THE WOMEN OF INDIA.
The condition of its women is the truest test of a people’s civilization.
Her status is her country’s barometer.
The one hundred million women of India admirably reflect the whole social
and religious condition of that land. There are more nations in India than
are found in all Europe; they also present a greater diversity of type.
Between the aboriginal tribes which treat the weaker sex only as a beast
of burden, and the Parsee community which holds its women in the highest
consideration and furnishes them with a liberal education and large
opportunity, there are many intermediate tribes and nations which regard
their women with varying degrees of consideration and of contempt.
Of all Scriptures the Zend Avesta of the Parsees is the only one which
furnishes woman, from the beginning, with absolute equality with man; and
that position she has never lost among the Parsees. But the Parsees in
India are a mere handful.
The Hindu woman constitutes four-fifths of the total number of her sex in
India; and her condition is fairly uniform everywhere and conforms, in
varying degrees, to a type whose characteristics are easily recognized.
She has come down from earliest history. We recognize her everywhere in
the pages of their ancient literature, in their laws and legends; and we
behold her in all the manifold walks of modern life. For nearly a quarter
of a century the writer has lived as her neighbour, gazed daily upon her
life, wondered at and admired her many noble traits which have been
preserved under the most adverse circumstances, and grieved over her
weakness and her many disabilities.
In ancient times, the position of woman in India was one of power coupled
with honour. Today the power remains, but the honour has been largely
eliminated.
1. In ancient Vedic times woman enjoyed many distinctions and revealed
great aptitude. She joined her husband in the offering of domestic
sacrifices and sat as queen in the home. Some of the sacred hymns of the
Rigveda were made by her and have come down these thirty centuries as a
beautiful testimony to her intellectual brightness and aspiration, and as
an evidence of the honour in which she was held.
Five centuries later this beautiful description was given of her in the
Mahabarata:
“A wife is half the man, his truest friend;
A loving wife is a perpetual spring
Of virtue, pleasure, wealth; a faithful wife
Is his best aid in seeking heavenly bliss;
A sweet speaking wife is a companion
In solitude, a father in advice,
A mother in all seasons of distress,
A rest in passing through life’s wilderness.”
The rights and opportunities of woman are strikingly illustrated by many
of the legends of their ancient epics. For instance, we read of the
_Svayamvara_ of the lovely princess Draupadi. It was the occasion when she
had attained womanhood and was entitled to the right to choose her own
husband. How graphically are the royal suitors described as they press
their claims to her heart and hand in knightly tournament. It is one of
those scenes which reveal woman in the possession of some of her most
queenly rights and attractions.
The ancient ideals of womanly character have come down the centuries writ
large in their songs and annals; and these ideals are today held as
dearly, and are loved and sung with as much ardour, as at any time in the
history of India.
Every boy and girl of that land, today, knows the lovely Sita, wife of the
noble and heroic Rama,—how, while in the power of the terrible Ravana, and
at risk of life, she withstood every temptation and lived in unspotted
purity and in supreme devotion and faithfulness to her royal lord.
Who does not know of the faithful Saguntala, whose legend is woven into
one of the most beautiful and touching love stories the world has ever
known. This drama was the first translation from Sanskrit into the English
tongue and elicited the astonishment and lively admiration of such a man
as Goethe.
India has always boasted of the constancy and devotion of the beautiful
Savitri to her beloved Sattyavân. After the death of her husband, she
followed his soul into the spirit-world with fearless devotion and pleaded
with the King of Death with so much passion and persistence for his return
to life that he was finally restored to her in youthful vigour.
These are some of the stock illustrations of the model wife used
everywhere and at all times in India. And they have had an extensive and
wonderful influence in the molding of wifely ideals.
It is, as we see, a glorification of devotion, faithfulness,
constancy—traits that have always beautified the character of the Hindu
woman. It is true that, apart from her husband and from the kitchen, woman
has had few ideals urged upon her in that great country. Her ambitions
have not crossed the doorsteps of her house and home. She is measured
entirely by her relation to her husband or children. She is her lord’s
companion and servant. Love to him is the wand which alone can transform
her life into gold. Her usefulness and her glory are the reflections of
his pleasure and of his satisfaction in her. She has no separate
existence. Apart from man, she is an absolute nonentity. And yet, within
the sphere which has been granted to her, she has shone with a wonderful
radiance and with a charm which reminds us often of some of Shakespeare’s
beautiful womanly creations.
