Some leaders in ISKCON (international society for krishna consciousness) promote these things.

I think it’s a joke coz they have no idea what it’s like to grow up in a society where these things are still going on.

They go to India for a few weeks every year and see everything from the outside looking in and comment how “great” or “natural” it is. They don’t know or experience the underlying problems.

Since child marriage was the norm in those days, better those children marry men who had their education in mind rather than men who did not.

blue mountain: I think he’s referring to Meera Nanda’s book, Prophets facing Backwards, which is a Richard Dawkin’s like deconstruction of Hinduism. She sees Vivekananda as a prime creator of India nationalism. Since we are on reformers, here is another quote from the eloquent Swami:

Where are the four castes today in this country? Answer me, [brahmins of Bengal]. I do not see the four castes. Just as our Bengali proverb has it: ” A headache without a head”, so you want to make this varnashrama [caste system] here. There are not [the traditional] four castes here. I see only the brahmin and the shudra. If there are kshatriyas and vaishyas, where are they and why do you brahmins not order them to take the yajnopavita [investiture with the sacred thread] and study the Vedas, as every Hindu ought to do? And if the vaishyas and kshatriyas do not exist, but only the brahmins and shudras, the Shastras say that the brahmin must not live where there are only shudras; so, depart, bag and baggage! Do you know what the Shastras say about people who have been eating mlechchha [non-Hindu] food and living under the government of the mlechchhas, as you have been doing for the past thousand years? Do you know the penance for that? The penance would be burning yourself with your own hands. Do you want to pass as teachers and walk like hypocrites? If you believe in your Shastras, burn yourself first like the one great brahmin who went with Alexander the Great and burnt himself because he thought he had eaten the food of a mlechchha. Do like that, and you will see that the whole nation will be at your feet. You do not believe your own Shastras and yet want to make others believe in them. If you think you are not able to do that in this age, admit your weakness and excuse the weakness of others; take the other castes up, give them a helping hand, let them study the Vedas and become just as good Aryans as any other Aryans in the world, and be you likewise Aryans. – Vivekananda

Have you ever read any of his works ??

This is what he told to upper castes.

“Get blasted, disappear! Let the new India emerge.Let New India arise- let her arise- out of the peasants’ cottage, grasping the plough; out of the huts of fisherman, the cobbler, and the sweeper. Let her spring from the grocer’s shop, from the oven of the fritter-seller. Let her emanate from factory, from marts and markets. Let her emerge from groves and forests, from hills and mountains.”

Of course she knew about it. Mahadev Govind Ranade, an Indian nationalist and early Pratharna Samaj luminary, even supported Ramabai’s efforts to remarry upper caste Hindu widows for a while. It was BG Tilak, another Indian nationalist, who convinced him to stop. Tilak exposed the Sharada Sadan for what it was: a proselytizing body. That incident is famous and controversial. Tilak quipped that he would remarry thousands of widows upon the day India gained freedom, which signified that he had other priorities.

she’s a thoroughgoing modernist and progressive, and not just on the question of women’s rights.

But she argued from a Eurocentric and Christian vantage point, viz., on the basis of the supremacy of Christianity over polytheistic and hierarchical Hinduism. This is why she never made it to the gallery of modern Indian heroes, and likely never will.

Great to see posts on 22 June and RaoSaheb. Whatever happened to that phase of Indian cinema (70s/80s). Even the arthouse flicks these days have been Bollywoodised.

I’m going from her own account, quoted in my earlier response to Pardesi Begum/Pandita/whomever: she says she and her brother were not welcome, and I believe her. If you don’t accept that a woman who could read Sanskrit might have posed a problem for Maharashtrian village Brahmins in the 1870s, that’s fine; I have no other documentation at present.

An earlier commentor questioned how she could be so successful in her Mission in Poona after returning if her status was so transgressive: don’t forget that when she came back from the U.S. she had thousands of dollars in charity donations to work with in the interest of starting her school. She was probably looked at quite differently then than she was when she and her brother were penniless orphans during a period of recovery from famine!

Several commentors have criticized my light-hearted comment in response to her dismissal of the scientific value of ancient texts like the Puranas. First, it should be said Ramabai is just as assertive in response to medieval Christianity (at one point she says baldly that in medieval England, cannibalism was widely practiced), and even contemporary Christians who exhibit “primitive” superstitions. In fact, she is aggressively dismissive of all religious beliefs she finds to be ‘superstitious’; she’s a thoroughgoing modernist and progressive, and not just on the question of women’s rights. I did not mean to offend with that comment; I wasn’t dismissing the Puranas as a spiritual source text for the Hindu tradition. Rather the focus (in Ramabai’s paragraph, and my echo of her in the post) was on the value of such texts to modern sciences such as astronomy.