Women of India

by Otto Rothfield

BENGALI LADY

In general, among the middle classes of Bengal, women practise a seclusion that is, however, not too rigid. It is a seclusion like that of classic Athens, not savagely jealous as it still is in many Rajput houses. But with the renaissance that in the last fifty years has so greatly altered life in this great province, many have learnt to discard orthodoxy and with it the traditional restrictions. At Benares, especially, many a Bengali lady can be seen walking openly to the temples and the sacred river. Always she bears a perfect courtesy and a rounded balanced dignity. Of the newer school, too many perhaps have aspirations gleaned from the lighter English novels which they eagerly read—dreams for whose passage the ivory gates of Hinduism were never meant to open. But deep in the hearts of all—far deeper than such fashions—are the images of Sita and Sakuntala. Some play tennis and ride, some there are who return from English schools and the smarter section of London society with the gossip of Ranelagh or the bridge club and a wider taste for amusement. But there are none who discard the tenderness and soft devotion of their native womanhood. Nowhere in India have there been so many marriages between English and Indian; nowhere have they been more successful. The number of women really educated, appreciative of art and literature, a few even themselves poets and writers, is out of all comparison large; and the artistic rebirth in Bengal must to some extent have been shaped by the influence of women’s grace on the social world. Without departing from the prescribed fields of service and abnegation, they take their part in every important movement—sometimes perhaps unwisely! But at times they have brought untold benefit by their acts. So a few years ago did the brave girl who by the sacrifice of her own life slew a great social evil—the purchase of men at the price of ruinous dowries. It must at least be conceded that the women of Bengal, descendant from mixed races but long since truly Indian, have clothed the sacerdotal ideal in vestment of soft and womanly grace. But there are other parts of India where even the Brahman woman has diverged from this ideal, or—should one not rather say?—has transfused into it the feelings and robust sensuality of a more vigorous nature. Where the late conquerors from the North have settled, where rich plains bear wheat and millet, and fields are hedged with the milk-bush and the cactus, where the great trees make the country seem like an English park, and the air bites cold in the winter mornings when a skin of ice crackles on road-side pools, where in the hot months the sun hangs like a disc of brass over the panting earth, there the pulse beats stronger and a larger nature sways the will. Women there have their claims as well as duties; and from life they demand, besides the right to serve, a broader power also and a rich fulfilment. They wish for love and to be loved, and even in their service they aspire to govern. For their womanhood they claim at least some freedom. The texts are still the same; but they are commented by a bolder temperament. The distinction holds good perhaps for all the women of real Hindustan—for the lusty graceful women of Allahabad, for instance, and the upper Ganges Valley.

A NÁGAR BEAUTY

But nowhere can this fine and active type be better studied than in the Nágar caste of Káthiawád and Gujarát. The Nágar community came to India with the last Scythian hordes; and almost at once, at the great fire baptism of Ajmer, attained the rank of Brahmans. To this day, so high do they hold themselves above all others, they hardly trouble to use the title Brahman, but call themselves merely Nágar, with a proud simplicity, as who would say, “I am the Prince.” For centuries they have held the appointments of the State and been famous as administrators. They are to be found in every rank and in every department of the public services, clever, courteous, receptive, and self-confident. Their pride has become a byword among other castes; and their success has made them the mark of envy and dislike. But there can be no question of the ability with which they have held their position, nor of the keen, progressive intellect that guides their interests and activities. They have an eager humanity, and a keen understanding of worldly good and evil, and are above the hypocritical renunciations and pessimistic sanctity of a priestly class. Literature they hold in honour; and the creative instinct, which leads many of them to administration as the career in which man expresses his active will through the minds and morals of mankind, forces others of their community to self-expression in thought and language. If renunciation there be, it is here, not for a mere negation, in itself fruitless; but to the end of a greater realization in the material given by humanity. In this dynamic will, the women have a proportional share. Ambitious and intellectual, they partake in the interests of their families and encourage or advise their husbands and their children. For the achievement of purpose they are ready for every sacrifice; but the consciousness of larger interests ennobles the sacrifice as it humanizes the purpose. They too serve, as every Hindu woman seeks to serve, and the Nágar wife, like her sisters, will cook and wash and stand aside before her man and wait upon his meals. But her devotion is shaped by a less trammelled intellect, and she claims in return an immediate recompense of love and attention.

Very beautiful are the Nágar women, and their beauty is the theme of countless songs and ballads. Fair with a rich golden vivid fairness, like the colour of ripe wheat, with dark eyes in whose depth glows a spark of passion and round which humour and laughter play, with full petulant lips, figures finely rounded and firmly plump like the quail, with, graceful movement and slender limb, the whole lit up by intelligence and comprehension and a touch of conscious charm, the Nágar woman presents a picture that remains unforgotten. Even laborious study seems to have no power to rob her of her looks, and the girl-graduate is fresh and graceful, as if she had never bent over Euclid or deductive logic. One meets them so at times in Ahmedabad or Baroda, in the houses of the highest officials, clever, well-read, well-bred, with perfect manners and astounding beauty, like some memory of the Italian Renaissance, taking no small part in the establishment of an urbane and liberal society, and like the donne of Boccacio they return to their homes to serve and cherish their husbands. And of love they can repeat the whole gamut. Indeed, the keynotes of this society, with all its undertones of Hindu abnegation—as in Florence, too, one imagines an undercurrent, not too discordant, from Savonarola’s denunciations—are not unlike Italy in the great age. Women have similar duties with a touch of the same implied seclusion; they have the same intrigues and stolen pleasures, the same essentially natural poise in life; they are now even beginning a similar application to learning and poetry. And of love too they have no lesser lore and experience than those ladies who, finely natural and fittingly acquiescent in their sex, gladdened and made illustrious the Courts of Mantua and Ferrara.