The physical attractions of woman have always, of course, captivated the
sterner sex in India, as in other lands. Her beauty is lavishly described
and painted in warm colours through all Hindu literature. And she _is_
physically beautiful; she will compare favourably with the fair ones of
any land in womanly grace, in beauty of figure, and in bewitching charm of
manner.
But the standard of womanly grace and beauty is not precisely the same
there as it is with us in the West. A Hindu and an American have different
ideals of personal beauty. Though the Aryan type of countenance may not
largely differ East and West, there are touches of expression and shades
of beauty which correspond respectively to the different ideals in both
lands. May they not have created the ideals themselves?
The most common results of a Hindu woman’s toilet are the smooth hair, the
blackened eyebrow, the reddened finger-nails, the pendent nose jewels, the
bulky ear-rings, the heavy bangles for ankles and arms. Without these,
life, to the Hindu belle, is not worth living. On wedding occasions, among
the common folk, red ochre is also daubed over the throat in ghastly
suggestion to the Westerner; but in glorious attractiveness to the native
of the land!
West and East associate a fair complexion with highest beauty. A fond
Hindu mother once came to the writer moaning that she could not find a
husband for her daughter because she was “too black!” The young man of
India puts a premium upon every shade of added lightness of complexion.
His taste is reflected in the universal feminine custom of using saffron
dye to lighten the complexion upon all festive occasions.
The clothing of the woman of India is exceedingly attractive. Her pretty
garb sets off admirably the beauty of her person; and, both in
inexpensiveness and grace, and in its contribution to health, is far
better than the complicated extravagance, the heavy encumbrance and the
insanitary tight-lacing of the West. The women of South India dress with a
view to comfort in the tropics; but they have also, in a most remarkable
degree, conserved appropriateness, beauty, and simplicity in their robes.
The possibilities of the one cloth, which is the full dress of the South
Indian woman, as a modest garment and as a charming full-dress equipment
would be a revelation to the much dressed votary of the West. In the
arranging of this cloth there is considerable scope for ingenuity and for
æsthetic taste; although, in this matter, the rules of each caste furnish
an iron etiquette which must be followed by the women. Indeed, the tyranny
of Worth in the West is nothing as compared with caste tyranny as the
Fashioner of the East. This is accounted for by the fact that a woman’s
dress must be arranged in such a way as to publish abroad her caste
affiliations.
Woman has a vast influence upon the life of the people of India. In no
other country has she relatively exercised more power. All this,
notwithstanding the fact that, for more than twenty centuries, she has had
no recognized position in religion or in society. Her spiritual destiny
has been entirely in the hands of man. By the highest authorities her
salvation has been made entirely dependent upon her connection with him.
She has absolutely no right of worship of her own. From the cradle to the
grave she is in man’s keeping. Until she is married, supreme obedience to
her father is her only safety; while her husband lives, heaven’s blessings
can come to her only through his favour and prayer; and, after his death,
her sons become her lords and the sole guardians and protectors of her
spiritual interests. All this is everywhere recognized by Hindu society,
and by none more than by the woman herself.
And yet, it is equally true, and a fact of remarkable significance, that,
in India today, the religious influence of woman is paramount. She is the
stronghold of Hinduism at the beginning of this twentieth century. Man,
under the growing influence of western thought, civilization, and faith,
has largely lost his moorings and is growing increasingly insincere and a
trifler with religious beliefs and institutions. The woman, on the other
hand, is a conservative of the conservatives. In her superstition she is
deeply sincere; her faith has no questionings, and her piety shapes her
every activity. Were it not for the women of India, Hinduism, with all its
vaunted philosophy, its wonderful ritual and its mighty caste tyranny,
would, within a decade, fall into “innocuous desuetude.”
It is a significant fact that in the religion of no other people on earth
does the worship of the female find so prominent a place. In many parts of
the land _Sakti_ worship, or the worship of goddesses, is widely prevalent
and almost paramount in influence. It is really the worship of power under
a female form; and the power which these goddesses exercise is mostly
malevolent in its character. The terrible wife of Siva, in all her dread
manifestations, is the most popular deity, because the most feared in the
land.
