LISTEN TO SWAMI VIVEKANANDA – simplified by J K SIVAN
In the West, the woman is wife. The idea of womanhood is concentrated there as the wife. To the ordinary man in India, the whole force of womanhood is concentrated in motherhood. In the Western home, the wife rules. In an Indian home, the mother rules. If a mother comes into a Western home, she has to be subordinate to the wife, who rules the home and holds its control. A mother always lives in our homes: the wife must be subordinate to her. See all the difference of ideas.
Now, I only suggest comparisons; I would state facts so that we may compare the two sides. Make this comparison. If you ask, “What is an Indian woman as wife?”, the Indian asks, “Where is the American woman as mother? What is she, the all-glorious, who gave me this body? What is she who kept me in her body for nine months? Where is she who would give me twenty times her life, if I had need? Where is she whose love never dies, however wicked, however vile I am? Where is she, in comparison with her, who goes to the divorce court the moment I treat her a little badly? O American woman! where is she?”
I will not find her in the West. I have not found the son who thinks mother is first. When we die, even then, we do not want our wives and our children to take her place. Our mother! — we want to die with our head on her lap once more, if we die before her. Where is she? Is woman a name to be coupled with the physical body only? Ay! the Hindu mind fears all those ideals which say that the flesh must cling unto the flesh. No, no! Woman! thou shalt not be coupled with anything connected with the flesh. The name has been called holy once and for ever, for what name is there which no lust can ever approach, no carnality ever come near, than the one word mother? That is the ideal in India.
I belong to an Order very much disciplined and respects mother. We have to go about without very much in the way of dress and beg from door to door, live thereby, preach to people when they want it, sleep where we can get a place — that way we have to follow. And the rule is that the members of this Order have to call every woman “mother”; to every woman and little girl we have to say “mother”; that is the custom.
Coming to the West, that old habit remained and I would say to ladies, “Yes, mother”, and they are horrified. I could not under stand why they should be horrified. Later on, I discovered the reason: because that would mean that they are old. The ideal of woman hood in India is motherhood — that marvellous, unselfish, all-suffering, ever-forgiving mother. The wife walks behind-the shadow. She must imitate the life of the mother; that is her duty. But the mother is the ideal of love; she rules the family, she possesses the family.
It is the father in India who thrashes the child and spanks when there is something done by the child, and always the mother puts herself between the father and the child. You see it is just the opposite here. It has become the mother’s business to spank the children in the West, and poor father comes in between. You see, ideals are different. I do not mean this as any criticism. It is all good — this what you do; but our way is what we have been taught for ages. You never hear of a mother cursing the child; she is forgiving, always forgiving. Instead of “Our Father in Heaven”, we say “Mother” all the time; that idea and that word are ever associated in the Hindu mind with Infinite Love, the mother’s love being the nearest approach to God’s love in this mortal world of ours.
“Mother, O Mother, be merciful; I am wicked! Many children have been wicked, but there never was a wicked mother” — so says the great saint Râmprasâd.
