The closing paragraph of Srila Prabhupada’s purport, which the BBT trustees promised in 2008 never to subtract, is missing from the 2024 printing of the BBT’s eighteen-volume Srimad-Bhagavatam and from the English text at vedabase.io. Of the six language editions on the site, only the Portuguese, Russian and Spanish still carry it. No notice of the change has been published.
The final paragraph of the purport to Srimad-Bhagavatam 4.25.41, in which Srila Prabhupada writes that “a woman likes a man who is very expert at rape,” has been removed from the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust’s English Srimad-Bhagavatam, in print and online. The paragraph has been one of the most frequently debated passages in his books for two decades. It is absent from the 2024 printing of the BBT International eighteen-volume set, and from the English edition at vedabase.io, the online library of Srila Prabhupada’s books maintained with the permission of the BBT and the Bhaktivedanta Archives.
As of 1 October 2026, the English page for the verse ends the purport with the sentence “In this way the woman is the center of all material enjoyment.” A Wayback Machine capture of the same page from 30 March 2024 shows an additional paragraph that followed it:
“In this regard, the word vikhyātam is very significant. A man is always famous for his aggression toward a beautiful woman, and such aggression is sometimes considered rape. Although rape is not legally allowed, it is a fact that a woman likes a man who is very expert at rape.”
The paragraph is part of the purport as printed in earlier editions of the Fourth Canto and remains in the original-edition text published at prabhupadabooks.com.
Photographs of the printed set, supplied to Akincana Gocara by an editor who owns a copy, show page 478 of the Fourth Canto volume with the purport to text 41 ending at “In this way the woman is the center of all material enjoyment,” followed directly by Text 42. The volume’s copyright page reads “Text © 1974 The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc.”, gives ISBN 978-91-7769-300-0 for the eighteen-volume set, and states “2024 Printing: 3,000 copies. Printed in China.”
The same ISBN has been used for the BBT’s standard eighteen-volume set since at least 2017, according to booksellers’ listings, so the paragraph may have been dropped in an earlier printing under the same number. Akincana Gocara has not yet compared a pre-2024 printing.
Vedabase.io offers this verse in six languages. All six editions were checked on 1 October 2026.
| Edition | Final “vikhyātam” paragraph | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| English | Absent | Present in the Wayback Machine capture of 30 March 2024 |
| Czech | Absent | No archive capture of the page exists, so its earlier state is unknown |
| Bulgarian | Absent | Already absent in the side-by-side capture of 30 March 2024 |
| Spanish | Present, softened | Last sentence says women like men who are “muy atrevidos” (very bold) |
| Portuguese | Present | Full paragraph |
| Russian | Present | Full paragraph |
The Bulgarian omission appears to be older than the English one. In the Wayback Machine capture of 30 March 2024, the site’s side-by-side view shows the English purport with the final paragraph but no Bulgarian counterpart for it. The Czech page has never been captured by the Wayback Machine, so it is not known whether the Czech text carried the paragraph before.
Online, the removal cannot yet be dated precisely. The 30 March 2024 capture is the last successful archive of the English page; the Wayback Machine’s later attempts, in January and March 2025, returned server errors. The online change therefore took place at some point between 30 March 2024 and 1 October 2026, while the printed evidence places the change in the BBT’s text in or before 2024. The verse page carries no editorial note, and no announcement of the edit was found on vedabase.io, on the BBT’s website or on the Bhaktivedanta Archives blog.
Two neighbouring passages that have drawn similar criticism, in the purports to Srimad-Bhagavatam 4.25.42 (“When a husbandless woman is attacked by an aggressive man, she takes his action to be mercy”) and 4.26.26 (“Generally when a woman is attacked by a man — whether her husband or some other man — she enjoys the attack, being too lusty”), were still present on vedabase.io on 1 October 2026.
The three purports have a history. In 2008 the GBC recommended to the BBT trustees that endnotes or appendices be added to Srila Prabhupada’s books to explain the statements in 4.25.41, 4.25.42 and 4.26.26, noting that “some ISKCON devotees may have used these statements out of context as an excuse to offend, neglect and abuse women.” The BBT trustees turned the recommendation down. In a statement published in June 2008, they wrote: “We do not intend to add anything to Srila Prabhupada’s books, or subtract anything, or change anything Srila Prabhupada says, to make his controversial or potentially controversial statements more acceptable to readers or less vulnerable to misuse by ISKCON devotees.” They said explanations would instead be offered on a separate website, to keep the books “free from editorial intrusions.”
Jayadvaita Swami, the longtime BBT editor of Srila Prabhupada’s books, had published a defence of the passage in May 2007, arguing that Srila Prabhupada used “rape” in its older sense of seizing or carrying off and that the purport describes a woman’s attraction to a bold, assertive man rather than approval of violence. The Vaishnavi Ministry published a similar reading in 2020, prepared with input from the BBT.
Vedabase.io was built by Prahlada-Nrsimha Das, a devotee from ISKCON Czech Republic, and launched in its present form in 2017 after he presented the project to a BBT trustee meeting. Its pages state that the content is “used with permission of © The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc.” and the Bhaktivedanta Archives, owner of the VedaBase.
The printed edition shows that the change is not confined to vedabase.io but is in the BBT’s own text, which vedabase.io reproduces. Neither the BBT nor vedabase.io has published a note explaining the removal, and the 2008 statement that the trustees would not “subtract anything” from Srila Prabhupada’s books has not been withdrawn. Akincana Gocara has not yet contacted the BBT or vedabase.io for comment on the reason for the change.
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