A Comprehensive Collection - Swami Vivekananda

ITHE REFORM OF CASTE, 549ege. That Rule was, after all,not all bad ;is allnothingbad? and nothingis all good. The Mahomedan conquest ofIndia came as*[salvationto the downtrodden^ ttf the poor.That iswhy o^e-fifth of our people have become Mahomedans.It? was not all the sword that did it. It wouldbe the height of madness to thin& it was all the work of&-WO.&1 and nre. And one-fifth one-half of your Madraspeople will become Christians if you do not take care. Wasthere ever a sillier thing before in the world than what Isaw in thp Malabar country. The poor Pariah is not allowedto* pass through the sairye street as the high-caste man, butif he changes his name to a hodge-podge English name itis all right ;or a Mahomedan name, it is all right. Whatinference would you draw except that theseMalabaris areall lunatics, their homes so many lunatic asylums* andthat they are to be treated with derision by every racein India until they mend their manners and know better.Shame upon them that such wicked and diabolical customsare allowed ;their own children allowed to die of starvation and as soon as those children belong to somebody else,feeding them fat. Yet with all this there ought to be nomore fight between the castes. The solution is not bybringing down the higher, but by raising the lower up tothe level of the higher. And that is the line of work thatis found in all our books, in spite of what you may hearfrom some people whose knowledge of their own scriptures*and whose capacity to understand the mighty plans of theancients are only zero. These w^ildnot understand,but those do that have brains, iibat have the intellect *to understand the whole scope of the work, to standaside for a moment and look at the wonderful processionof the national life through ages and ages as laid down,as can be traced bit by bit throughall the books