It is natural to inquire whether this characteristic of the Hindu pantheon
is not a reflection of the Hindu mind as to the influence of woman, and as
to the belief of man in the evil character of that influence. As is the
place and power of woman among the men so is the character and place of
the goddesses in the pantheon of that people.
The famous religious reformer Chunder Sen, though he adopted and used the
Lord’s Prayer, changed the form of address from the masculine to the
feminine and said, “Our Mother who art in heaven!” The adoration of the
female in Hindu worship was never more marked than at present. What has
Christianity to meet this bent of the Hindu mind? Or should it be
discouraged as an element in worship? The Romanists meet it by exalting
and giving preëminence to the Virgin Mother. The Protestants have nothing
corresponding to this.
Socially, the Hindu woman is a reactionary of the most pronounced type;
she opposes social reform at all points—nowhere more than when it is
directed to ameliorate her own condition. Religiously, as we have seen,
she is the slave of man by law and teaching; yet she rules her household,
even in these matters, with an iron hand.
From her throne in the home she so wields her sceptre that it is felt also
throughout the whole social fabric. Her beloved lord has perhaps passed
through a university course, is a pronounced social reformer and
discourses in eloquent English, before large audiences of his admiring
countrymen, concerning the mighty social evils which are the curse of the
country; he, with his ardent fellow-reformers, frames rules which shall
soon usher in the millennium of social reform and progress! And then
he—this man of culture, of eloquence, of noble purposes and of altruistic
ambitions—goes to his home and meekly submits to the grandmotherly tyranny
which has shaped his life much more than he knows, and which vitiates and
renders nugatory all his social and other schemes! As man has narrowed the
scope of woman’s life in that land, so she has given it intensity of
power.
And what is more significant, she has become supremely contented with the
narrow sphere which man has grudgingly given her. And, for this very
reason, she combats every endeavour, on the part of her friends, to
release her from her bondage and to increase her opportunities and
blessings in life. The old triple slander perpetrated upon India, to the
effect that “it is a country in which the women never laugh, the birds
never sing and the flowers have no fragrance,” is a falsehood in all its
details. Hindu women have as merry a laugh as their sisters in any other
land. They have learned to make the best of their lot and to rejoice in
it.
Since the time of the Mohammedan conquest, and probably long before, the
higher class of women have mostly led a life of seclusion. This is
preëminently true of the northern parts of the country where Mohammedan
influence was strongest and the Hindu had carefully to protect his wife
and daughters from the coarse Mussulman. In South India this seclusion is
very rare and observed only among the most aristocratic. The common woman
of India finds ample freedom of intercourse in her town and village, and
figures conspicuously at the great religious festivals of her land.
Generally speaking, woman is the redeeming feature of India. She is the
ideal home-keeper and housekeeper. Usually, she is devoted to her husband,
a passionate lover of her children, the conserver of society, the true
devotee in religion. Her lord and husband has been taught, from time
immemorial, to keep her in obscurity and to surround her with the screen
of ignorance and narrow sympathies; but she has magnified the work
assigned to her; her excellence has shown far beyond his; and, in her
bondage, she has built her throne from which she has wielded her sceptre
of love and goodness over him.
She has never aspired to realms not granted to her by her lawgivers. The
modern aspiration of the “new woman” of the West does not appeal to her.
She asks only to be let alone in her narrow but, to her, all-sufficient
sphere.
2. But, after all we have said, or can say, of the power of woman in
India, it still remains that, in no other land, has she suffered such
marked disability and deeper injustice. If her goodness has shone out of
her darkness, it has only served to reveal the more the sadness of her
position. She bears in her condition the signs of her bondage and
humiliation. The evils of the land have been attributed to her; and man
too often ascribes his own degradation and sin to the curse breathed upon
him by woman.
The proverbs of a country are the truest test of its sentiments. What have
these to say of the woman of India today?
“What poison is that which appears like nectar? Woman.”
“What is the chief gate to hell? Woman.”
“What is cruel? The heart of a viper. What is more cruel? The heart of a
woman. What is the most cruel of all? The heart of a soulless, penniless
widow.”
