The Queen's Daughters in India

by Elizabeth W. Andrew; Katharine C. Bushnell

While we talked, the sudden night of a country without a twilight came on, although it was not really very late. One of the girls lighted a native lamp of the rudest sort—a bit of wick floating in an earthenware cup of oil—and set it in a niche in the wall. The room was unfurnished excepting the charpoy, or cot bed, on which we sat. The girls and mahaldarni sat, native fashion, on the floor, their cotton chuddars and skirts fluttering in the cruel wind that came in at the open archway, for door there was none.

They said the men of their regiment were very bad, and often when drunk beat them and robbed them, not only refusing to pay them any money, but even taking away their cotton quilts and selling them to their own native servants for a few pice with which to buy drink. They described the case of one woman who was beaten terribly by a soldier, and cut in the arms and breast; after this, several of the girls had effected their escape. We have often spoken of this as one of the most deeply shaded pictures in our memory, not only because of the dreary, comfortless surroundings, but because of the cruelty and oppression that weighed these helpless women down, from which there seemed no hope of escape. We talked to them out of the fullness of our sympathy, and promised to pray and work in their behalf, that they, and others like them, might have an opportunity to turn to a good life.

But turning from the physical injury inflicted on these poor women, we wish to present a view of their mental sufferings. It has been urged by many advocates of the regulation of vice that the whole nature of a woman was changed by her sinful life—that she had no sensitiveness and no deep sense of the degradation of her position. We utterly deny this on behalf of the scores of women with whom we have talked in India—whether of high or of low caste, Hindoo or Mohammedan, and of whatever nationality; whether brought up in virtue and afterwards betrayed, or brought up from infancy in vicious surroundings. We deny it even in regard to the mahaldarnis placed over the women, whom avarice might blind, and the ordinary routine duties of their position might harden. Yet when their womanly feelings were appealed to, they always responded, and felt shame with and for the women under their care.

In all our conversations there was shown a most remarkable patience, on the part of the women, in regard to the various inconveniences and hardships which the regulations entailed upon them. The fire of their hatred and indignation all centred upon the heart of the regulations, the examinations, and the violation of womanhood which these examinations were felt to be. It is of no use for any one to deny to us that these women have deep feelings in regard to their wrongs and their shame. We have felt the beating of their aching hearts against our own; we have heard histories that throbbed with the strong agony of betrayed innocence; we have seen a hopeless woe in eyes that will haunt us for ever.

At Peshawar, the women said, when speaking of the great hardship of being turned out of the Cantonment, “Where can we go to? We are prostitutes. No one would give us work.” And again, “Every one under this Government is treated well but ourselves; we only are despised.”

We do not present these facts with any thought of taking our position with those who argue that the better regulation of vice implies a better protection of the degraded women; but rather to show that in the working out of such regulations the woman is absolutely lost sight of, and only the prostitute is considered. Every interest in the woman’s character, happiness, health, life itself, is made subservient to the health and convenience of the British soldier. Every assertion that would put a humanitarian gloss on the regulation of vice is utter hypocrisy.

At Meerut, where there were a good many women present, one, without any question whatever on our part, suddenly broke forth into the most intense expressions of disgust at the Governmental regulation of vice, in which those girls gathered about her sympathized, one especially taking part in the conversation from time to time, and corroborating what was being said. She said, “The Queen does not approve of this; it is the Commander-in-Chief and the officers who are doing these things! Oh, what a shame that the Government does these things!” Then she burst into a passion of indignation, describing in vivid language and with a natural eloquence of gesture the whole shameful proceeding, and the humiliation to which they were subjected.

Words fail to convey the force, and fire, and pathos with which that poor, untaught woman pleaded the cause of her sisters. It was one voice out of many protesting against this cruel wrong, and representing the undying dignity of a woman’s nature, even when forced into a deeper abyss than she ever voluntarily chose to enter. We asked if the other women felt as this one did, and they all answered indignantly, “We all hate it.” The first woman cried out, “It is very disgusting; oh, shame!” We told them it was a grief to us that those who called themselves Christians should do such things, and that they ought not to bear the name. She replied bitterly, “Yes; the Commander-in-Chief, the Colonel, and all of them, all the way down—your Christian men!—they all favour these things. The Queen does not countenance it, for she has daughters of her own; and she cares for her daughters in India also. It is the Commander-in-Chief” (meaning Lord Roberts).

The accounts we have given in previous pages reveal the extremely tender age at which some of these girls were thrust into a life of shame by court proceedings under the Contagious Diseases Acts, when they were openly enforced. Two Benares girls declared they were taken up by the police at fourteen, and one Sitapur girl said she was sold to a mahaldarni at eleven. Much has been said of the horrors of child-marriage in India, and these atrocities should not be minimized, even though we bear in mind the usually slender type of Eastern manhood; but what shall we say when the robust British soldier has had placed at his mercy a little girl of fourteen years old, of the delicate Oriental type; and this done by regular process of law “to preserve his health”?

Then again considering the heathen training of these women, we were led to expect that we should find blindness of the moral sense in relation to this sort of wrong-doing. On the contrary, they expressed great shame and humiliation, never tried to justify their sinful acts, spoke almost universally of their hatred of the life, shed bitter tears, and told us how burdened their hearts were in thinking of their sins. Unlike what we met elsewhere in speaking of religion to the natives, they had little desire for controversy. With not a single exception, we were made welcome, treated courteously, and listened to and blessed for our message. Even in the case of the mahaldarnis we found them not inaccessible, but inclined to expressions of contempt for the whole system of regulation, and of apology for being the hirelings of such a system—an excuse which must have more weight than in a country where industries are open to women. Rahiman of Meerut was an exception. She said she considered her business perfectly legitimate, because she was in a “Government position.”