invented primarily for their benefit, for though a man might marry
beneath him, no woman was allowed like liberty. The natural result of
this arrangement was that there were too few men to go round in the
higher castes; and in a scheme of life and after life which has no
room or use for spinsters, the only resource was to marry them off as
quickly as possible, whence, in the opinion of some, infant marriage,
though the instinct of self-preservation against Mahommedan raids must
have done something.
Of course, no woman realizes this, and the reason she will give you for
Baby marriages is that a Father’s class of Heaven depends on the age
at which his daughter was married. If she is settled between three and
five he goes to a first-class heaven, if between five and eight to a
second class, eight and eleven to a third class--after that to hells,
only to hells! For herself she is content with the most detailed and
minute table of procedure, nor questions how it was made. She knows far
better than any man the difference between +A and -A. She will tell you
also quaint exceptions to the God-rules. “You may stand by So-and-so
when she is cooking a dish of green (but not red) pulse, and never
_never_ when she is cooking rice. It would all have to be thrown away,
it and the vessels, even if the shadow of a shadow fell across it.” In
South India I have heard tell of a caste of Brahmins so strict that no
lower caste may come within thirty yards of its elect; and when the
high-caste woman walks abroad, she has a fore-runner clearing the way
before her face.
Again, with some castes not only must you, being alien or of a lower
caste, not touch their water or water vessels, but you must not enter
the room which holds the drinking-water. If you do, the water is
defiled. They have too good manners to tell you this. It may be their
last drop of water in a drought, nevertheless, when you have gone
away, the water is faithfully rejected. Nor, again, may they drink
water even at the hands of the elect if the alien or outer-brother is
in the room.
Different civilizations, different notions of cleanliness. The point
seems to be to learn each other’s aversions and respect them. The
Hindu is horrified at the use of tooth-brushes. “What! use the same
brush twice?” She herself uses a twig of the _Neem_ tree, no fatter
than her own smallest finger, and of course there is a fresh twig for
each using. Again, at the use of tubs, “You go dirty into the water
from which you expect to come out clean,” she exclaims. You refer
gently to the bathing in the Ganges. “Ah, but that is different,” she
will answer, “that is holy water, however apparently impure, however
apparently contaminated, it is holy.” Her reasoning explains what
hitherto puzzled me--how little particular the Hindu is about the
intrinsic cleanliness of water, despite her belief in sacred streams.
The Founders of the religion, knowing the value of water in a hot
country, called it sacred, no doubt in order to keep it clean. Their
thought was, “It is sacred, do not defile it.” The modern Hindu says,
“It is sacred--even the thing that most defiles, cannot defile it.”
The same Hindu who will bathe before touching the sacred basil, will
be absolutely indifferent as to the water in which she bathes. If it
is a sacred river, a sacred tank, it may be thick as pea soup with
impurities. That is no matter.... Again, another incongruity. The
eating of the flesh of the cow revolts a Hindu--you do not realize how
strongly till it is something other than yourself--as a dog, suspected
of a meat diet, who sniffs at them; and yet the sacrifice of goats at
Kalighat, for instance, cannot be seen unmoved by the most inveterate
eater of flesh.
The fact is, that with the Hindu the root of all aversion is
traditional religion, and this it is which overlays the ordinary
aversions of instinct or culture. At the present day purely arbitrary,
too, seems the table of clean and unclean, though, as in all religions,
no doubt it had its one-time significance. In an agricultural country
the cow was a useful animal. If you wished preservation, the only way
was to declare it sacred. The religious sanction appeals most strongly
to peoples in their infancy, and in India we find a nation which
still keeps its nursery rules, so to speak.... And, as is proper, the
women know far more about these rules than do the men. A Hindu will
often say, appealed to on this point or that of religious custom or
religion: “I do not know, but information may be had in _the Inside_.”
One such Inside produced the fact that the sanctity peculiar to the
Ganges applies to one town at least, to Puri by the Sea. As the Ganges
receives all castes--in death, so does Puri--in life.
