Part 71 (1/2)
”A rich husband (merchant caste) brought his wife to me for treatment. He said she was sixteen, and they had been married eight years. 'She was good wife, do everything he want, wait on him and eight brothers, carry water up three flights of stairs on her head; now, what will you cure her for? She suffer much. I not pay too much money. When it cost too much I let her die. I don't care. I got plenty wives. When you cure her for ten s.h.i.+lling I get her done, but I not pay more.' I explained to him that her medicines would cost more than that amount, and he left, saying, 'I don't care. Let her die. I can have plenty wives. I like better a new wife.'”[267]
Though the lawgiver Manu wrote ”where women are honored there the G.o.ds are pleased,” he was one of the hundreds of Sanscrit writers, who, as Ramabai Sarasvati relates, ”have done their best to make woman a hateful being in the world's eye.” Manu speaks of their ”natural heartlessness,” their ”impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and bad conduct.” Though mothers are more honored than other women, yet even they are declared to be ”as impure as falsehood itself.”
”I have never read any sacred book in Sanscrit literature without meeting this kind of hateful sentiment about women.... Profane literature is by no means less severe or more respectful toward women.”
The wife is the husband's property and cla.s.sed by Manu with ”cows, mares, female camels, slave girls, buffalo cows, she goats, and ewes.”
A man may abandon his wife if he finds her blemished or diseased, while she must not even show disrespect to a husband who is diseased, addicted to evil pa.s.sions, or a drunkard. If she does she shall be deserted for three months and deprived of her ornaments and furniture.[268] Even British rule has not been able to improve the condition of woman, for the British Government is bound by treaties not to interfere with social and religious customs; hence many pathetic cases are witnessed in the courts of unwilling girls handed over, in accordance with national custom, to the loathed husbands selected for them. ”The G.o.ds and justice always favor the men.” ”Many women put an end to their earthly sufferings by committing suicide.”
WIDOWS AND THEIR TORMENTORS
If anything can cast a ray of comfort into the wretched life of a Hindoo maiden or wife it is the thought that, after all, she is much better off than if she were a widow--though, to be sure, she runs every risk of becoming one ere she is old enough to be considered marriageable in any country where women are regarded as human beings.
In considering the treatment of Hindoo widows we reach the climax of inhuman cruelty--a cruelty far exceeding that practised by American Indians toward female prisoners, because more prolonged and involving mental as well as physical agonies.
In 1881 there were in British India alone 20,930,000 widows, 669,000 of whom were under nineteen, and 78,976 _under nine_ years of age.[269] Now a widow's life is naturally apt to be one of hards.h.i.+p because she has lost her protector and bread-winner; but in India the tragedy of her fate is deepened a thousandfold by the diabolical ill-treatment of which she is made the innocent victim. A widow who has borne sons or who is aged is somewhat less despised than the child widow; on her falls the worst abuse and hatred of the community, though she be as innocent of any crime as an angel. In the eyes of a Hindoo the mere fact of being a widow is a crime--the crime of surviving her husband, though he may have been seventy and the wife seven.
All women love their soft glossy hair; and a Hindoo woman, says Ramabai Sarasvati (82), ”thinks it worse than death to lose her hair”; yet ”among the Brahmans of Deccan the heads of all widows must be shaved regularly every fortnight.” ”Shaved head” is a term of derision everywhere applied to the widows. All their ornaments are taken from them and they are excluded from every ceremony of joy. The name ”rand”
given to a widow ”is the same that is borne by a Nautch girl or a harlot.” One poor woman wrote to a missionary:
”O great Lord, our name is written with drunkards, with lunatics, with imbeciles, with the very animals; as they are not responsible, we are not. Criminals confined in jails for life are happier than we.”
Another of these widows wrote:[270] ”While our husbands live we are their slaves, when they die we are still worse off.” The husband's funeral, she says, may last all day in a broiling sun, and while the others are refreshed, she alone is denied food and water. After returning she is reviled by her own relatives. Her mother says: ”Unhappy creature! I can't bear the thought of anyone so vile. I wish she had never been born.” Her mother-in-law says: ”The horned viper!
She has bitten my son and killed him, and now he is dead, and she, useless creature, is left behind.” It is impossible for her to escape this fate by marrying again. The bare mention of remarriage by a widow, though she be only eight or nine years old, would be regarded, says Dubois (I., 191), ”as the greatest of insults.” Should she marry again ”she would be hunted out of society, and no decent person would venture at any time to have the slightest intercourse with her.”
