Sometime in early November 1893, at the end of the Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda embarked on a lecture tour of the United States. He started in the east and came to the town of Northampton, Massachusetts to give two evening lectures at Smith College - a women's college.
Vivekananda found it very difficult to find accommodation at any of the hotels in Northampton because he was dark in color. So a lady who had a large house near the collage agreed to host him at her place. Also boarding in this house were four girls from the collage. These girls could not find accommodation at the college dormitories as they were full. All four had recently joined the college. In this group of students was a girl by the name Martha Brown. Martha was eighteen years old. She was brought up in a sheltered atmosphere, in the strictest Protestant Christian orthodoxy. Being more of a "free-thinker", Martha was not at all comfortable with the Protestant Christian orthodoxy. When she and her three friends came to know that Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk, was to speak at their collage and that he was actually going to live at their house, they were very excited. They looked forward to talking to a real Indian.
This is how Martha describes Swami Vivekananda when he came to their house, “The day came, the little guest-room was ready, and a stately presence entered our home. The Swami's dress was a black Prince Albert coal, dark trousers, and yellow turban wound in intricate folds about a finely shaped head. But the face with its inscrutable expression, the eyes so full of flashing light, and the whole emanation of power, are beyond description. We were awed and silent…” Of the lecture Vivekananda gave that evening, she said that Vivekananda in his red robe, orange cord, and yellow turban was an imposing figure on the platform and he had a wonderful mastery of the English language with its rich sonorous tones.
After the evening lecture, the College president, the head of the philosophy department, and several other professors, the ministers of the Northampton churches, and a well-known author came to the house where Vivekananda was staying. They in fact came to challenge Vivekananda and his Vedanta philosophy. They came to meet the Swami to prove to him that Christianity was the only true religion. The meeting took place in the living-room. Martha and her three friends were also present in the room, sitting quietly in a corner listening eagerly to the discussion.
Martha’s sympathies were clearly with the Swami. She felt the professors and the church leaders had an unfair advantage over the Hindu monk, for the professors and the ministers knew their Bibles thoroughly and the European systems of philosophy, as well as the poets and commentators. How could one expect a Hindu from far-off India to hold his own with these, master though he might be of his own learning? But the result that followed took Martha completely by surprise. She said, “To texts from the Bible, the Swami replied by other and more apposite ones from the same book. In upholding his side of the argument he quoted English philosophers and writers on religious subjects. Even the poets he seemed to know thoroughly, quoting Wordsworth and Thomas Gray (not from the well-known Elegy)… The discussion, beginning with the utmost courtesy-became less cordial, then bitterness crept in, a resentment on the part of the champions of Christianity as they felt that it was "thumbs down" for them. And truly it was.”
Almost four decades later while recounting this incident, Martha commented, “Why were my sympathies not with those of my own world? Why did I exult in the air of freedom that blew through the room as the Swami broadened the scope of religion till it embraced all mankind? Was it that his words found an echo in my own longings, or was it merely the magic of his personality? I cannot tell, I only know that I felt triumphant with him.”
After Swami Vivekananda left Northampton, Martha never saw him again. But the brief encounter with Vivekananda remained in her memory for ever. For the next four decades Martha went through many sorrows and joys, responsibilities and struggles. Through all this she was always longing for the freedom of the spirit. Finally it was in the universal Gospel of Swam Vivekananda that “the Divine is within us, that we are from the very first a part of God, and that this is true of every man” she found the satisfaction of her longing.
Sometime in 1935 Martha left her home in the United States of America and journeyed westward to encircle the globe. In early November she landed in Calcutta, India. The very next day she went to the Belur Math on the farther side of the Ganga (river Ganges) to bow her head in reverence before the tomb of the great Swami Vivekananda.
