Since, as Ward attests (116), the young widows "without exception,
become abandoned women," it is obvious that one reason why the priests
were so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure an
abundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes. The
hypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines,
but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favor
and secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to their
sensual appetites and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses for
their gratification--making these opportunities, in fact, part and
parcel of their religious ceremonies. Their temples and their sacred
carts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene pictures
of a peculiarly disgusting kind,[271] which were freely exposed to the
gaze of old and young of both sexes; their temples were little more
than nurseries for the rearing of bayadères, a special class of
"sacred prostitutes;" while scenes of promiscuous debauchery sometimes
formed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocritical
pretext.
It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirely
responsible for Hindoo depravity. It has indeed been maintained that
there was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices which
now afflict them; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorant
dreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted by
whites. One of the oldest Hindoo documents, the _Mahabharata_, gives
us the native traditions concerning these "good old times" in two
sentences:
"Though in their youthful innocence the women abandoned
their husbands, they were guilty of no offence; for
such was the rule in early times." "Just as cattle are
situated, so are human beings, too, within their
respective castes"
which suggests a state of promiscuity as decided as that which
prevailed in Australia. Civilization did not teach the Hindoos
love--for that comes last--but merely the refinements of lust, such as
even the Greeks and Romans hardly knew. Ovid's _Ars Amandi_ is a model
of purity compared with the Hindoo "Art of Love," the
_K[=a]mas[=u]tram_ (or _Kama Soutra_) of V[=a]tsy[=a]yana, which is
nothing less than a handbook for libertines, of which it would be
impossible even to print the table of contents. Whereas the translator
of Ovid into a modern language need not omit more than a page of the
text, the German translator of the _K[=a]mas[=u]tram_, Dr. Richard
Schmidt, who did his work in behalf of the Kgl. Akademie der
Wissenschaften zu Berlin, felt it incumbent on him to turn more than
fifty pages out of four hundred and seventy into Latin. Yet the author
of this book, who lived about two thousand years ago, recommends that
every one, including young girls, should study it. In India, as his
French translator, Lamairesse, writes, "everything is done to awaken
carnal desires even in young children of both sexes." The natural
result is that, as the same writer remarks (186):
"Les catégories des femmes faciles sont si nombreuses
qu'elles doivent comprendre presque toutes les personnes du
sexe. Aussi un ministre protestant écrivait-il au milieu de
notre siècle qu'il n'existait presque point de femmes
vertueuses dans l'Inde."
The Rev. William Ward wrote (162) in 1824:
"It is a fact which greatly perplexes many of the
well-informed Hindus, that notwithstanding the wives of
Europeans are seen in so many mixed companies, they
remain chaste; while their wives, though continually
secluded, watched, and veiled, are so notoriously
corrupt. I recollect the observation of a gentleman who
had lived nearly twenty years in Bengal, whose opinions
on such a subject demanded the highest regard, that the
infidelity of the Hindu women was so great that he
scarcely thought there was a single instance of a wife
who had been always faithful to her husband."[272]