The numerous instances of this kind which happen in the island have encouraged a swarm of satirical effusions upon the faithlessness of the female sex; but if the women were also poets, they might echo every note of the song. In illustration of the estimate formed of them, we may quote a few lines translated from the original by Sirr. They apply to the fraudulent disposition of women, and have become proverbial among the people.
“I’ve seen the adumbra tree in flower, white plumage on the crow,
And fishes’ footsteps on the deep have traced through ebb and flow.
If man it is who thus asserts, his words you may believe;
But all that woman says distrust—she speaks but to deceive.”
The adumbra is a species of fig-tree, and the natives assert that no mortal has ever seen its bloom.
Under the native kings the Singhalese were forbidden to contract marriage with any one of nearer affinity than the second cousin; such an union was incestuous, and severely punished. Under the English government, however, many of these old restrictions have been modified. Among the Christian population, on the other hand—Catholic as well as Protestant—many traces of their old idolatry are still distinctly visible in the ceremony of marriage.
The Buddhist law allows to every man, whatever his grade, only one wife; but the ancient Kandian princes, of course, broke this law and took as many wives or concubines as they pleased.
We have alluded to the numerical difference between the sexes. The population of Ceylon is about 1,500,000, and the males exceed the females by nearly a tenth. In 1814 it was 476,000; there were 20,000 more males than females. In 1835 there was a population of 646,000 males, and 584,000 females. At both these periods the disparity was greatest in the poorest places. In the fishing villages, where wholesome food abounded, there were more females than males. The same circumstance is true at the present day. Some writers attribute this to a gracious provision of Nature, which checks the increase of the people; but Nature makes no provision against unnatural things, and starvation is a monstrous thing in a fertile country. We may with more safety assign as a cause the open or secret infanticide, which, under the old laws, was common. Female children, except the first born, born under a malignant star, were sure to be sacrificed. It was hardly considered an offence; but being, under the British rule, denounced as murder, has been gradually abolished. The easier means of life, which in Ceylon and throughout the rest of our Asiatic dominions are afforded to the people under English sway, take away the incentive of poverty to crime. The population has enormously increased, an unfailing sign of good government, if misery does not increase with it.
The social position of the Singhalese women is not so degraded as in many other parts of the East; the poor labouring hard, but as partners rather than as slaves. This superior condition does not, unhappily, elevate their moral character, for it is unaccompanied by other essential circumstances. Profligacy, we have said, is widely prevalent in Ceylon; yet prostitution, at least of the avowed and public kind, is not so. Under the Kandian dynasty it was peremptorily forbidden; a common harlot had her hair and ears cut off and was whipped naked. If, however, we accept the general definition of the word prostitution as any obscene traffic in a woman’s person, we shall find much of it clandestinely practised. The women are skilful in procuring abortion, and thus rid themselves of the consequences which follow their intrigues. Of course, in the sea-port towns prostitution exists, but we have no account of it. It is fair, however, to notice the opinions of Sir Emerson Tennent, that the morals of the people in these and in all other parts of the islands are rapidly improving, and that marriage is becoming a more sacred tie[74].