Afterword

Despite failing health, Mozoomdar continued to lecture in the US until early December, spending most of his time in Boston. In total, he was said to have delivered almost two hundred lectures during his three months in the country in 1893.Note: ⁶²Bose, The Life of Protap, 202-3. His efforts bore fruit. Immediately after the World’s Parliament, John Henry Barrows began an effort to provide PCM financial support. In December 1893, this resulted in the Mozoomdar Mission Fund, which allowed PCM to visit the US once more in 1900.Note: ⁶³Mullick, The First Hindu Mission, 138. In October 1894, Caroline E. Haskell gave $20,000 to the University of Chicago in order to establish an annual lectureship in Kolkata. She did so as a direct response to a wish that Mozoomdar had penned to Barrows earlier that year.Note: ⁶⁴These lectures continued until at least 1961. Ibid, 210.

These and other developments kept PCM active until the summer of 1904, when his health began to decline sharply. Though his diabetes was under control, he had contracted tuberculosis, and his deteriorating condition confined him to his bed by December.Note: ⁶⁵Bose, Life of Protap, 360. Despite this, PCM spent the final six months of his life in earnest devotion: his friend and biographer Suresh Chunder Bose described it as “the conquest of the love of God over sickness and death.” Note: ⁶⁶Ibid, 371. Mozoomdar died in his Kolkata home on May 21, 1905, in the company of Saudamini and under the watchful gaze of Debendranath Tagore and Keshub Sen, whose portraits hung on a nearby wall.Note: ⁶⁷Ibid, 375. Though he cannot be said to have fully realized his ambitions for the Brahmo Samaj, Mozoomdar died at peace, in the company of loved ones, ready for union with the divine. Perhaps the two epitaphs inscribed on his monument, written in his own words, express this best:

I have done the work that was given to me, I have kept the vow I took. I have struggled to unfold my message to many men and women. Peace fills my soul. For all opportunities and facilities, yea for discouragements and depressions, I have the heart to be grateful to God. His ways are not our ways, nor His purposes our purposes. But He has amply proved to me this His great dispensation of the Spirit is sure some day to be the faith of mankind. Blessed forever be His name.

I have gained thee with very little spiritual culture, while living this lowly life on earth. Now I start on my way to gain Thee in a degree beyond all measure.Note: ⁶⁸Ibid, 376-7. The second of these is an English translation from Bengali. It is unclear whether Mozoomdar’s monument still stands.