“He is a fool who considers his wife as his friend.”
“Educating a woman is like putting a knife in the hands of a monkey.”
These are a few of the many proverbs which characterize woman in one
vernacular only. Every other Indian tongue equally abounds in proverbial
expressions which brand a woman as one of the greatest evils of the land.
Sanskrit writers have exhausted vituperative language in describing woman.
They represent her as “wily, hypocritical, lying, deceptive, artful,
fickle, freakish, vindictive, vicious, lazy, vain, dissolute,
hard-hearted, sinful, petty-minded, jealous, addicted to simulation and
dissimulation. She is worse than the worst of animals, more poisonous than
the poison of vipers.”
These proverbs do not necessarily reveal the depravity of the Hindu woman;
but they do testify unmistakably to the estimation in which she is held by
man.
The ignorance of woman there is dense and is probably a fact which closely
connects her with the proverbial expressions concerning her. Her
illiteracy is not an incident in Indian life. It has been, through the
centuries, a settled policy of the land. At the present time only one
woman in two hundred can read and write in that land of progress. The
remarkable thing is, not that so many are illiterate, but that even a few
have been taught at all, in view of the attitude of the Hindu mind towards
her. In ancient times there was little to learn, in India, apart from
religion; but it has been the strict injunction of their Shastras and
religious instructors that no man shall, under penalty of hell, teach to
his wife or daughter the Vedas which are the purest and best part of Hindu
Scriptures. Any form of useful knowledge was considered dangerous in her
possession.
It is not that woman is wanting in capacity. She is as bright and as
teachable as her brother. All that she has needed, educationally, has been
opportunity; and this, society has denied her, and this has done injustice
not only to her but, still more, to itself.
Infant marriage has been, for many centuries, a crying evil in that land.
This has brought to woman a train of evils which have made deplorable her
condition above all the women of the earth. This custom originated,
probably, from a sense of kindness to the girl herself. It was the
expression of a desire on the part of the parents to insure their
daughter, at an early date, against failure to attain that which all
Hindus regard as the _summum bonum_ of a woman’s life—marriage. But, in
their short-sighted policy, they failed to realize the myriad evils which
would follow this pernicious custom. The girl’s will or desire must not be
regarded as an element in this life compact! And, what is worse still,
these infant compacts are necessarily followed by early consummation,
whereby girls enter, in many cases, upon the duties of motherhood at
twelve years of age. Few, indeed, are permitted to reach full physical
development before they assume the function of child-bearing. This is not
only a serious evil to the woman herself, it also gives poor chance for
the begetting of a healthy progeny and for the early training of the same.
And it is not strange that the woman who thus early enters the sphere of
motherhood should become a worn out old woman at thirty-five or forty
years.
Much effort has been put forth in India, by Westerners especially, to make
infant marriages impossible, or at least unpopular. But, little success
has thus far attended this effort.
A small meed of alleviation was gained with much effort in 1891. It came
through the passing of the “Age of Consent Bill” whereby the age of a
girl’s consent to cohabitation was raised from ten to twelve. To a
Westerner, the blessing acquired by this bill seems in itself a mockery
and only reveals the appalling cruelty of that people to its girls.
It has been found impossible to touch, much less remove, the gross evil of
infant marriage itself, the custom which opens wide the door to other
ghastly evils.
The greatest of these is that of virgin-widowhood. If men will perversely
marry their infant daughters to small boys, it is sure that a considerable
proportion of the boys will die before their marriage is consummated.
Thus, annually, thousands of these poor girls, who are in absolute
ignorance of the situation, are converted into virgin widows whose
condition, upon the death of their husbands, is instantly changed from one
of innocent childhood pleasure into a sad, despised and hated widowhood.
For, the parents of the boy sincerely believe that it is her evil star
which has killed the boy whose destiny was blended with her own. And
henceforth she is regarded, not only by the parents concerned, but by
society in general, as an accursed person, hated for what has happened to
her husband, and also a creature to be shunned. Her presence must not be
allowed on any festive occasion, lest its evil influence bring sorrow and
death to others. Thus a child of four or five years may suddenly have her
prospects blasted, her life embittered and her company shunned by the
whole world, with none to befriend, to cheer or to comfort her. There are
two millions of such sad and injured ones in India today. Their cry goes
up to God and to man in inarticulate appeal for relief and redress against
a social custom and a religious rule which consigns them, in their time of
greatest innocency, to a life which is worse than death itself and which
robs them of the protection, love and sympathy which the whole economy of
heaven and earth should guarantee to them.
