Women of India

by Otto Rothfield

Actually, therefore, it may be said—if words are used in the usual sense—that the aristocracy of India is composed of the Mussulman nobility and of the second or Kshatriya class of Hindus, the ruling and fighting houses of the land. And of these at once the most interesting and the most important are the tribes known collectively under the name of Rajputs, “sons of kings,” as the word would read in English. They are, of all the people of India, the most gallant and picturesque. Almost they are Indian chivalry itself. In India, the homes properly speaking of the Rajput tribes are in Márwár, Mewár, and Káthiawád, in the tracts, that is, which stretch from the centre of the Continent to the sands of Sind and down to the base of the Peninsula, as well as in the province that projects into the Ocean to the West. From the desert of Bikanir and Jodhpur, where water has to be sought by shafts hundreds of feet below the level of the scorching sand, to the forests and glens and rocks of Mewár and to the fertile plains that roll across Gujarát to the Arabian Sea, they rule or hold their lands on service tenures, and hunt and shoot and make love and yearn for battle. Bikanir, Jodhpur, Rutlam, Jamnagar, Baria, and how many other names there are that in the Great War have made dear the Rajput clans! They have borne the flag as fighting gentlemen to France and Flanders, to East Africa, and the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates. The recital of their deeds and glory is a task, alas! for other pens. Be it for these lines to make something plain of the manner of their daily life at home.

But first a few words must be written of their history. For without some such knowledge, there can be no understanding either of India or of the qualities for which the Rajput stands. Modern India, as it is now known, came to shape in the nine hundred or thousand years that passed from the day of Alexander to the Mussulman conquests. Before that period there was an India, still reflected in the Scriptures and in the living beliefs of the people, when Aryan immigrants furnished rulers and priests to dark Dravidian masses, cousins of those who still people the South Sea Archipelagoes, peoples who even now form the staple of the Southern Indian population, those who speak Tamil and Telugu and migrate as labourers not only to Ceylon but even to Fiji and Jamaica and Trinidad. But after the division of Alexander’s Eastern Empire, that vast half-obscure series of invasions began which changed the face of the greater part of the Indian continent and altered all the constituents of its population. From the Bactrian Empire and its Hellenized inhabitants, came Menander with the Ionians—Yávans as they are known in Indian history. From the Oxus valley and Central Asia came the Scythian Sákas and the Kusháns. And all of these accepted the Buddhist faith and ruled kingdoms and helped learning and founded new families. Then, in the end of the fourth and throughout the fifth centuries, this India already so transformed, was flooded by the vaster, all transmuting hordes of Gujjars and White Huns. Each horde in turn swept into its embrace something of its predecessors, each being widely mixed and composite. So to the last in all those conquering peoples—and the Huns were a people on the move and not an army—there were elements of Greek and Turk, Avar and Mongol, and Persian and Caucasian—all the elements in short that go also to make up Eastern Europe and its nations. Those were the peoples from whom descend the Kshatriya caste of modern India, these fine well-mannered fiery sportsmanlike Rajputs, who are the pride of their country. They look like any Hungarian nobleman or Georgian chief; and all the centuries spent in enervating climates and an austere faith have not taken from them their dash and passionate fervour.

They are Kshatriyas now, it has been said, these Rajputs from Central Asia. For from of old the classic, if academic, division of the Indian peoples has been supposed to be in four great caste or class abstractions, of which the second or warrior class is known as Kshatriya. And in fact it was into this caste that the invaders were by artful priests assumed to be adopted. The first hordes, from Bactria and the Oxus, had become followers of Buddha, a casteless faith in which the Brahman priesthood lost its privileges. But the later comers, the Gujjars and Huns, with their adoration of fire and sun and moon, were quickly persuaded to the Hindu system and the acceptance of the Brahman priesthood. So they slew as they conquered and extirpated the adherents of the reformed creed. And for reward they obtained the rank of Kshatriya and genealogies of the true Aryan breed. Those who were soldiers and founded states or formed the fighting men-at-arms of the clan maintained the rank, and are the Rajputs of to-day. The rest, as they settled down to trade or craftsmanship or as each by the succeeding horde was engulfed, and, where it was not absorbed, oppressed, brought to the multitudinous castes of upper India that Rajput element which is still strongly marked by Scythian tribal names and even by customs or appearance. It was a clan system, something like the Highland clans. Just as Macdonalds or Camerons absorbed into themselves earlier Picts or later broken septs, so did even the proud Sesodias of Udepur, one must suppose, take into their tribe in the first rush of conquest many converted Sákas or Kusháns, broken tribes, it may be, who were useful recruits, or perhaps at times some powerful leaders. As the Highlander going to Glasgow or the Lowlands, lost his nobility and became artisan or weaver or tradesman, marrying with the common people and shedding his pride and distinctions, so of the Central Asian fighting tribes there were many who descended to the common level of the working population.