Even more beautiful than the women in the Nágar caste are their charming and delightful children. With the round oval of their faces, the fair bloom of their skins, the growing intelligence that dances in their eyes, they at once captivate all who look. In general up to the age of eight or ten they remain naked (though an unfortunate new fashion, imitated from customs made necessary by the cold grey skies of England, tends to hamper their free beauty in ugly and unwholesome clothes), and the light movement of frail gold-browned limbs in the Indian air is sheer refreshment to the eye. Devotion, then, the Nágar woman certainly stands for, devotion and the due and harmonious fulfilment of the duties of her station. A woman she is always, fully and truly womanly. But she is far above the mere privative of empty abnegation. Beauty she knows and values, and she is not ignorant or afraid of the power that kindly beauty can exercise in the affairs of men. Learning she can recognize and honour; literature she assists; even of art, she is not, like her sisters, much afraid. In Gujarát from of old the dainty custom has remained by which on certain festivals, the feast of lamps for instance, ladies of the highest classes meet in the open streets of the residential quarters and chant choral songs while they move round in a circle, beating time with their hands and bending gracefully up and down. They sing of spring and flowers and the sports of girl-friends in palace-gardens. But in the large industrial cities which in the last generation have risen upon the older towns with their restricted social circles, the publicity of the streets has become inconvenient. The Nágar ladies in Ahmedabad, for instance, have taken a leading part in transferring the old songs to larger concert halls in clubs and similar places, and at the same time raising the standard and artistic value of the performance. Those who have ever heard such a concert must be grateful for a movement full at the same time of beauty and colour and sweet sound along with modesty and perfect taste. For a higher social life, with heightened enjoyments and a rational freedom, for self-development and wider interests, yet well within the limits that nature prescribes for woman, distinct from the far other limits set to man by his divergent functions, for a life that has in it something of Greece as well as the main ideals of Hinduism, the Nágar woman, for all the illiberal asceticism of the Brahman tradition, may emphatically stand.

In the mercantile classes the same ideals persist, deflected however by the incidents of their livelihood and to an even greater extent by a profound difference in spiritual aspect. Of the Hindu trading classes by far the most important and the most ubiquitous are the merchants of Márwár, of Gujarát, and of Cutch. All follow one of two sects, the Vaishnava or the Jain—the latter in essence a different religion, originally indeed a protest against Hinduism but now little more than a sect, another ripple, so to say, on the waters of national faith. Both at any rate are protests against Brahman orthodoxy and the gnostic philosophies of essential Hinduism. Numerically and in its effects, by far the more important is Vaishnavism. In the form in which it has been adopted by the trading classes, it is the belief that by love alone can God be realized. It centres upon Krishna, that tender and sportive figure, in whom the God Vishnu again came to earthly life, and in whom are enshrined the memories of a once-living hero. On Him mythology and popular song have lavished their softest endearments and their most entrancing images. In His name have been composed the voluptuous love-poems of many generations; and the dalliances of Krishna with the milk-maids and His beloved Rádha are the constant theme to which Indian passion turns for lyrical expression. They are the familiar accompaniment in childhood as in age of the merchant’s women-folk. In Vaishnavism such as this the devotee throws himself, as a suppliant, on God’s grace and love alone. He acknowledges indeed his innate incapacity to apprehend the Godhead, but he aspires at least to feel something of His Glory in those ecstasies of self-abandonment which can be likened on this earth only to the passionate love of man and woman. In their prayers too they associate with the God that consort Lakshmi or Rukhmini, who gives wealth and prosperity—the benign divinity who with her lord preserves and maintains all living things and in loving-kindness intercedes for all who seek by love and submission to realize the Divine in the universe, be their sins manifold as the sands upon the shore.

In every land, of course, the pursuit of wealth as such must be opposed to higher spiritual activities and loftier aspirations. For the merchant the end must be the acquisition of riches for its own sake. All other purposes are either means or incidents. He must treat men and women as means and not as ends in themselves. He can have for humanity none of that respect which is felt by him who, as equal among equals, seeks as his end human perfection, or even by him who, again one of many equals, works, as he thinks, by pain and self-denial for the greater glory of God. Where acquisition is the supreme good, all else must be subordinate. And the methods of acquisition are really two-fold, either by careful saving and the starving of desire to accumulate useless metal tokens which are the equivalents of untasted pleasures, or by wilder speculation quickly to capture the wealth which, exchanged, can buy luxury and material gratification. Side by side, in the same class of men, the two methods can be seen. Extravagant abstention and extravagant lavishness, a fulfilment that is material or an abstention that is no less material, these in all countries are the marks of the merchant class. But they can be mitigated in their effect, as they were in the Italian Renaissance by the almost superstitious devotion of all ranks to the newly-exhumed classic ideal. In India this mitigation is given by the creed of Krishna and of love. Materialized though it has to be when refracted through the mind of man the acquisitive, it is still an influence, nicely attuned to the receiver, for something finer and ennobling. What there is of good, charity and spiritual significance in the merchant’s life (and it is after all much) is mainly drawn from a faith which, even when interpreted in a too material sense, could hardly be replaced for its worshippers by any other credo. In modern Europe the aristocratic ideal has for the richer merchant something of the same significance and mitigating value. But for those outside the circle in which this ideal can be operative there is no other thought to raise and enlarge the spirit.