Coupled with this terrible fact is the other, that woman _must_ marry in
India _anyhow_. No disgrace and misfortune can befall a woman, according
to Hindu ideas, equal to that of spending her whole life in maidenhood.
This, of course, is connected with the idea that she has no social status
or religious destiny apart from man. Hence it is that a host of loving
parents, who are unable to find a suitable match for their daughters,
rather than leave them unmarried, stupidly join them in wedlock to
_professional_ bridegrooms. There is, in Bengal, today, a division of the
Brahman caste whose men are professional purveyors to this silly but
prevalent superstition. They are prepared to marry any number of girls at
remunerative rates. And thus they acquire a fair income. Each of these men
have scores of such wives and entertains the proud satisfaction,
doubtless, that he is bestowing a favour upon a benighted community by
coupling his name in wedlock with unfortunate girls who otherwise would be
without a name or hope among men! A state of society which renders such a
condition of things possible is not only a disgrace to any community, it
is a monstrous evil against the womanhood of that community. Is it any
wonder, then, that so many of the women of India, under these
circumstances, should commit suicide? Is it strange that a wife, in such a
land, should find it best to obey and submit to the indignities of the
worst kind from her husband? And is it remarkable that the Hindu widow,
rather than endure the neglect, the temptations and the obloquy of her
widowhood, should have preferred to practice Suttee and to end her
miseries upon the funeral pyre of her husband? When we remember that their
system consigns one-fifth of all the women of India—more than 20,000,000
souls—to this despised and ostracized widow class, we realize the depth of
evil which flows from the system.
There is still another cruel injustice inflicted upon the womanhood of
India. Many thousands (there are 12,000 in South India alone) of her
daughters are dedicated in infancy to a life of shame in connection with
temple worship in that land. These women, the so-called “servants of the
gods,” have been mostly dedicated by fond mothers to this wretched life as
a thank offering to the gods for blessings received. This seems very
strange when it is known that all such girls thereby become public
characters. The “Dancing Girl” of India is thus shut up to her evil life
by those who love her most; and her religious profession becomes to her
the highway to perdition and a bitter curse to society. Recent effort has
been made, in Bombay, to save such girls by making it a legal offence to
“marry” them to the gods and thus devoting them to a life of shame. But
this law only refers to the dedication of girls of tender age in Bombay.
It is exceedingly sad that, practically, the whole population is utterly
indifferent to this greatest insult committed against the womanhood of
India and to the coupling of their own religion and their gods with the
ruin of the soul and body of many thousands of the daughters of the land.
It is not remarkable, under these circumstances, that among all the people
of India the birth of a daughter is the most unwelcome of domestic events.
The evils which surely await her, and the greater possibilities of sorrow
and suffering which surround her, the great burden of expense and of
trouble which her training, and especially her marriage, will entail upon
the family—all combine to make her birth a much dreaded event.
The large expense, in the shape of the marriage dowry and the wedding
expenses which have to be incurred among nearly all classes in connection
with the disposal of their daughters, only make this situation the more
emphatic.
The practice of infanticide, so extensively found in India, was the direct
result of this difficulty. For instance, among the noble race of Rajputs
in North India it was found, some years ago, that, in a community of
30,000, there was not a single girl! Every daughter that was born was
killed. The higher the rank of the family the more constant and systematic
was the crime. “Thus, while an unmarried daughter in India is looked upon
as hopelessly disgraced, a son-in-law cannot always be found unless the
father of the girl is prepared to pay highly, and the marriage of a
daughter may mean the ruin of a family. Rather than incur this danger, the
Rajput preferred that his daughter should perish. And though the
government has enacted stringent laws against this custom, it is not
entirely eradicated yet.”(10)
Thus the Hindus have wittingly and unwittingly placed many of the most
serious disabilities of life upon their women. And the greatest evil of it
is that the woman has become so hardened to her lot that, like the
prisoner of Chillon, she has become enamoured of her chains and is most
loathe to part with her bondage.
