Gandhi Before Gandhi

Author(s): Bipin Doshi, Priti Shah
Publisher: Jain Academy Educational Research Center Promotion Trust Mumbai

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A GANDHI BEFORE GANDHI
Dr. George F Pentecost's Unjust and inhospitable criticism on Vivekanand and Virchand Gandhi on 24th September 1893
"We have listened to lectures from distinguished Orientals on our political and social shortcomings for the last few days with as much patience as we could command. They have been going through the slums of Chicago and New York and have been dumping down the buckets of mud upon us, but we deny that these are specimens of Christianity. But in India, among high class Brahmins, there are at least 600 priestesses and every one of them is a prostitute. They are prostitutes because they are priestesses and they are priestesses because they are prostitutes. These Oriental men are criticizing Christianity. There are two or three Oriental bubbles floating over Chicago that need to be pricked."
Virchand Gandhi's befitting reply on 25th September 1893
"Before proceeding with my address, I wish to make few observations. This platform is not a place for mutual recriminations, and I am heartily sorry that from time to time the most un-Christian spirit is allowed freely here, but I know how to take these recriminations at their proper value. I am glad that no one has dared to attack the religion I represent. It is well that they should not. But every attack has been directed to the abuses existing in our society. And I repeat now what I repeat every day, that these abuses are not from religion, but in spate of religion, as in every other country
occasions. Some of them are of dubious character, and the Hindu society feels it and is trying its best to remove the evil, but to say "they are prostitutes because they are priestesses and they are priestesses because they are prostitutes" is a statement which differs as much from truth as darkness from light. These women are never allowed to enter the main body of the temple, and as for their being priestesses, there is not one such woman priestess from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.
"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 and pass a whole life in abusing the Hindus, Abuses are not arguments against any religions, nor self-adulation, the proof of the truth of one's own. For such I have greatest pity. There are few Hindu temples in Southern India where women-singers are employed to sing on certain
"If the present abuses in India have been produced by the Hindu religion, the same religion had the strength of producing a society which made the Greek historian say: 'No Hindu was ever known to tell an untruth, no Hindu woman ever known to be unchaste" And ever in the present day where is there a chaster woman or a milder man than in India? The Oriental bubbles may be pricked, but the very hysterical shrieks sent forth from this platform from time to time show to the world that sometimes bubbles may be heavier than the bloated balloons of vanity and self-conceit.
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