the American Asoka,” a reference to the emperor Ashoka.

Afternoon speakers, in Barrows’s order, included Virchand Gandhi, a Jain lawyer of Bombay, then Minas Tcheraz, an Armenian editor, then Chakravarti, whom Vivekananda lists as representing Theosophy, then Alfred Williams Momerie of London, who told the hall he would not trespass on its attention more than two minutes. Across that stretch of Barrows, “two minutes” appears only in Momerie’s promise. Then, in Barrows’s narration: “Swami Vivekananda, of Bombay, India, was next introduced.”

What the printed speech says

The reply thanks the audience in the name of “the most ancient order of monks in the world,” “the mother of religions” and the Hindu people. He says he belongs to a religion and a nation that sheltered the persecuted, naming the Israelites who came to southern India and the Zoroastrians. A hymn about streams that begin in different places and reach one sea is quoted, along with a verse he attributes to the Gita in which the Lord says all paths lead to him. His closing hope is that the bell that tolled that morning will be the death knell of fanaticism.

Barrows’s text and the Complete Works text, as the Belur Math website prints it, agree in substance. The Complete Works prints “Sisters and Brothers of America” as the first line of the speech, and that version runs 473 words. The speech as Barrows prints it begins at “It fills my heart with joy unspeakable,” with the salutation kept in his narration.

Amiya P. Sen, a historian of modern India who has written extensively on Vivekananda, argues that two claims in this reply let patriotism outrun historical caution: calling Hinduism the mother of religions, and claiming the most ancient order of monks, which he says is more correctly associated with Buddhism. Sen also notes that at least a dozen Indian delegates were invited and that public and scholarly accounts have neglected all but Vivekananda.

Several minutes, two minutes, standing

Three sources give three pictures of the applause. For Barrows it lasted several minutes, and he does not say anyone stood, though he quotes an eyewitness describing people on their feet for Pung Kwang Yu that morning. Vivekananda’s letter of 2 November says “a deafening applause of two minutes followed,” and then he went on. The Life tells it differently: hundreds rose to their feet, and for two full minutes he tried to speak and could not.

A standing ovation of seven thousand people comes from later telling. Mrs. S. K. Blodgett, who years afterwards became his hostess in Los Angeles, once told of seeing seven thousand people rise to their feet, Burke reports. The number carries a question mark in Burke’s text, and she then writes herself of a “spontaneous and prolonged standing ovation.” Sen calls the account contested, noting that the official history reports the applause while A Chorus of Faith, a compilation published in Chicago in 1893, has no such reference. Barrows’s history, the Parliament’s official record, contains both the salutation and the applause.

What the newspapers printed

Barrows listed him as “of Bombay.” The Daily Saratogian had called him a monk of Madras, and the Chicago Inter Ocean wrote a year later that he “represented the Hindoos of South India.” He was from Calcutta, according to Harris.

The Boston Evening Transcript’s correspondent, writing from Chicago on 28 September, found “The most striking figure one meets in this anteroom is Swami Vivekananda” and reported him saying he kept no money and was in Chicago by subscription. The Chicago Advocate of the same date said his English was as good as his mother tongue but called Protap Chunder Mozoomdar a man of far greater spirituality and gave him first place. Mozoomdar spoke for the Brahmo Samaj, a worship society traced to the Brahmo Sabha that Ram Mohan Roy opened in 1828. The Chicago Interior, a Presbyterian newspaper that opposed him, was quoted in October as saying most of the men who praised alien faiths owed their quickening and morals to contact with Christianity.

The Life quotes the New York Herald, without a date, as calling him “undoubtedly the greatest figure in the Parliament of Religions.” In his own review at the end of the second volume Barrows calls him “the orange monk,” who “exercised a wonderful influence over his auditors.”

The later speeches

Barrows records the frog-in-the-well story Vivekananda told on 15 September, and his paper on Hinduism, read on 19 September and printed on pages 968 to 978 of volume 2. The paper says the Vedas are not books but a treasury of spiritual law found by seers, some of the best of them women, and on why a perfect soul is bound by matter it says the Hindu answers, “I do not know.”

On 20 September, in the evening session, he asked why Christians sent missionaries to save souls abroad but did nothing for people starving in Indian famines, and said “it is an insult to a starving man to teach him metaphysics.” On the eleventh day, 21 September, Bishop Keane, reading C. F. Donnelly’s paper on Catholic charity, endorsed his denunciation of Christian charity limited to converts, said such criticism was not heard half enough, and said he would be grateful for it. Barrows’s programme for the Scientific Section lists Vivekananda again on 22 and 23 September.

His last address came on 27 September. To anyone who hoped for unity through the triumph of one religion and the end of the others he said, “Brother, yours is an impossible hope.” Barrows prints the three phrases he wanted on the banner of every religion, the first being “Help, and Not Fight,” and adds that “very little approval was shown to some of the sentiments expressed in his closing address.” Lucy Monroe, the Chicago correspondent of The Critic, wrote on 3 October, in a letter the magazine printed on 7 October, that no one had expressed the Parliament’s spirit, limitations and finest influence so well as the Hindu monk.