All who know the orthodox Hindu Zenana will have pathetic instances in
mind of a loyalty which dignifies all womanhood. Nor often however, I
hope, is loyalty put to such severe test as with the little lady whom I
found imprisoned in a fortress in Northern India.
Her story was interesting--she was the daughter of a King, and educated
beyond ordinary. “She shall be as a son to me,” had said her Father,
and he taught her to read and write and figure, and rumour said that
even the local magazine was edited from behind the Purdah. When she
was of an age to marry, her family Priest went a horoscopical tour to
secure her a husband.
At Benares he met the family Priest of another Raj in search of
a bride, and the two Priests agreed to end their wanderings, and
accommodate each other. But alas! the bride-groom’s priest had not
revealed that his patron was half-witted, nor that the Ministers of the
estate were in negotiation for a lady from among themselves. So, on her
wedding day the Raj candidate learnt both that she was wedded to an
idiot, and that she had a co-wife.
She afterwards said that the first six months of her life were almost
happy, though she did not realize this till the contrast of the
afterwards had come upon her. They killed her babies--as they were
born, they were both boys--one they smothered in tobacco fumes, the
second had less merciful handling. For the birth of the third she
requested protection, taking care to explain that her husband was not
at fault, “God had made him a fool.” She was given a fortress not far
from the Capital, a Guard was put on the gate.... All this happened
nine years before help reached her. In the meantime the Guard had
become her gaoler. Food she had none, save the remnants of stores laid
in nine years previous; servants or companions she had none. For nine
years had she had speech of no one.
Her father had died; all attempts made by her old Mother to get to
her, or to get news of her, had failed. Then, in penitence for making
the marriage, her old family Priest brought me to her. I have never
forgotten what I found at the end of that difficult journey ... a
fortress in ruins, the home of bats, and so unsavoury that the only
clean spot was a small roof-terrace furnished with a string bed and a
broken chair or two. Here lived the Ranee and her son; he was alive and
safe--in this she had her reward; but provisions were reduced to one
earthen pot of grain, and endurance was much strained.
She told me her story, with pitiful entreaties not to hold her husband
to blame; how could the poor creature, God-blasted, be responsible?
The ministers were responsible, who held her liable for the fact
that her co-wife had daughters only, always daughters! Even calling
the last--“_No more of this_ Kalidevi”--had brought no improvement.
Yes, she had seen her husband; once he made his way into the Fortress
through a private gate while out hunting, and he climbed up to the
roof-terrace and sat on the broken bed, and said: “Let me go, lest I
be moved to compassion and help you.” And she had helped him to go
secretly, swiftly, even as he had come.
Poor man, what further proof were needed that he could never be to
blame. “Had not God Himself made him a fool? she blamed him not,” but I
noticed that she devoted herself passionately to providing against like
misfortune for the son. We took her servants and supplies, and later
brought her away in safety to her Mother. The Fool lives. The co-wife
must now be dead, for when last I heard of my Ranee two significant
things were reported of her: one was that she worshipped an empty
earthen pot with the left hand (that was to show contempt), and then,
to protect herself, offered the first mouthful of every meal to an
amulet which hung round her neck. And are not both these things known
to the initiated as referring to ghosts of co-wives alone?
Yet another type is the woman who rules a State, whether in her own
right (as with the Begum of Bhopal), or as widowed regent.
History tells us of one such lady, whose diary of statecraft an emperor
of India was glad to consult. Shrewd, wise, far-seeing, responsible,
the Purdah has hardly been any drawback to the women born with a
talent for ruling, though even for these exists the chief danger of
seclusion, namely, that they may get to view life through the eyes of
one person--their chief adviser.
Where he is unreliable and the woman is weak the danger will be
apparent to all.
It is the chief adviser who rules in reality, manipulating her
revenues, surrounding her with creatures bound to him by ties of
relationship or purchase; as likely as not her spiritual guide is also
of his choosing, and the lady is in a coil from which extrication is
well-nigh impossible. I have seen her struggle to get free, and fall
back again helpless; but most often she is dangerously unconscious of
the subtle influences abroad. Her day is spent grossly, lying on her
elbow among brocaded cushions, chewing betel-nut, while her maidens fan
her, or amuse her with tales of Court rivalries and jealousies. Her
Prime Minister brings her documents to sign, and she hears perhaps an
occasional account of his administration of the estate, but there is no
sense of obligation towards her people; no interest, even parochial,
in their daily life; no thought for their welfare. It is not to the
advantage of the chief adviser to encourage feelings of this kind, and
the woman herself has too little imagination to care about the wants of
subjects whom she never sees.
But all Indian widows do not rule estates. What then of the rest? What
of the ordinary widows, of the highest caste, for instance, the type
of woman who, in the olden days, would have fed the flames of the
funeral-pyre bound to a husband’s corpse? What of her.
For the most part she lives the life of a willing drudge in the house
of her mother-in-law. “For it is so alone now,” as one explained to me,
“that we can win merit for our lords.”
I have never forgotten the agony of this little lady, sent home to her
own mother to live in luxury, robbed of her chance of service.
