Rare autograph signed quotation from the leader of the Hindu reform movement, the Brahmo Samaj, in Bengal, India. On an off-white card, he has penned a three line quotation ("Ill health has been to me a perpetual invitation to the land where inccoruptible _ unfading life awaits the weary pilgrim"), signing "PC Mozoomdar," dating it "Roxbury [MA] Oct 1893," and adding a sentiment in Sanskrit, "Sarva arnuman purnakaranti" ("May all your manokamna ["wishes"] be fulfilled"). In very fine condition. 4.5 x 3.5 inches; 11.5 x 9 cm. A close follower of Keshub Chandra Sen, Mozoomdar was a leading pioneer of the interaction between the philosophies and ethics of Hinduism and Christianity. Sen and his colleagues agreed that four Brahmos would study and report on the relationship between Brahmo ideals and the four major world religions (Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism and Islam) and it was Mozoomdar who was assigned to study Christianity. His resulting book, The Oriental Christ, was published by Geo. H. Ellis in Boston in 1883. It was much discussed in the West, and eventually led to an important correspondence between Mozoomdar and Max Müller about the relationship between Hinduism and Christianity. One of the first Indians to command an audience in the United States of America, his lectures across America’s Eastern seaboard, enamored liberal Christians such as Jenkin Lloyd Jones, a Unitarian minister who would help organize the Parliament of the World's Religions, a congress held in Chicago as part of the World's Columbian Exposition, September 11 to 27, 1893 and now considered to have marked the beginning of the modern interfaith movement. The present quotation was penned shortly after Mozoomdar's appearance there. Alongside others from the East such as Swami Vivekananda, Mozoomdar represented the Bramho Somaj, and addressed the parliament in order to rally support for the New Dispensation, a Brahmo Samaj project of global religious confraternity that he hoped would mark the end of religious sectarianism and restore the prominence of an emotional, rather than intellectual, pursuit of God.
