Journey
Vivekananda's wandering, 1888–93
Five years on foot and by rail, 1888 to 1893, through a sacred map that already existed. He travelled as an unknown mendicant with no fixed name, stayed with maharajas and with untouchables, and came out of it at the southern tip with an argument about poverty rather than about metaphysics.
Stops (11)
- Belur Math · Baranagar and the beginning
Rāmakrishna died in 1886 and his young disciples took monastic vows in a rented house at Baranagar, from which Narendranāth set out alone in 1888. Belur Math, founded in 1898 on the Hooghly, is where the wandering ended institutionally: the order he came back to build.
- Kāshī / Vārānasī / Banāras · Vārānasī — the first months
Among the earliest stops, and where he is said to have met the scholar Pramadadās Mitra and to have argued scripture with him by letter for years afterward. He returned in 1902 to found a home for the sick, having concluded that Kāshī's dying poor were a better subject than its philosophy.
- Ayodhyā · Ayodhyā — the northern plain
One of the first stages north-west out of Bengal, and part of a stretch through Ayodhyā, Lucknow, Agra and Vrindāvan in which he was still travelling as an ordinary pilgrim under changing names. Nothing about the journey was announced; almost all of it is reconstructed from letters and from the memories of hosts.
- Vrindāvan · Vrindāvan — the beedi and the lesson
The story he told against himself: refusing a pipe from a roadside sweeper out of caste scruple, walking on, turning back and smoking it, because the renunciation he professed was inconsistent with the refusal. Whether or not it happened at Vrindāvan, he told it as the moment the wandering started teaching him.
- Khetri · Khetri — the patron and the name
Ajit Singh of Khetri gave him money, support and the name Vivekānanda, under which he sailed to Chicago; he also sent him to hear a courtesan sing, whose song about not judging by birth the monk took as a rebuke. A small Shekhāwati court is why the world knows the name it does.
- Dilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū · Mount Ābū — the Jain marble and a Muslim host
At Ābū he stayed with a Muslim official, and when a Hindu raja objected he is said to have answered that a Vedāntin sees no difference. The Dilwāra temples are the other thing Ābū holds — eleventh-century Jain carving thin enough to pass light — so the hill carries two claims at once.
- Dvārakā / Dvārāvatī · Dvārakā — the western coast
Part of the long Gujarat and Kāthiāwār stretch of 1891, during which he read Pānini with a pandit at Porbandar and was advised to go west because his work was not in India alone. Dvārakā is the Chār Dhām point on a route that otherwise avoided the obvious.
- Shatrunjaya / Pālitānā · Pālitānā — nine hundred temples on one hill
The Śvetāmbara tirtha at Shatrunjaya, climbed by some three and a half thousand steps, was part of the same Kāthiāwār months. He spent much of this period reading and arguing with Jain and Vaishnava scholars rather than preaching, which he had not yet begun to do.
- Pandharpūr · Pandharpūr — the Deccan
The Maharashtra leg of 1892, through Pandharpūr, Poona and Kolhāpūr toward Bangalore and Mysore. He is recorded singing abhangs with Varkarīs here — a Bengali monk taking part in a Marathi devotional practice he had no stake in, which is the sort of thing the journey kept doing to him.
- Kanyākumārī · Kanyākumārī — the end of the land
He reached the southern tip in December 1892, having walked much of the way from Bangalore, and prostrated at the Devī temple. The country behind him was now something he had seen rather than read about, and what he had seen was its poverty.
- Vivekānanda Rock Memorial · The rock — three days, December 1892
He swam out to the rock offshore and sat three days. What he came back with was not a vision of God but a programme: that India's problem was material, that religion could not be preached to empty stomachs, and that he should go abroad to raise money for it. Chicago followed nine months later.