Page:Ramakrishna - His Life and Sayings.djvu/82

64 B&mak?7sh#a's Wife.

Another charge which Mozoomdar seems to consider as proved against Rlmaknsh#a is what he calls his almost barbarous treatment of his wife. What he means is evi- dently that he forgot or neglected her till she was seventeen years of age. But this can hardly be called barbarous in India, where it is a recognised custom that a girl of five years of age, as his wife was when he married her, should remain at her parents' house for years before she migrated to the house of her husband and his parents. And that a man in a state such as Rimakr/sha is described to have been in should decline to live maritakmtnt, is again by no means unusual in Eastern, nay, in Western countries also.

Vivekinanda told us that when at the age of seventeen his wife went to find him, he received her with real kind- ness, and that she was quite satisfied to live with him on his own terms, if he would only enlighten her mind and make her to see and to serve God. Such a relationship is by no means without a precedent, and cannot be called barbarous, for volenti non fit injuria. Strange to say, I received not many days ago a letter from an American lady who had gone to visit R^maknsh^a's widow, Mrs. S. C. Ole Bull, the widow of the famous violin player, and deeply interested in the religious movements in India. On July u, 1898, she writes from *Sringar in Kashmir: 'We were the first foreigners who were allowed to see Sarada-devi, the widow of R^mak^'sh^a. She called us her children, and saying that our visit to her was of the