Between the twilights

by Cornelia Sorabji

The fact is, that with the Hindu the root of all aversion is traditional religion, and this it is which overlays the ordinary aversions of instinct or culture. At the present day purely arbitrary, too, seems the table of clean and unclean, though, as in all religions, no doubt it had its one-time significance. In an agricultural country the cow was a useful animal. If you wished preservation, the only way was to declare it sacred. The religious sanction appeals most strongly to peoples in their infancy, and in India we find a nation which still keeps its nursery rules, so to speak.... And, as is proper, the women know far more about these rules than do the men. A Hindu will often say, appealed to on this point or that of religious custom or religion: “I do not know, but information may be had in the Inside.” One such Inside produced the fact that the sanctity peculiar to the Ganges applies to one town at least, to Puri by the Sea. As the Ganges receives all castes—in death, so does Puri—in life.

Here such holiness does the very fact of residence give, that it over-rides distinctions. A Brahmin would eat at the hand of a sweeper in Puri, would eat and keep his caste. In theory, of course, a man should eat at the hand of a sweeper anywhere, a sweeper, say, turned Sanyasi (a world-renouncer or holy man); but my same information adds as rider that no Sweeper, even in Puri, would dream of thrusting himself on a Brahmin.

I referred the point to my Wisest of the Wise. “It is true,” she said, “and only the holiest Brahmin, he who has got so far past the trammels of his body as not, say, to be conscious of even heat or cold—for caste is only a distinction of this body—only such a man would say to the Sweeper, ‘Come, friend, the God in you and the God in me is one: let me eat at your hands,’—and such an one could take no sin eating with the Sweeper. But as long as you are conscious of repulsion, aversion, there is sin in disregarding it—sin which will affect the after-genesis, which will annul a life-time of merit.”

This same penalty, loss of caste, is the reason for what has been called in official documents “enforced widowhood.” The Priests attached excommunication to re-marriage. And since, as we have seen, things social and things religious overlap in Hinduism, the Priests had the opportunity of banning in both ways. No more invitations to caste dinners, as well as no more visits to the Temple, to sacred Tanks and Wells and Bathing Ghats, for the excommunicated. Few women and fewer men will face excommunication of this type, and one reads with amusement of the ardent reformer who, before proposing marriage to a charming widow of his acquaintance, wrote a hundred notes to friends and acquaintances, “Will you dine with me if I marry So-and-so?” There were not fifty righteous found willing, even on paper! But in truth the number of those who wish or would countenance re-marriage is very small. The feeling of the orthodox about marriage is this: It is a Gift—the gift by a Parent of a daughter to a husband. The Gift must be a first Gift, no one must have had earlier use of it, no one must even have had earlier chance of longing for it. You must be certain the possession is your very own—wherefore the giving in infancy. Wherefore again, even if you died after mere symbolic and before actual possession of your gift, the Gift was nevertheless yours.... Infant widowhood. How can it be given again—that Gift? If it would be sin in infancy, it would be worse sin later on. And the woman’s reasoning is of the same class. The best believe in the sacrament of marriage: they worship their husbands as the life-force: for his using or abusing, his pleasure or neglect they exist. He being gone, what is there? In the old days there was suttee, and who shall say but that the moral strength it represented did not make for something in the national consciousness? No one ever enforced widowhood. No one enforced suttee: no one to-day can really restrain suttee. One old test was putting your smallest finger into the fire and burning it to the bone: if you could stand that, unflinching, you were worthy to be suttee. Another was stirring boiling hot rice with your bare hand. I know a woman whose proudest memory is that some Great-Aunt or Grandmother stood the test.

Of course misuse of the practice crept in. Some women became suttee because it was expected of them. What tragedies there must have been! How the other women must have whispered: “Will she be suttee? Oh! will she?” or, “She surely will be suttee!” And in each case it would have determined the undetermined. Again, one can imagine the woman who did not love suffering suttee in expiation, or in terror at her own gladness of release; or she who was not loved enough seeking it in pride or hunger of heart. Oh! the tragedies in that handful of ashes on the suttee stone. Then, again, there would be the Priest-made suttees, an increasing number as the years carried life further and further from the original ideal.

But, as I said above, the real suttee was never compelled, nor is she now. Only this morning I have heard of a woman, within a four-mile radius of where I sit writing, who soaked her sari in oil, and falling upon her dead husband’s body set fire to herself; and of another just saved from a like attempt. Who could prevent them? Now and again, as lately in the Punjab or Gaya, cases are brought to light, and convictions point anew to the law; but Police administration Reports do not represent the tale of suttees in any one Province.

The class of woman who for the kingdom of Heaven’s sake became suttee before the Act of 1829, still is suttee, either actually in the old-time way, though by stealth and unnerved by the admiration of the onlooker, or in the life of religion and unselfishness. We have all known at least one such Saint living between her house of Gods and the cares of other people, a burden-bearer who bears without railing, nay often with cheerfulness, and who has learnt to live without any hope, save for him with whom she was forbidden to die. Perhaps the living sacrifice began when she was but twelve years of age ... perhaps she lived to seven times twelve.... “What did you do?” I asked of one such, “in the long ago when life pulsed in your veins?” She smiled at me the smile of her who has attained. “There were the children of other people who needed love; there is always my house of Gods.... I am a Swami-bakht (worshipper of my husband).”

She to whom I refer was loved and honoured, the high priestess, so to speak, of her family. “She was too holy for life’s commonplace, so the Destroyer set her free to pray,” as said her Father. Yet, she also was accursed, a thing of ill-omen, not to be seen on occasions auspicious, barred then, even from the Temple. If aught went wrong in the house, even her staunchest friend would say: “I must have looked at your face this morning, Didi.” And, to be the bringer of bad luck, that must be the hard part of the lot of these women. That they keep their faces to the Light, in spite of this, seems to me the very crown of Sainthood.

I have spoken of one type of widow, the rarest; some there are who identify themselves with the thing accursed, who have not the strength, like that other, to falsify the curse by every moment’s life of blessed service, many who accept misery as their portion; some who distract themselves from misery by vice or by lapses from virtue.... The odd thing is that modern Hinduism, as represented by the Priesthood, would wink at the last-named, while excommunicating the virtuous widow who re-married. I said “the odd thing,” but wrongly, for of course, if my earlier conclusion be true, and modern Hinduism is a system of canonical “Thou-shalt-nots” and not of refined ethics (as in the Shasthras), the Priests are quite consistent.

“You shall be outcast. I will not dine with you.”