Conclusion

No records remain of Mozoomdar’s correspondence with Saudamini after his departure from Chicago. One reason for this, and also perhaps for his feeling “numb and absent-minded,” is that Mozoomdar’s health declined rapidly during the course of his three-week stay there. By the close of the World’s Parliament of Religions, PCM was diagnosed with diabetes and forbidden to work. Yet his sense of duty to his divine task both forbade him from heeding his doctor’s advice and prevented him from writing home about his condition.59Bose, Life of Protap, 185.

Mozoomdar surely felt pressure to perform well at the World’s Parliament of Religions, not only to justify his travel to the West, but also to validate his hopes that the New Dispensation could flourish there. It is to his credit that little of PCM’s personal problems surface among his speeches in Chicago.60This is not to say that his failing health was lost to his friends. Correspondence between John Henry Barrows and Jenkin Lloyd Jones indicates that the latter believed Mozoomdar would soon succumb to Bright’s Disease. See Jenkin Lloyd Jones, “Dec. 15, 1893,” in Letters to John Henry Barrows, 403. Jenkin Lloyd Jones Papers, Meadville-Lombard Theological School Library. Accounts of his addresses depict Mozoomdar at his best. For example, the Christian Register, a Boston paper edited by John Henry Barrows, the chief organizer of the World’s Parliament of Religions, proclaimed:

No voice commanded more attention or more sympathy at the Parliament of Religions than that of the prophet of the Brahmo-Somaj. Upon no one in the Pentecostal gathering did the cloven tongue of fire more surely rest [than on] Mr. Mozoomdar.61“Babu Protap Chunder Mozoomdar,” The Interpreter 2, no.4 (1893): 80.

Further evidence rests in the transcriptions of his speeches, though it is beyond the scope of this study to detail these parliament lectures. Rather, this chronicle has been meant to provide the intimate and seldom-considered details of PCM’s hopes, fears, and experiences during his sojourn from Kolkata to Chicago. Mozoomdar was eager to travel yet homesick, publicly ebullient yet privately ill, anxious of failure yet inspired by God. This personal context, much more than the history of British colonialism or even the controversies of Keshub Sen, holds the key to understanding most fully his addresses in Chicago and his broader religious vision.

  1. Bose, Life of Protap, 185. ↩
  2. This is not to say that his failing health was lost to his friends. Correspondence between John Henry Barrows and Jenkin Lloyd Jones indicates that the latter believed Mozoomdar would soon succumb to Bright’s Disease. See Jenkin Lloyd Jones, “Dec. 15, 1893,” in Letters to John Henry Barrows, 403. Jenkin Lloyd Jones Papers, Meadville-Lombard Theological School Library. ↩
  3. “Babu Protap Chunder Mozoomdar,” The Interpreter 2, no.4 (1893): 80. ↩