3. But the dawn of a new day has risen upon India. It is the day of
woman’s emancipation. A new spirit, during the past century, has entered
that land, and the welcome era of brighter blessing, greater appreciation
and larger opportunity for woman has actually begun. One has only to study
the laws which, during the nineteenth century, were enacted in India with
a view to removing the terrible evils and crimes which were committed
under the sanction of Hinduism; and he will find that not a few are
directed towards the amelioration of the condition of woman. Such inhuman
customs as _suttee_, the murder of children, the dedication of girls to
lives of shame—these have been removed in whole or in part; and, by the
“Age of Consent Bill” and other similar half measures, the beginning has
been made in introducing a day of better things for the women.
Many of the efforts of Hindu Social Reformers are directed towards the
removal of some of the disabilities under which woman lives. It is true
that the woman of India cannot expect, for a long time, much help from her
own people. Even the Social Reformers among them are so few in number, are
so half-hearted in their measures, and are so unwilling to deny themselves
in behalf of the cause which they advocate, that little can be expected
from them. And yet, it must be said that in a few matters of importance
Hindu sentiment is slowly moving in the right direction. As a Social
Reformer, the Hindu is a poor success; but he is not a fool; he can see
that the situation, so far as woman is concerned, is becoming increasingly
untenable and flagrantly inconsistent with the growing light of today. The
hope is that he will yield, with increasing readiness, to the pressure
brought to bear upon him by Western sentiment.
The presence of many women of the West in that land has been a standing
rebuke to the Hindu social situation. These women have done not a little
to stir within their Eastern sisters a desire for something better. They
open their eyes to the contrasted conditions of the women of the East and
of the West. When they shall have aroused the women of India to the
desperateness of their condition and to the urgent need of reform and
relief, the battle will be more than half fought and victory will be in
view. For, when the Eastern woman herself will vigorously demand her
emancipation, man will yield it to her. The Dufferin Hospitals are a noble
tribute to the active interest of the good lady whose name they bear; and
the sympathetic endeavour of Lady Curzon for the elevation of India’s
women are but suggestive of considerable work which the fair sex of the
West have rendered and are rendering in behalf of their Indian sisters.
Protestant Christian missions have been pioneers in this great movement
towards the emancipation of the women of India. American and English
women, connected with these missions, have given themselves to the
redemption of their sisters. More than one thousand of these good women
are devoting their lives to the salvation of India through the elevation
of the women of the land. Thousands of schools are conducted by them in
which a host of young girls are receiving that training which Hinduism has
proscribed for many centuries. And through these schools, and by means of
at least two thousand Bible Women, trained by them, they have access into
hundreds of thousands of Hindu homes where they reveal to the women and
girls a broader horizon of life and give a new conception of the
privileges and opportunities which are opening today before them. They are
creating among the women a spirit of unrest which is the dawning of a new
ambition for greater things in life and service. The very presence of
these foreign ladies suggests to their Indian sister a new sphere broader
than the home, and a new opportunity pregnant with rich blessings to the
land.
Under the influence of these missionary efforts and of the less thorough
training given in government schools, Hindus themselves are beginning to
bestir themselves and to establish schools for their daughters; and thus
we trust that coming years will not only witness a change of thought among
Hindus concerning women, but also a new line of indigenous activity for
their elevation.
There is further ground for encouragement; for the Hindu man of culture is
growing increasingly sensitive to the wide gulf which lies between him and
his absolutely untrained wife. He sees that, while the Western woman is
suited in every way to become the companion of, and a helpmeet to, her
husband, his own little wife is fit to be neither. Even when not separated
from him by a disparity of many years in age, he finds that she has
absolutely no interest outside the walls of her home and has not the first
qualification to discuss with him or to help him by advice in any matter
pertaining to his work or profession. So he, under the new light of modern
times, is increasingly ambitious to have a wife of the new training and of
the larger horizon, and is willing to pay a premium for her in marriage.
And this, itself, is beginning to create a market for educated women even
in that stronghold of conservatism, the Brahman caste.
Thus the effort of Christian missions in the development of womanhood is
acting like leaven upon the whole social mass.