Here such holiness does the very fact of residence give, that it
over-rides distinctions. A Brahmin would eat at the hand of a sweeper
in Puri, would eat and keep his caste. In theory, of course, a man
should eat at the hand of a sweeper anywhere, a sweeper, say, turned
_Sanyasi_ (a world-renouncer or holy man); but my same information
adds as rider that no Sweeper, even in Puri, would dream of thrusting
himself on a Brahmin.
I referred the point to my Wisest of the Wise. “It is true,” she said,
“and only the holiest Brahmin, he who has got so far past the trammels
of his body as not, say, to be conscious of even heat or cold--for
caste is only a distinction of this body--only such a man would say
to the Sweeper, ‘Come, friend, the God in you and the God in me is
one: let me eat at your hands,’--and such an one could take no sin
eating with the Sweeper. But as long as you are conscious of repulsion,
aversion, there is sin in disregarding it--sin which will affect the
after-genesis, which will annul a life-time of merit.”
This same penalty, loss of caste, is the reason for what has been
called in official documents “enforced widowhood.” The Priests attached
excommunication to re-marriage. And since, as we have seen, things
social and things religious overlap in Hinduism, the Priests had the
opportunity of banning in both ways. No more invitations to caste
dinners, as well as no more visits to the Temple, to sacred Tanks
and Wells and Bathing Ghats, for the excommunicated. Few women and
fewer men will face excommunication of this type, and one reads with
amusement of the ardent reformer who, before proposing marriage to a
charming widow of his acquaintance, wrote a hundred notes to friends
and acquaintances, “Will you dine with me if I marry So-and-so?” There
were not fifty righteous found willing, even on paper! But in truth
the number of those who wish or would countenance re-marriage is very
small. The feeling of the orthodox about marriage is this: It is a
Gift--the gift by a Parent of a daughter to a husband. The Gift must
be a _first_ Gift, no one must have had earlier use of it, no one must
even have had earlier chance of longing for it. You must be certain
the possession is your very own--wherefore the giving in infancy.
Wherefore again, even if you died after mere symbolic and before actual
possession of your gift, the Gift was nevertheless yours.... Infant
widowhood. How can it be given again--that Gift? If it would be sin in
infancy, it would be worse sin later on. And the woman’s reasoning is
of the same class. The best believe in the sacrament of marriage: they
worship their husbands as the life-force: for his using or abusing,
his pleasure or neglect they exist. He being gone, what is there? In
the old days there was suttee, and who shall say but that the moral
strength it represented did not make for something in the national
consciousness? No one ever enforced widowhood. No one enforced suttee:
no one to-day can really restrain suttee. One old test was putting
your smallest finger into the fire and burning it to the bone: if you
could stand that, unflinching, you were worthy to be suttee. Another
was stirring boiling hot rice with your bare hand. I know a woman whose
proudest memory is that some Great-Aunt or Grandmother stood the test.
Of course misuse of the practice crept in. Some women became suttee
because it was expected of them. What tragedies there must have been!
How the other women must have whispered: “Will she be suttee? Oh! will
she?” or, “She surely will be suttee!” And in each case it would have
determined the undetermined. Again, one can imagine the woman who
did not love suffering suttee in expiation, or in terror at her own
gladness of release; or she who was not loved enough seeking it in
pride or hunger of heart. Oh! the tragedies in that handful of ashes on
the suttee stone. Then, again, there would be the Priest-made suttees,
an increasing number as the years carried life further and further
from the original ideal.
But, as I said above, the real suttee was never compelled, nor is she
now. Only this morning I have heard of a woman, within a four-mile
radius of where I sit writing, who soaked her _sari_ in oil, and
falling upon her dead husband’s body set fire to herself; and of
another just saved from a like attempt. Who could prevent them? Now and
again, as lately in the Punjab or Gaya, cases are brought to light, and
convictions point anew to the law; but Police administration Reports do
not represent the tale of suttees in any one Province.
The class of woman who for the kingdom of Heaven’s sake became suttee
before the Act of 1829, still is suttee, either actually in the
old-time way, though by stealth and unnerved by the admiration of the
onlooker, or in the life of religion and unselfishness. We have all
known at least one such Saint living between her house of Gods and the
cares of other people, a burden-bearer who bears without railing, nay
often with cheerfulness, and who has learnt to live without any hope,
save for him with whom she was forbidden to die. Perhaps the living
sacrifice began when she was but twelve years of age ... perhaps she
lived to seven times twelve.... “What did you do?” I asked of one such,
“in the long ago when life pulsed in your veins?” She smiled at me
the smile of her who has attained. “There were the children of other
people who needed love; there is always my house of Gods.... I am a
_Swami-bakht_ (worshipper of my husband).”
