I had a chance at these [dinners and receptions] to talk to educated Indian women.
This was a novelty.
Their costume stamps them as women.
It is the most becoming, the most stylish and, at the same time, the most meaningful dress ever devised by women.
I hope fervently that the sexual disease of the West, which tries to transform woman into a sort of awkward boy, will not creep into India in the wake of that fad “scientific education.”
It would be a loss to the whole world if the Indian woman should cease to wear her native costume. India (and perhaps China, which I do not know) is practically the only civilized country where one can see on living models how women can and should dress. . . .
It is a sad truth, but the European woman, and particularly her hopelessly wrong dress, put up no show at all when compared with the dignity and elegance of the Indian woman and her costume.
Even fat women have a chance in India; with us they can only starve themselves to death. ~Carl Jung, Jung: His Life and His Work, Page 175.
You have to adapt yourself to the family and know how to talk and how to behave, when twenty-five to thirty members of a family are crowded together in a small house, with a grandmother on top.
That teaches you to speak modestly, carefully, politely. It explains that small twittering voice and that flowerlike behaviour.
The crowding together in families has the contrary effect with us.
It makes people nervous, irritable, rough, and even violent. But India takes the family seriously.
There is no amateurishness or sentimentality about it. It is understood to be the indispensable form of life, inescapable, necessary, and self-evident. It needs a religion to break this law and to make “homelessness” the first step to saintliness.
It certainly seems as if Indians would be unusually pleasant and easy to live with, particularly the women; and, if the style were the whole man, Indian life would be almost ideal. But softness of manners and sweetness of voice are also a part of secrecy and diplomacy.
I guess Indians are just human, and so no generalization is quite true. ~Carl Jung, His Life and His Work, Page 175-176
He [Jung] had been enormously struck in India by the skillful behavior of the Indian woman and by the fact that she really lived by her Eros principle, and thereby giving the men in her environment the opportunity to live their principle, supported on the feeling side by every woman they met, instead of—as is all too general in Europe—being douched with cold water from breakfast time on. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Word, Page 175
I realized painfully at the time, however, that it is unfortunately a fact that Western woman is going through a stage in which it is very difficult for her to live by her own principle, Eros. ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Word, Page 176
“When she still wears her national Tracht (costume), European woman dresses very meaningfully, if never quite so successfully as her Indian sister. But now that she has opened the door to greater consciousness, she can never shut it again “without tremendous psychic loss.” ~Barbara Hannah, Jung: His Life and His Word, Page 176