Attempts have been made in recent times by liberal-minded men to marry widows; but they were subjected to so much odium and persecution therefor that they were driven to suicide.
When a widow dies her corpse is disposed of with hardly any ceremony.
Should a widow try to escape her fate the only alternatives are suicide or a life of shame. To a Hindoo widow, says Ramabai Sarasvati, death is ”a thousand times more welcome than her miserable existence.”
It is for this reason that the suttee or ”voluntary” burning of widows on the husband's funeral pyre--the climax of inhuman atrocity--lost some of its horrors to the victims until the moment of agony arrived.
I have already (p. 317) refuted the absurd whim that this voluntary death of Hindoo widows was a proof of their conjugal devotion. It was proof, on the contrary, of the unutterably cruel selfishness of the male Hindoos, who actually forged a text to make the suttee seem a religious duty--a forgery which during two thousand years caused the death of countless innocent women. Best was told that the real cause of widow-burning was a desire on the part of the men to put an end to the frequent murders of husbands by their cruelly treated wives (Reich, _212_). However that may be, the suttee in all probability was due to the shrewd calculation that the fear of being burned alive, or being more despised and abused than the lowest outcasts, would make women more eager to follow obediently the code which makes of them abject slaves of their husbands, living only for them and never having a thought or a care for themselves.
HINDOO DEPRAVITY
Since, as Ward attests (116), the young widows ”without exception, become abandoned women,” it is obvious that one reason why the priests were so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure an abundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes. The hypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines, but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favor and secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to their sensual appet.i.tes and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses for their gratification--making these opportunities, in fact, part and parcel of their religious ceremonies. Their temples and their sacred carts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene pictures of a peculiarly disgusting kind,[271] which were freely exposed to the gaze of old and young of both s.e.xes; their temples were little more than nurseries for the rearing of bayaderes, a special cla.s.s of ”sacred prost.i.tutes;” while scenes of promiscuous debauchery sometimes formed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocritical pretext.
It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirely responsible for Hindoo depravity. It has indeed been maintained that there was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices which now afflict them; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorant dreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted by whites. One of the oldest Hindoo doc.u.ments, the _Mahabharata_, gives us the native traditions concerning these ”good old times” in two sentences:
”Though in their youthful innocence the women abandoned their husbands, they were guilty of no offence; for such was the rule in early times.” ”Just as cattle are situated, so are human beings, too, within their respective castes”
which suggests a state of promiscuity as decided as that which prevailed in Australia. Civilization did not teach the Hindoos love--for that comes last--but merely the refinements of l.u.s.t, such as even the Greeks and Romans hardly knew. Ovid's _Ars Amandi_ is a model of purity compared with the Hindoo ”Art of Love,” the _K[=a]mas[=u]tram_ (or _Kama Soutra_) of V[=a]tsy[=a]yana, which is nothing less than a handbook for libertines, of which it would be impossible even to print the table of contents. Whereas the translator of Ovid into a modern language need not omit more than a page of the text, the German translator of the _K[=a]mas[=u]tram_, Dr. Richard Schmidt, who did his work in behalf of the Kgl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, felt it inc.u.mbent on him to turn more than fifty pages out of four hundred and seventy into Latin. Yet the author of this book, who lived about two thousand years ago, recommends that every one, including young girls, should study it. In India, as his French translator, Lamairesse, writes, ”everything is done to awaken carnal desires even in young children of both s.e.xes.” The natural result is that, as the same writer remarks (186):
”Les categories des femmes faciles sont si nombreuses qu'elles doivent comprendre presque toutes les personnes du s.e.xe. Aussi un ministre protestant ecrivait-il au milieu de notre siecle qu'il n'existait presque point de femmes vertueuses dans l'Inde.”
The Rev. William Ward wrote (162) in 1824:
”It is a fact which greatly perplexes many of the well-informed Hindus, that notwithstanding the wives of Europeans are seen in so many mixed companies, they remain chaste; while their wives, though continually secluded, watched, and veiled, are so notoriously corrupt. I recollect the observation of a gentleman who had lived nearly twenty years in Bengal, whose opinions on such a subject demanded the highest regard, that the infidelity of the Hindu women was so great that he scarcely thought there was a single instance of a wife who had been always faithful to her husband.”[272]