It is not, I think, untrue to say that the orthodox Hindu widow suffers
her lot with the fierce enjoyment of martyrdom and a very fanaticism
of selflessness. But nothing can minimize the evils of that lot. After
all, a widow is a thing of ill-omen, to be cursed even by those who
love her. That she accepts the fact makes it no less of a hardship.
For some sin committed in a previous birth the Gods have deprived her
of a husband. What is left to her now but to work out his “salvation,”
by her prayers and penances to win him a better life-place in his
next genesis? So even the “cursings” of her are in their way a
satisfaction. They are helping her to pay her debt to Fate.
For the mother-in-law what also is left but the obligation to curse,
exaction of that debt? But for this luckless one her son might still be
in the land of the living.
Now, how shall I make it clear that there is no determined animosity in
this attitude? The person cursing is as much an instrument of Fate as
the person cursed. Are we not all straws blown by the wind of Fate, and
of our own past actions? Little room is there in Hindu ethics for the
sense of personal responsibility for wrong-doing.
Indeed, the widow is often, especially as she gets on in years, and in
the house of her own mother, a person loved in spite of her fatal gifts
of ill-luck. She fills the place of a good home-daughter, is at the
service of everyone, from the eldest to the youngest. Often she is a
devotee, most religious, and greatly supported by the consolations of
her faith. She will herself say on some occasion of rejoicing: “Let me
not be seen, I am luckless.”
And there is certainly no denying that the sum of self-sacrifice which
she represents is, at its best, some solid good to a nation--the salt
leavening the lump. One can imagine how the practice of suttee helped
to maintain this high Hindu ideal of altruism, so comparatively easy
was it to face that one final act of pain and of glory. But in these
days, and under the petty tyranny of a mother-in-law, the altruism of
the little widow is worn threadbare.
It is all very well in theory to assert no personal animosity towards
her whom you hold it a religious privilege to curse, and to burden with
every unpleasant duty imaginable. Your practice is apt to mislead. Even
Hindu widows are but human, and a lifetime of such dissembling of love
must leave them slightly bruised at the foot of the stairs.
Again, with the laxity of modern times and the lapses from orthodoxy,
there comes to the chief sufferer the wonder whether after all she is
dealing vicariously in this spiritual rialto; whether she is buying
gifts for her husband after all. The morbid consciousness that she is a
thing of ill-omen gnaws at her. Admit the doubt and you admit inability
to bear what is put upon her; you admit discontent, consciousness of
hardship, of ill-treatment. Yet all these tyrannies, this very doubt,
has the march of time brought to the Hindu widow. There lies the
tragedy. From whatever cause, she is losing faith in her own sacrifice,
in her old attitude towards life; and therefore is she to be pitied
indeed.
How can we help the fact that the number of women in this class must
increase daily? The age marches forward towards personal and individual
dignity, and the old ideals of the vicarious are being pushed into the
background of the unregenerate.
The majority suffer in silence; some gloriously, some ingloriously and
sadly rebellious. Some fall into the hands of the Widow Re-marriage
Committee, and are re-married. It is not for the onlooker to say
whether this solution is sufficient. A few are now beginning to find
that life has some use for a woman unmarried, even for her. They are
learning to earn their own living and to bless the world with honest
labour. She is buying back the curse, this widow who works, in a way
which must surely conserve for the nation much of that selflessness
which we claimed in the suttee, and certainly much more apparent
usefulness. As doctor, teacher, nurse, and in humbler walks of life,
which of us who know modern India have known and not blessed the
Hindu widow? For the first time, too, since the Vedic era, do we find
in India unmarried girls over ten years of age. This is the nearest
approach to spinsterhood in the East, and the spinster--she is very
rare--is almost always a self-respecting woman earning her own living.
I have said that the impetus of the age is towards individualism. How
can we keep the Hindu woman out of the great current?
The time when the nation could be served by a grovelling womankind--if
ever such time there was--is past.
A woman’s place in the National life will now best be filled by the
realization of herself; she must grow to her full stature, taking
as her due her share of God’s light and air, of the gifts of the
Earth-Mother.
She need lose none of those qualities which made her loved in
mythology, in the times of the Vedas, in history. Indian women have it
within their power to prove to the world that gentle womanly graces
are not incompatible with independence.
What a redemption of that curse of the widowed, what a revenge on Time,
if the widow herself take the foremost place in this regeneration of
Indian womanhood!
XII
GARDEN FANCIES
Everyone in India is familiar with the homely little _Tulsi_--the
sacred basil--with its aromatic brown spirals and dull green leaves. It
was sprawling across the drive of a house I had newly come to tenant,
and while my _Mali_ and I did tidyings in the Garden, I spoke to him
gently about the plant. “Move the sacred garden-person. Suppose some
day we drove over it and hurt it, quite by accident, what sin! See,
put it in a new hole yonder, by your own hut if you wish.” He is a
holy man, my _Mali_, from Puri, where dwells Jagannath of the Car with
his Brother and Sister; and he will not touch the _Tulsi_ till he has
bathed, saving for it his first draught of water of mornings. I could
only hope that my good intentions were credited. But he made no sign
beyond a reverence to the _Tulsi_, and a wagging of his head from side
to side, which I interpreted as “Forgive me” (to the plant), “do I not
eat the Huzoor’s salt? It is an order” (for me).