LADY FROM MEWÁR

Now the Rajput tribes for over a thousand years have been the kernel of Indian aristocracy. They have lofty genealogies which trace their trees to roots in mythology, to birth from fire or the personified sun and moon. The god Krishna, a Kshatriya chief, indeed, of real but hidden fact, mixed inextricably with the ancient concept of a cloud-god, powerful in some forgotten Aryan home, has his place as divine progenitor in many a family tradition. They have their professional bards who sing the epics of their race and preserve the records of their families and descent. For a thousand years they have spent the lustres fighting, tumultuous, each chief with his following against his neighbour, always divided, yet throughout in no mere lust of acquisition but in the spirit of a sport, sought for its own sake, governed by the rules of chivalry. Throughout Rajputana and Káthiawád, their castles stand on every eminence. Thence they could sally forth upon a foray, or in them, if the worst befell, sustain a brief siege. Younger sons either went out to carve themselves a career and perhaps a kingdom with the sword or received an appanage, half-independent, in which they governed as vassal princes. The chief ruled with a power absolute and arbitrary; but he had to rule as a father among his children. The clan obeyed, as a child obeys his father; yet withal there was always a curious feeling of equality. They were all of the same blood, they felt, high or low, born to carry arms, all gentlemen; and the chief was no better than his poorest brother, except that God had given him as eldest of the older line the right of decision in affairs. For their estates the clansmen paid by service, each according to his fief serving in person or with subordinate horsemen and men-at-arms. To this class belong the women who have been India’s heroines, the women whose names survive in story, brave with the brave, tender and true. Best known of all, perhaps too well-known again to bear mention, are Padmini, the princess of Mewár, and her no less courageous companions and maid-servants. For she was beautiful, of a beauty so surpassing as to bring ruin to her own people. ’Alá-ud-din, the great conqueror, heard of her fame and contrived to see her features in a mirror. Then, having looked, he swore that she must be yielded to his passion or, if not, that Chitor, the capital of Mewár, should fall. Finally, when it was no longer possible to resist and the impregnable fort was only too clearly pregnable by the enemy, Padmini called the wives and daughters of the fighting men and told them what was in her mind. In the vaults deep within the core of this strange hill fortress, they piled wood and straw and built themselves a vast pyre. Then with a farewell to the soldiers who were to charge in one last sortie upon the enemy, the women went down the steps to the supreme offering and laid themselves upon the logs of burning wood and died. In this way the women of Chitor—without one to shrink or to draw back—preserved for all time the memory of Rajput honour and the exaltation of Rajput womanhood.

Even to-day, without a doubt, there are within the zanánas of Mewár many women of a spirit no less sublime. The honour of the family, that is a sacred flame which they feed in their hearts with ever renewed fuel of self-sacrifice and devotion. That is a repute, which, even when they sin, they seek to preserve intact; and they know only too well that infraction of this law brings with it death. The women live, with few exceptions, in the strictest seclusion, seeing no male person except their husband and occasionally an uncle or a brother. But, in despite of privacy, the fame of their conduct is whispered abroad and their influence in affairs is only too often felt, even by Political Agents and Residents. In a chief’s household, there may be two or three wives, each with her separate establishment and her appanages. The management of her estates alone demands a good deal of intelligence and force of will. Handicapped as she is by being forced to converse with her stewards through a curtain, behind which she remains invisible, it is remarkable with what ability many a Rajput wife or widow controls the administration of her funds, though sometimes unhappily she may become the victim of fraud or specious appearances. The popular estimation of the Rajput ladies’ talents is shown in the Gujaráti proverb, “The clever woman’s children are fools, and the foolish woman’s children are clever,” in which the former is the Rajput woman with her impetuous and often imprudent sons, and the latter the cunning Bania trader with his usually awkward and futile mother.

Only experience can show how deep, and sometimes how perverted, is the respect for family honour; how hard the duty imposed upon women to preserve it above all things else at any cost. Some years ago, a young Rajput gentleman in an access of insane rage murdered his stepmother in her room. He had a sister, a girl of eighteen, still unmarried, who was sitting beside the pair and saw the murder done before her eyes. As it happened, a Government officer was near the place, got early information, and by a forced ride through darkness over forest tracks was able to reach the scene of the murder by midnight. He went at once to the girl’s quarters and, while respecting the custom of purdah, insisted upon speaking to her in person. The girl was still shaken by the murder that she had witnessed, her nerves upset, her night sleepless, her mind a vortex of cruel impressions. Under the skilful questioning, she soon broke down, and—told the truth! She recounted the facts as they had happened; and the facts were that her brother, the head of the family, was a murderer. But thereafter the girl remained unmarried, no Rajput of lineage, however poor, being found to accept in marriage a Rajput maiden who by the mere truth had fixed in the public eye a stain on the family name.

Of Rajput wooings there is still many a romantic story to be told. In one of the smaller states there had been some talk of marrying the daughter of the house to a greater chief. The young lady, a girl of about fifteen, exceptionally beautiful and graceful, well-educated, a writer of excellent letters both in her own and in the English language, managed to get hold of a photograph of the proposed consort and incontinently fell in love with the pictured image. The negotiations met with unexpected difficulties and the project all but fell through. The young chief, who had not seen her, was indifferent and accepted an offer from a more powerful state, where he married the young princess, almost a child. This was so far from damping the other lady, that it served only to inflame her further. The greater the difficulty, the more determined she was to win the man whom she now loved with a bitter passion. She wrote, she intrigued, she guided the negotiations herself, she entreated and schemed and insisted. At last she was successful, and the young chief came to wed her as his second wife. Throughout the ceremony, he was indifferent, almost bored. From his manner it was plain that he married only as a duty, because he was a gentleman, bound to a promise which he may have thought himself cheated into giving. But, the ceremony over, he went according to custom to eat the first meal with his new wife and for the first time to see her face and listen to her speech. In less than an hour everything was changed. Fired by her immediate charms, he burst all the bonds of etiquette and carried his bride off to his own tents. He made her his queen and put her like a seal upon his heart. For the child whom he had formerly married there was little thought, and the new bride, who for so many years had loved him from his portrait with a passionate eagerness, became the ruler as well as the loving servant of her prince.