She to whom I refer was loved and honoured, the high priestess, so to
speak, of her family. “She was too holy for life’s commonplace, so the
Destroyer set her free to pray,” as said her Father. Yet, she also was
accursed, a thing of ill-omen, not to be seen on occasions auspicious,
barred then, even from the Temple. If aught went wrong in the house,
even her staunchest friend would say: “I must have looked at your face
this morning, _Didi_.” And, to be the bringer of bad luck, that must be
the hard part of the lot of these women. That they keep their faces to
the Light, in spite of this, seems to me the very crown of Sainthood.
I have spoken of one type of widow, the rarest; some there are who
identify themselves with the thing accursed, who have not the strength,
like that other, to falsify the curse by every moment’s life of blessed
service, many who accept misery as their portion; some who distract
themselves from misery by vice or by lapses from virtue.... The odd
thing is that modern Hinduism, as represented by the Priesthood, would
wink at the last-named, while excommunicating the virtuous widow
who re-married. I said “the odd thing,” but wrongly, for of course,
if my earlier conclusion be true, and modern Hinduism is a system
of canonical “Thou-shalt-nots” and not of refined ethics (as in the
_Shasthras_), the Priests are quite consistent.
“You shall be outcast. I will not dine with you.”
It is but another anomaly in this land of anomalies that _that_ should
be the strongest possible sanction in a community where there is no
social intercourse in the Western sense, where individual families live
so entirely aloof, that their womenkind do not visit each other.
But the fact is, there is nothing more unassailable than caste. In the
second century before Christ Buddha strove to break it down--Gautama
Buddha, who was so reverenced by the Hindu that he is considered an
incarnation of Krishna.... Yet, to-day, in Buddha Gaya, the preacher
of the brotherhood of man sits in the beautiful old Temple, to which
Hindu and Buddhist alike come on pilgrimage, with a caste mark on his
forehead! And under the very shadow of the image the Brahmin will throw
away the food or water defiled by contact with the outer-brother.
We see men travelling by the same train (and of course this and all
the other cohesive tendencies always being quoted to us do effect
something), and we think this represents a breaking down of barriers.
Does it, of the real barrier? Listen to the Water-Carriers on the
platform: “Water, water for the Mahommedan”; “Water for the Hindu”;
“Water for _the Brahmin_.” The Brahmin may “water” any caste, the
highest may stoop to serve the lowest; but the highest may not accept
service of any but the highest.
To my mind this caste problem is one which will need grapplement before
any single other object or aim or ambition can be made national,
representative. There is neither speech nor language in orthodoxy, yet
its voice is heard by those who live among the masses away from the
Anglification of the great cities; and it is a voice that asserts,
that none dream of disobeying. It is a voice that curses; men fear
to disobey, even when they writhe under the curse. And all the full
ecstatic organ stop of the handful of vociferating Reformers in the
Metropolis would not drown one silent syllable of its perpetual
invocation!
One word more. I have called this study _the Nasal test_. We all know
what happens when a Hindu wife lapses from rectitude. There is no
scene in a law Court, but she goes through life self-betrayed; she has
lost the tip of her nose. The pain of the punishment is obviously its
publicity; but it would be interesting to know whether in origin it had
any connection with caste. Is it possible that the mutilated nose was
but symbolical of the husband’s right to excommunicate? “For this sin
you are to me outcast. I know no greater punishment. Reap even as you
have sown!”
IX
THE MOTHERS OF FIGHTERS
Rugged hills, all stone and cactus bush, and brown-white dust and
grass the colour of dust; and, from the desert beyond the hills, hot
dry winds smiting the face.... Such is the country which breeds the
warrior caste--grim and gaunt and attractive. Nothing of softness in
man and soil, even the very fold of the hills where elsewhere in the
smiling uplands of the Deccan or the rhododendron-clad Himalayas, or
the jungle-veiled hills of Central India, you expect a handful at least
of grass, green and succulent for the sheepfolk: even this here breeds
stones to hurl at the invader when other missiles fail. The Rajput
hill-giant opens his mailed fist and shows you David’s weapons.
