Swami Vivekananda on Women of India

[Guest guest]

THE WOMEN OF INDIA (Detroit Free Press, March 25, 1894)

Volume 3, Reports in American Newspapers

 

Swami ViveKananda lectured at the Unitarian Church last night on " The Women of

India, Past, Medieval and the Present. " He stated that in India the woman was

the visible manifestation of God and that her whole life was given up to the

thought that she was a mother, and to be a perfect mother she must be chaste. No

mother in India ever abandoned her offspring, he said, and defied any one to

prove the contrary. The girls of India would die if they, like American girls,

were obliged to expose half their bodies to the vulgar gaze of young men. He

desired that India be judged from the standard of that

country and not from this.

 

* * *

(Tribune, April 1, 1894)

 

BURNINGS COMPARED

 

The Hindu widow went to her death agony amid feasting and song, arrayed in her

costliest garments and believing for the most part that such an act meant the

glories of Paradise for herself and family. She was worshipped as a martyr and

her name was enshrined among the family records.

 

However horrible the rite appears to us, it is a bright picture compared to the

burning of the Christian witch who, considered a guilty thing from the first,

was thrown in a stifling dungeon, tortured cruelly to extort confession,

subjected to an infamous trial, dragged amid jeering to the stake and consoled

amid her sufferings by the bystander's comfort that the burning of her body was

but the symbol for hell's everlasting fires, in which her soul would suffer even

greater torment.

--

Om namo Bhagavate Sri Ramanaya

Prashant Jalasutram