Place · princely-state capital · India
Khetri
The former princely state in Jhunjhunu district, Rajasthan, 180 kilometres west of Delhi, whose Maharaja Ajit Singh (1848-1901) hosted Swami Vivekananda for three stays between 1891 and 1893 and became his lifelong patron. Khetri Palace is where Vivekananda — then still Narendranath Datta — adopted the monastic name Vivekananda at Ajit Singh's suggestion before sailing to Chicago. The Maharaja covered the travel costs for the 1893 Parliament of Religions. The patronage case documents how a princely court underwrote the launch of a Vedanta mission that could not have reached America on monastic alms. Khetri Palace is now a heritage site.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Tradition
- Ramakrishna Mission accounts
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 28.000, 75.790
Connections (3)
- Parivrajaka legVrindāvan
Vivekananda wandered for five years between 1888 and 1893 — Varanasi, Ayodhya, Vrindavan, Khetri, Mount Abu, Dwarka, Palitana, the Deccan, and finally Kanyakumari, where he sat on the rock and decided what to do. He walked the existing sacred map and came back with a political argument about poverty and national self-respect. The Maharaja of Khetri paid for his passage to Chicago and gave him the name he sailed under.
- Parivrajaka legDilwāra Jain temples, Mount Ābū
Mount Abu was one stop on Vivekananda's five years of wandering between 1888 and 1893, and it was there that he met the Khetri Maharaja who afterwards funded his travels and gave him the name he sailed to Chicago under. Dilwara's five marble temples, carved thin enough to be translucent, are a Jain tirtha on a hill that is also a Puranic site — the kind of layered place his whole journey was made of.
- Patronage networkSwami Vivekananda
Ajit Singh of Khetri funded Vivekānanda's passage to America, supported his mother in Calcutta while he was away, and gave him the name he used from 1893. A small Shekhāwati princely state is the reason a Bengali monk reached Chicago, which is patronage doing for a modern monk exactly what royal patronage had always done.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Swami Vivekananda’s travels in India (1888–1893)”.
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