Vivekananda

(1863 - 1902)

Born to an upper-middle-class Bengali family, Vivekananda traveled to the United States in 1893 to participate in the World’s Parliament of Religions as a spokesperson for Hinduism. After arriving in the country, he met Katherine Sanborn, a poet and lecturer who, impressed by his “lordly, imposing stride, as if he ruled the universe,” invited him to visit her farmhouse in Massachusetts before the conference. “If anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart,” Vivekananda said at the parliament.