Of the diabolical habit of forcing girls into marriage before they had
reached the age of puberty and its wide prevalence I have already
spoken (293), and reference will be made to it in many of the pages
following this. Here I may, therefore, confine myself to a few details
relating to one country, by way of showing vividly what a deadly
obstacle to courtship, free choice, love, and every tender and
merciful feeling, this cruel custom forms. Among all classes and
castes of Hindoos it has been customary from time immemorial to unite
boys of eight; seven, even six years, to girls still younger. It is
even prescribed by the laws of Manu that a man of twenty-four should
marry a girl of eight. Old Sanscrit verses have been found declaring
that "the mother, father, and oldest brother of a girl shall all be
damned if they allow her to reach maturity without being married;" and
the girl herself, in such a case, is cast out into the lowest class,
too low for anyone to marry her.[131] In some cases marriage means
merely engagement, the bride remaining at home with her parents, who
do not part with her till some years later. Often, however, the
husband takes immediate possession of his child-wife, and the
consequences are horrible. Of 205 cases reported in a Bengal
Medico-Legal Report, 5 ended fatally, 38 were crippled, and the
general effect of such cruelty is pathetically touched on by Mme.
Ryder, who found it impossible to describe the anguish she felt when
she saw these half-developed females, with their expression of
hopeless suffering, their skeleton arms and legs, marching behind
their husbands at the prescribed distance, with never a smile on their
faces.
It would be a mistake to seek a partial excuse for this inhumanity in
the early maturing effects of a warm climate. Mme. Ryder expressly
states that a Hindoo girl of ten, instead of seeming older than a
European girl of that age, resembles our children at five or six
years.