Women of India

by Otto Rothfield

Mother, my hair is black and his head is all white or grey.

My youth is at its blooming and already my life is wrecked.

Goddess mother, why was I not strangled at birth, why was I not poisoned?

Yet if my husband die, it is my part to be true to death.

Nay, Goddess mother, with joined hands I pray at thy feet,

When I am born again, give me a husband that is young and strong.”

But as long as society tolerates the acceptance of money by a bride’s father, so long will there be parents to be tempted by gold to sanction their children’s ruin. And even then there will persist a deeper reason. For girls are all early married and widows may not marry a second time. So, even against his will, an elderly man is forced, if he wishes to have the legitimate and socially-sanctioned companionship of a woman, to seek in marriage one of the young girls who alone are in India available for a suitor.

The prohibition of widow remarriage has also been bitterly attacked, often by those Indians who, from education or environment, have been affected by rationalism, sometimes by those who find a false pride in the imitation of foreign custom. But the prohibition is not of course universal. Those castes which have not yet set up a claim to the higher ceremonial purities, are free to compound with human desires by a second marriage, devoid of sacramental significance. It is in the higher classes that the woman may have to pay for the pride of caste by her individual austerities. Yet against the prohibition of widow remarriage may be set the terrific wastage in Europe of chaste and unmarried women. It has not at least entailed upon Indian society that narrowing and unnatural education which Europe has seen itself forced to accept, with all its consequent evils, and which is perhaps inevitable if chastity is to be required as their highest and sometimes their only virtue from women who are in every case condemned to a lengthy and, in a vast number of unhappy cases, to a life-long celibacy. In India a woman is at least allowed to know and to be natural; for an early marriage gives her in her ripening maturity the fitting fulfilment of her womanhood. And, even at the worst conjunction of destiny, the ideal of devotion crystallized in an unbroken widowhood is, in itself, no ignoble aspiration. The unflinching veneration that a son gives to his widowed mother is in India no small recompense for her sacrifice to a sacred duty. Widowhood is recognized by all as a state—divinely imposed—of austerity and atonement. But it has its own quiet rewards in the family home, with its sense of duty done, like a nun’s or a Sister of Mercy’s. It is harsh in those castes, which have merely adopted a custom, when the inspiring ideal is not felt living in their hearts, deep and intense. And it is also harsh in those cases where the original thought has been warped by an exaggerated deduction or where punishment is too rigorously exacted for illicit infringement of the rule. At least in the case of the child-widow, betrothed indeed by a sacrament, but never really wedded, some speedy relaxation of the rule appears desirable: and it is probable that, with the decay of faith and with the new scepticism about blessings conveyed by an astrologer’s predictions, some such amendment will soon ensue.

A deeper objection to the Hindu system is one which has been seldom, if ever, expressed. Racially, the absence of that natural selection which expresses itself in sexual desire, cannot but be detrimental. It is perhaps vain to expect a vigorous childhood to be born from unions in which healthy desire is replaced by the coldness of duty or by an instinct that has not been transfigured by personal attraction and selection. The difficulty is inherent in a system which bases its selection upon the supernatural and rejects the natural call of spirit to spirit and sense to sense. And yet it must be confessed, not without shame, that a careful selection by parents, if it could be trusted to be rational and disinterested, might be no more injurious than the restricted and illusory choice, too often made in ignorance, which so far seems to be the only substitute that civilization has learnt to provide. In general, it may be said that the Hindu rules of marriage are, in the ordinary sense of happiness, as conducive to the happiness of the spouses as the fast transforming systems of modern Europe, and that their happiness is less self-centred and more altruistic. Romantic love is, after all, most commonly, even in Europe, the short-lived flower of life in one sex and one class. Marriage must everywhere be in practice limited and artificially restricted. Economic conditions are very near the base of most marriages; and even in the richer classes must be a main constituent of the bride’s decision. Moreover, for the lasting purposes of marriage, affection is no bad substitute for love—affection and the sense of destined consecration. It may at least be asserted that, in general, among the upper castes of India the mingled feeling of duty and devotion is as strong as, and perhaps more stable than, in the corresponding sections of English society. In many places, however, and in many castes, the soft bloom of companionship and emotion is bruised by the brutality of a first union with a partner before unknown and undesired. Nor can it be denied that the gnostic asceticism, to which Indian idealism has so often condescended, has killed, where it could, that joy in a free humanity which alone can invest marriage with the flaming beauty of love. When the value of love is considered as an inspiration to art and chivalry and, indeed, to every creative activity, then the loss, thus self-inflicted, will appear in all its gravity. It may well be that the deathly slumber of the arts in modern India is to no small extent due to spiritual conditions which exclude and condemn the love which is profane, and is therefore alive and immortal.