Part 20 (1/2)
I think it was George William Curtis who said, ”The test of a civilization is its estimate of woman”; and if we are to accept this standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom.
In the great temple at Madura are statues of ”The Jealous Husband” who always carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; and the att.i.tude of the man in the case is the att.i.tude of Hinduism as a system. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that woman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his ”Dharma Sastra” sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: ”It is the nature of woman in this world to cause men to sin. A female is able to draw from the right path, not a fool {237} only, but even a sage.” And the ”Code of Hindu Laws,” drawn up by order of the Indian Government for the guidance of judges, declares:
”A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions.
If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will behave amiss. A woman is not to be relied on.”
”Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar.”
In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman has been divided into ”the three subjections.” In childhood she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sons or--most miserable of all!--lacking a son, to her husband's kinsmen.
Her husband is supposed to stand to her almost in the relation of a G.o.d. ”No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands,”
says Manu, ”no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife honors her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven.” And a recent Hindu writer says, ”To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas (the Hindu scriptures). To wors.h.i.+p the husband is to wors.h.i.+p the G.o.ds.”
Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are doubly hard on the women. The women may no more rise above their caste than the male members of the family; and they are predestined to take up life's most serious duties before their fleeting childhood has spent itself. No wonder they look old before they are thirty!
If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, a trip through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. A law enacted by the British Government a few years ago decrees that while the marriage ceremonies may be performed at any age, the girl shall not go to her husband as his wife until she is twelve years old; but it is doubtful if even this mild measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I attended an elaborate {238} and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was told that the bride was ”eleven or twelve” and would go to her husband's home (he lives with his father, of course) the following week. My travelling servant told me that he was married when he was sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years longer with her parents before coming to him. The first American lady I met in India was telling of a wedding she had recently attended, the bride being a girl of eleven and the groom a year or two older. In Secunderabad a friend of mine found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who had been given in marriage, and in the house where he visited was a ten-year-old girl who had been married two years before to a man of thirty.
In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls Manu named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maximum. The father who delays finding a husband for his daughter until after she is twelve is regarded as having committed a crime--though it must always be remembered that girls and boys in India mature a year or two younger than boys and girls in the United States.
One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost increases with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies in all cases are expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish about as much excitement as circuses at home. My first introduction to a Hindu wedding was in Agra one Sunday afternoon--though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is the same as any other day--and the shops were in full blast (if such a strenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless Hindu merchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy as they ever are.
From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, and as the deafening hullabaloo came nearer its volume and violence increased until it would have sufficed to bring down the walls of Jericho in half the time Joshua took for the job. Just behind the drummers came two gorgeously clad small boys astride an a.s.s begarlanded with flowers; and when the musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so as {239} to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-year-old small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and gauze and who ought to have been at home studying the Second Reader, was on his way to be married, and the little chap riding behind him was the brother of the bride. It was very hard to realize that such tots were not merely ”playing wedding” instead of being princ.i.p.al partic.i.p.ants in a serious ceremony!
The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged for a couple who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, and though no one could have asked for a more gracious welcome than my American friend and I received, I very much doubt if any one of the high-caste folk about us would have condescended to eat at the same table with us even to end a three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was a nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been a three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's house, we were told, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feasts arranged by the groom's father. One thousand people had been invited and, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served, I should think that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5000 rupees, or $1633, was none too high.
Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or a father with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strain his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that among the humbler cla.s.ses a father will sometimes mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story that the bride is ”as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's”--he must also be paid for his indispensable services.
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Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man--whose face she may never have seen but once or twice--to take up the hard life of a Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet from her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion of the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so galling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at the same table with her husband, but must be content with what he leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the people to a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. ”Some of my girls are engaged to be married,” Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home in Calcutta, said to me, ”and when their fiances come to call, after the Christian fas.h.i.+on, the girls must remain standing as inferiors while the boys are seated.”
Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that her husband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If she lives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husband is authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and in nearly all such cases the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W.
J. Wilkins says that a servant in his employ married a second wife and insisted that the first should not only support herself but contribute the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. The older wife is tantalized by the thought that she herself was selected by the parents of her husband, while the new wife is probably his own choice; and another cause of jealousy is found in the new wife's youth. For no matter how old the man himself may be--forty, fifty or sixty--his bride is always a girl of twelve or thereabouts--and for the very simple reason that practically no girls remain single longer, and widows are never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay of a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an agent to his native village and caste with power to negotiate.
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[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TAJ MAHAL FROM THE ENTRANCE GATE.]
The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful than the building itself.
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[Ill.u.s.tration: GUNGA DIN ON DRESS PARADE.]
Ordinarily the Indian water carrier, or _bhisti_, is attired more nearly after the manner described in Kipling's poem:
”The uniform 'e wore Was nothing much before An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind.