WOMEN OF INDIA - 12.

(Delivered at the Shakespeare Club House, in Pasadena, California, on January 18, 1900)

 For Recap -Read Part-1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 & 11.

THE LECTURE :- Part-12.


You Western people are individualistic.

I want to do this thing because I like it; I will elbow every one.

Why? Because I like to.

I want my own satisfaction, so I marry this woman.

Why? Because I like her.

This woman marries me. Why? Because she likes me.

There it ends.

She and I are the only two persons in the whole, infinite world; and I marry her and she marries me — nobody else is injured, nobody else responsible.

Your Johns and your Janes may go into the forest and there they may live their lives; but when they have to live in society, their marriage means a tremendous amount of good or evil to us.

Their children may be veritable demons-burning, murdering, robbing, stealing, drinking, hideous, vile.


So what is the basis of the Indian's social order?

It is the caste law. I am born for the caste, I live for the caste. I do not mean myself, because, having joined an Order, we are outside.

I mean those that live in civil society. Born in the caste, the whole life must be lived according to caste regulation.

In other words, in the present-day language of your country, the Western man is born individualistic, while the Hindu is socialistic — entirely socialistic.

Now, then, the books say :- if I allow you freedom to go about and marry any woman you like, and the woman to marry any man she likes, what happens?

You fall in love; the father of the woman was, perchance, a lunatic or a consumptive.

The girl falls in love with the face of a man whose father was a roaring drunkard. What says the law then?

The law lays down that all these marriages would be illegal.

The children of drunkards, consumptives, lunatics, etc., shall not be married.

The deformed, humpbacked, crazy, idiotic — no marriage for them, absolutely none, says the law.

Swami Vivekananda

To be continued  ...