“Nothing of softness in man or soil.” And yet once you are inside those
hill-fortresses the grimness relaxes--you get the very romance of
beauty--lace work in marble, water palaces and walled gardens. Thus
at Oodeypore, at the foot of that wonderful rock-hung fortress of the
King who was saved by his Nurse, is the _Suggun Niwas_, sitting like
a lotus flower on its broad green leaf--a series of marble lattices
and balconies and exquisite turrets, built round the quiet peace of a
water garden of fruit trees, gorgeous study in orange and green, or the
_potpourri_ of the flower garden of my Lady Rosebody. Or there again,
is the Queen of Cities, the Universal Mother standing to greet you at
the mouth of a great mountain gorge. The road winds higher and higher,
the gates of the outer world close upon you; you are at home here in
the peace place of “the heart’s true ease,” beside the lake of pink
mimosa and sweet-scented thyme....
You walk in the dead cities--the walls have outlived the rivalry of
Kings--the white palaces glitter on the hill tops, and the priceless
mosaics still hide in the niches.... The fierce upstanding men of the
divided beard, their swords girt upon their loins, are fighters still.
You know that when you meet them in the Cities of the Living, they
have not lost their cult of the sword, their love for the soil, these
earth-born. But, what of the women? The gardens are deserted and the
baths and robing-rooms, the summer palaces, and the sandal-wood halls
of pleasure, and all the dainty or thoughtful arrangements which prove
the Rajputni an individual in the eye of her lord--all deserted....
Here, when the King held his moonlight Durbar on the roof of the
palace, she had hidden to watch the pomp and circumstance of feudalism,
the glitter of jewelled daggers, the soft richness of brocade, or the
sheen of those richer garments of light ... and the Lake lay peaceful
at her feet, and the twin fortresses frowned watch and ward.... Here
she was suttee when her Lord died fighting at the Gate; here she led
his armies to victory; here she drank smiling, the poisoned cup, which
was to save the honour of a line of Kings....
Down this dusty road, between the high walled mountains, she walked
in the procession of women, all garlanded with roses and jasmine, to
make oblation before the Goddess of Children. Or, now again it is “the
Festival of Flowers” itself; the grain has sprouted and the women go
with singing and dancing to bathe in the sacred Lake before they carry
to their lords the green sprig which, worn in the turban, is sign of
love and unity. It is the Women’s Festival. No man may take part in
it; but the grim men of the grim mountains, with love and reverence at
their hearts, stand at the salute--a guard of honour for the women as
they pass.
Or now she is in trouble--her lord is at the wars, and her little ones
are defenceless in the Fortress which overlooks the desert ... what
shall she do? She sends her bracelet, and a strand of silk, a circlet
of gold--it is but a symbol, to him whom hereby she calls her Brother,
“Bracelet-bound-Brother”--and hereafter her soul knows no fear.
And he? the Brother--whose but hers is his devotion, his life; and he
gives both willingly, albeit knowing he may never even see the face of
her he serves. Not the crassest mind would attach the smallest scandal
to the relationship.... And perhaps selflessness in love, the love of a
man, has seldom in India reached a higher level.... And that brings me
to a reminiscence.
It was a hot day in an extra oppressive June, and I was making my way
through the Bazaar of a Raj Town--to the rabbit warren where burrowed
the workers in enamel. The Bazaar itself was full of interest--open-air
booths, gay with glass bangles and draperies; quaint ox-carts, tied up
in gorgeous red “lampshades” to shelter the bargaining Purdahnashin;
wedding processions; priests with begging bowls, and pontifical bulls,
small and white and saucy, moving from grain stall to vegetables,
exacting toll at will.... But my Master-worker had more still to chain
me. The artists sat on the roof, dreaming their colour dreams. They
told me they worked on the roof because in a busy town you cannot get
near enough to the Earth-Mother; and you are reduced to lessening the
distance between you and the sky. “What would you?--something living
must watch a man at work--if he wants perfection.”
