How can we help the fact that the number of women in this class must increase daily? The age marches forward towards personal and individual dignity, and the old ideals of the vicarious are being pushed into the background of the unregenerate.
The majority suffer in silence; some gloriously, some ingloriously and sadly rebellious. Some fall into the hands of the Widow Re-marriage Committee, and are re-married. It is not for the onlooker to say whether this solution is sufficient. A few are now beginning to find that life has some use for a woman unmarried, even for her. They are learning to earn their own living and to bless the world with honest labour. She is buying back the curse, this widow who works, in a way which must surely conserve for the nation much of that selflessness which we claimed in the suttee, and certainly much more apparent usefulness. As doctor, teacher, nurse, and in humbler walks of life, which of us who know modern India have known and not blessed the Hindu widow? For the first time, too, since the Vedic era, do we find in India unmarried girls over ten years of age. This is the nearest approach to spinsterhood in the East, and the spinster—she is very rare—is almost always a self-respecting woman earning her own living.
I have said that the impetus of the age is towards individualism. How can we keep the Hindu woman out of the great current?
The time when the nation could be served by a grovelling womankind—if ever such time there was—is past.
A woman’s place in the National life will now best be filled by the realization of herself; she must grow to her full stature, taking as her due her share of God’s light and air, of the gifts of the Earth-Mother.
She need lose none of those qualities which made her loved in mythology, in the times of the Vedas, in history. Indian women have it within their power to prove to the world that gentle womanly graces are not incompatible with independence.
What a redemption of that curse of the widowed, what a revenge on Time, if the widow herself take the foremost place in this regeneration of Indian womanhood!
XII
GARDEN FANCIES
Everyone in India is familiar with the homely little Tulsi—the sacred basil—with its aromatic brown spirals and dull green leaves. It was sprawling across the drive of a house I had newly come to tenant, and while my Mali and I did tidyings in the Garden, I spoke to him gently about the plant. “Move the sacred garden-person. Suppose some day we drove over it and hurt it, quite by accident, what sin! See, put it in a new hole yonder, by your own hut if you wish.” He is a holy man, my Mali, from Puri, where dwells Jagannath of the Car with his Brother and Sister; and he will not touch the Tulsi till he has bathed, saving for it his first draught of water of mornings. I could only hope that my good intentions were credited. But he made no sign beyond a reverence to the Tulsi, and a wagging of his head from side to side, which I interpreted as “Forgive me” (to the plant), “do I not eat the Huzoor’s salt? It is an order” (for me).
Notwithstanding, the Tulsi moved not, and frequent reminders at last elicited a reason. “It would take a ceremony and a very holy man to transplant the sacred Tulsi.”