Talks Excerpt 533. Swamiji shares valuable insights on customs regarding treatment of women.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

When I went to India in 1969, I did not know the customs of the people there. One day I was sitting in a bus when a few women got on as well. No one gave them a seat and I thought, ‘What is wrong here?’ Humbly, like a gentleman, I stood up. I thought about how these poor ladies must have walked so far in the sun. I said to one of them, ‘Ma, please come and take a seat.’ But she would not take the seat. So again I said, ‘Ma, take your seat.’ Then the conductor came along and said, ‘No, she won’t sit, Swami. You sit.’ I said, ‘But she should sit.’

He then asked me a very serious question: ‘Is that your lady?’ (That is a bad thing to ask in India.) I said ‘No. I do not know what you mean.’ He said, ‘If she is not your lady why do you want her to sit next to another man? We do not do that here.’ It was foolish of me not to have observed this. Of course in South Africa it would have been acceptable to do this, but in India it is considered culturally wrong. The body of somebody else’s wife should not touch another man. If this discipline is practised here in South Africa, it will also bring about good results.

In the Ramayana we find that Mother Sita put on a veil when she was talking with Ravana in Lanka. This shows that she did not even touch Ravana’s breath. Why then did Mother Sita go into the fire when she came back from Sri Lanka? It was not that Sri Rama was not sure of her purity, but that when Mother Sita had been alone in the forest Ravana had actually held her and put her on the airship. Therefore some people might have said, ‘Ravana touched her so she became impure.’ That is the reason she walked through the fire when she came back – to show that she had not been defiled in any way.

It says in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda that you are not even supposed to say to another man’s wife, ‘How beautiful you look.’ Have you no wife [of your own] to admire? Have you no mother to admire? Have you no sister to admire? What business have you to admire someone else’s wife? And our foolish mothers think that it is a compliment. It is not a compliment. It is a germ of immorality.

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These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be