They sat before queer little tables; some beat out on the rich gold
trinket the pattern which was to hold the colour--mixed to some secret
prescription, old as the City, of precious stones ground fine as
powder; others painted--their pallet, slabs of brass with five finger
marks for hollow; their brush, steel needles. All the light and colour
in the sky seemed entrapped in that workshop. And now, suddenly the
light has gone, and the workmen grope after their tools and pack them
away; and the roof is left to the women and me.
They were telling me a story--the old-time one of that Queen who full
of grief at her lord’s cowardice in refusing to stand by his overlord,
had buried herself alive under a sour plum-tree, which ever after grew
and flourished exceedingly in appraisement of her deed. “Tchut”! said
one: “Bury herself--what work! Better far have girt his sword upon that
not-man, and sent him forth in the name of his Fathers, and of all the
fighters yet unborn.”... And all the other women wagged their heads in
appreciation of this sentiment.
Now I had heard that story last in Bengal. But far other was the
comment. The Bengal variant tells of the clever subtlety with which the
husband avoided the battle, and how it was only the wife’s action which
betrayed him to the overlord, who said, “Because this woman had shame
in her heart for a man’s cowardice, the women of this house shall for
ever be called ‘Queens,’ but their husbands shall not be Kings.”
And when they get as far as that, the women say: “What! can any desire
widowhood? Alas, what little love the Ranee had, not to rejoice that
her lord was saved the danger of death! Alas! what defect in love to
cast blame upon him in dying!”
But it is never in Bengal that the story is followed by another old
as the Sack of Chittore. The Rajput widow is about to spring into
the flames when she sees the boy who saw her husband die. She pauses
awhile, and “Oh Badal,” says she, “tell me ere I go hence to join my
lord--tell me how he bore himself against his enemy.” And Badal: “He
was the reaper of the harvest of battle. I followed his steps as the
humble gleaner of his sword, on the bed of honour he spread a carpet
of the slain--a barbarian Prince his pillow, he laid him down: and he
sleeps ringed about by his foes.”
Hearing which she of the warrior caste, goes smiling through the fire
to her tryst.
The fact is, you see, the ideals of the women are not the same.
Both have given to the world, do give to the world, new types of
perfection in love; but to one, love means the service of the world,
and compulsion of the highest in her Beloved to that end; to the other
it means just the service of her lord, it means self-abnegation and
worship to the exclusion of all criticism.
She of Rajputana although giving royally, demands something, and gets
it: she of Bengal demands nothing, she is here to give, not to get; and
if by chance she is thrown a crumb, she is grateful to pathos.
The one type, if I may so put it, is masculine, the other the
quintessence of femininity ... and it is a difference easily explained.
It is the outcome of the history of the two peoples. The Fighter
demands that his womenkind should be of the stature of the Mothers
of Fighters. So to the beauty of subjection, she adds the beauty of
self-respect. In the other, self is so submerged that there is no room
even for respect of self. And, the sainthood of the women apart, one
questions the wisdom of the second type, for the man.
The _Khettrya_ Rajputni of to-day though very strictly Purdahnashin is
still _an individual_: still does she claim and keep the spirit which
is hers by inheritance. The festival and practice of the Bracelet has
its place in her life even now, though the fighting days are over ...
still is hers the reverence of the Flower Festival. But the custom of
the Mahommedan has affected her also: she lives much in the Zenana,
attending to her gods, her house, and children.
The _Shudra_, who has no purdah, and the _Veishya_, whose purdah
means two veils and a number of women attendants, may be seen in the
street: and, as we look at her in her pretty red draperies, carrying so
gracefully her pyramid of water-pots, or trudging sturdily through the
burning dust to the shrine beside the Lake--we see in level brow, in
frank open countenance and carriage, the spirit of the free--and we say
to ourselves, “No! the personality of the Rajputni is not dead, it is
only domesticated.”
But we carry our questionings no further: “By God, I am a Rajput and a
King. I do not talk of the life behind the curtain!”
X
THE QUEEN WHO STOOD ERECT
It was a spacious roof-terrace--large even for the house of a King:
for an earthquake had destroyed almost an entire story, and no one had
troubled to do more through the years that followed than move away the
_débris_.