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It is likely that foriegners make such statements because they depend upon third-hand information and tend to forget that such unseemly social customs are not a part of the true religion.
Virchanbhai, among the delegates, was furious at this quite unfair remark and felt that the remark needed a reply. This was indeed an extra feather in Virchandbhai's cap. As a representative of Jainism it was only right that he did not stick to his own religion in the narrow sense of the termmore so because he was a follower of the noble concept of Syadvaada which accepted the greatness of all other religions too. He behaved like a patriotic Indian and sought to dispel false beliefs about the social and religious practices in his country. This attitude is also seen in one of his lectures entitled, 'Some mistake, corrected', which he believed later while about to leave America. That remarkably touching defence of the Hindu religion was as given below:
'Some men in their ambition think that they are Pauls, and what they think they believe. these new pauls go to vent their platitudes upon India. They go to India to convert the heathens in a mass, but when they find their dreams melting away, as dreams always do, they return to pass a whole life in abusing the Hindu. Abuses are not arguments against any religion, nor self-adulation the proof of the truth of one's own. For such I have greatest pity. Their are a few Hindu temples in Southern India where women singers are employed to sing on certain occasions. Some of them are of dubious character, and the Hindu socirty feels it and is trying its best to remove the evil, but to call these........ 'preistess because they are prostitutes' and 'prostitutes because they are preistesses' is a statement which differs as much truth as darkness from light. These women are
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