WOMEN OF INDIA - 13.

(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 & 12.

THE LECTURE :- Part-13.

But the Mohammedan comes from Arabia, and he has his own Arabian law; so the Arabian desert law has been forced upon us.

The Englishman comes with his law; he forces it upon us, so far as he can.

We are conquered.

He says, "Tomorrow I will marry your sister".

What can we do?

Our law says, those that are born of the same family, though a hundred degrees distant, must not marry, that is illegitimate, it would deteriorate or make the race sterile.

That must not be, and there it stops.

So I have no voice in my marriage, nor my sister.

It is the caste that determines all that.

We are married sometimes when children.

Why? Because the caste says :- if they have to be married anyway without their consent, it is better that they are married very early, before they have developed this love: if they are allowed to grow up apart, the boy may like some other girl, and the girl some other boy, and then something evil will happen; and so, says the caste, stop it there.

I do not care whether my sister is deformed, or good-looking, or bad-looking: she is my sister, and that is enough; he is my brother, and that is all I need to know.

So they will love each other.

You may say, "Oh! they lose a great deal of enjoyment — those exquisite emotions of a man falling in love with a woman and a woman falling in love with a man. This is a sort of tame thing, loving each other like brothers and sisters, as though they have to."

So be it; but the Hindu says, "We are socialistic. For the sake of one man's or woman's exquisite pleasure we do not want to load misery on hundreds of others."

Swami Vivekananda
To be continued  ...