India, it has been aptly said, "forms a great museum of races in which
we can study man from his lowest to his highest stages of culture." It
is this multiplicity of races and their lack of patriotic co-operation
that explains the conquest of the hundreds of millions of India by the
tens of millions of England. Obviously it would be impossible to make
any general assertion regarding love that would apply equally to the
10,000,000 educated Brahmans, who consider themselves little inferior
to gods, the 9,000,000 outcasts who are esteemed and treated
infinitely worse than animals, and the 17,000,000 of the aboriginal
tribes who are comparable in position and culture to our American
Indians. Nevertheless, we can get an approximately correct composite
portrait of love in India by making two groups and studying first, the
aboriginal tribes, and then the more or less civilized Hindoos (using
this word in the most comprehensive sense), with their peculiar
customs, laws, poetic literature, and bayadères, or temple girls.
In Bengal and Assam alone, which form but a small corner of this vast
country, the aborigines are divided into nearly sixty distinct races,
differing from each other in various ways, as American tribes do. They
have not been described by as many and as careful observers as our
American Indians have, but the writings of Lewin, Galton, Rowney, Man,
Shortt, Watson and Kaye, and others supply sufficient data to enable
us to understand the nature of their amorous feelings.
"WHOLE TRACTS OF FEELING UNKNOWN TO THEM"
Lewin gives us the interesting information (345-47) that with the
Chittagong hill-tribes
"women enjoy perfect freedom of action; they go unveiled,
they would seem to have equal rights of heritage with men,
while their power of selecting their own husband is to the
full as free as that of our own English maidens."
Moreover, "in these hills the crime of infidelity among wives is
almost unknown; so also harlots and courtesans are held in abhorrence
amongst them."
On reading these lines our hopes are raised that at last we may have
come upon a soil favorable to the growth of true love. But Lewin's
further remarks dispel that illusion:
"In marriage, with us, a perfect world springs up at
the word, of tenderness, of fellowship, trust, and
self-devotion. With them it is a mere animal and
convenient connection for procreating their species and
getting their dinner cooked. They have no idea of
tenderness, nor of the chivalrous devotion that
prompted the old Galilean fisherman when he said 'Give
ye honor unto the woman as to the weaker vessel,' ...
The best of them will refuse to carry a burden if there
be a wife, mother, or sister near at hand to perform
the task." "_There are whole tracts of mind, and
thought, and feeling, which are unknown to them_."