Thirty-two years after Debendranath dictated and wrote out Brāhmo Dharma, the reformer, writer, and public intellectual Keshab Chandra Sen (Figure 3.1) created a unique institution titled “Pilgrimages to Saints.” From 1880, and lasting only a few years, this featured historical pageants to great figures in the history of religion, from the Prophet Muhammad, to Caitanya, to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other wise men drawn from across time and space. Drawing from the spirit of comparative religion embodied most clearly by Max Müller, this pilgrimages project transcended mere appreciation of texts or ideas. Drawing from the European intellectual traditions he admired, it rather featured a synthesis of a diversity of texts and appreciation for non-textual sources. This approach, defined by him as “subjective” and which “endeavors to convert outward facts and characters into facts of consciousness,”1 included the facts and character traits of Jesus Christ, as well as a host of other individuals in religious history. Included in this line of saints were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker, prominent North Americans central to the mid-nineteenth-century history of religion, as analyzed in chapter 2.

Alive from 1838 to 1884, living through the 1857–1858 rebellions, which shook India, the British Empire, and the world, Keshab emerged as a figure who would pioneer new definitions of religion, building upon the comparative religious scholarship of Rammohan and Debendranath.