Notwithstanding, the _Tulsi_ moved not, and frequent reminders at last
elicited a reason. “It would take a ceremony and a very holy man to
transplant the sacred _Tulsi_.”
“Bring him; make the ceremonies,” I entreated, stipulating only that I
should be present.
So, next morning he brought the holy man, and they sat, both of them
on their heels, beside the bush, and read it some sacred texts about
Jagannath and his colleagues; then they explained to it the situation,
my wishes, its own danger ... and with many mutterings of magic words
they carried the plant to the new place.
The rest of the ceremony was fixed for “the hour of union,” and when
all was ready I was duly summoned. Little earthen pots, fed with oil,
in which floated a cotton wick, made great illuminations about the
Mali’s hut.
The _Tulsi_ sat in its hole, and gathered about it in apology and
propitiation were the Mali’s gardening tools; the basket, mouth to
earth, holding a light, a brass plate of sugar biscuits and parched
rice, and a pot of Ganges water.... He made an offering of the tools
and foodstuffs, and last of all of a handful of lovely white lilies.
These he crushed among the brown roots, bruising them, burying
them--who shall say what symbol he had in his mind? then he watered the
plant, muttering, and finally settled once more on his heels and read
it a little pink book of invocations to the God of the Car--read it
from cover to cover--there by the light of the little earthen lamp on
the basket.
When he made himself into a huddled-up pillow before the tree, head
pressed against the newly-raked earth, I knew the ceremony was over.
What was most extraordinary was his utter unselfconsciousness. He
had been pleased that I should come, had begged it; but at his
“God-worship,” my presence was completely forgotten. The ritual was
more than form of game. How cruel to suggest to such as he, then, the
thought in my mind, that the _Tulsi_ probably owed its sacred origin
and place in every Hindu courtyard to its efficacy in keeping away
mosquitos!
I wondered what reason my Purdahnashin would give me for the worship
of the _Tulsi_. I would ask. Curiosity was rewarded with a beautiful
story. Why did she hold the _Tulsi_ holy? It was only because it was
the wife of the Great God. Did I not know the tale? Listen then. Once
upon a time lived a great Giant who had a beautiful wife, and was
successful in conquering and possessing himself of everything he wished.
In his pride of conquest he forgot all limits and claimed the wife of
the Destroyer himself. Then the Great God, angry, came himself to earth
to punish the Giant, and slew that powerful one as he lay beside his
bride in all his security of possession. But when the poor lady walked
forth to make living sacrifice of herself, as was meet, upon the dead
body of her lord--it was the Great God himself who was enamoured of
her, and he sat by the burning corpse disconsolate. None could drag him
back to heaven; nor moved he night and day till the object of his love
had found new form in the sweet-smelling _Tulsi_, with its soft green
leaves and brown flowering spirals, struggling upwards to the light.
“Forget not the perfume of the _Tulsi_. The customs of your race, in
marrying, in dying, in loving....” sang my friend. “It means all that
to us who sprinkle it with water in the morning.”
* * * * *
But in my little garden there was no holy _Tulsi_ to sprinkle with
water in the morning! Transplanting suiteth not the aged: and the
friend of the Garden-people appeared before me sad and shaven.
“My Mother is dead, and at my hands: have I leave to carry her to the
waters of oblivion?”
Leave, of course: but let the blame be rightly fixed; not the
worshipper, but the Huzoor, she who ordered, carried the sin. This
did not satisfy, as I would have wished: and it was not till many
days later that the faithful slave brought me a cleared brow, and his
mountain top of philosophy.
“But to him who does not deem it sin it is not sin.”
Now is that what the sacred plant will now say henceforth and for ever
to my lover of ceremonies in his garden, and am I responsible for the
dangerous doctrine? I wonder.
XIII
A CHILD OR TWO
In an orthodox Hindu house of mine acquaintance are to be found
two darling Babies, aged four and five. They are girls, one named
“Lightning-Beloved,” the other after a Greek Goddess.
I made their acquaintance first in the Summer, and they were most
seasonably dressed in gold waist-bands and an amulet a-piece--for
the Goddess of Learning, a bear’s claw, and for “Lightning-Beloved,”
a little gold box of mystic “spare-me-s” against the blue sword of
her tempestuous Lord.... I was much in request for games, and daily
beguiled into longer and longer visits; how could one resist Babies who
were just being introduced to the joys of childhood? And, when I left
the “Inside,” there would be one Baby on my hip--they taught me that,
and it is quite easy, I assure you--and one clinging to leg and hand
as I walked downstairs.
But joy was at the full when I invited them to come and see me. The
hour fixed was at a distance of a week, and every day I was asked “has
it come?” When it did come I was sitting at my window, and seeing the
Raj carriage and pair, with all its pomp of liveried attendants, dash
up the drive, I smiled to myself, thinking of the semi-nude atoms which
would presently issue thence. Little did I know. The atoms, my very own
Baby friends of the waist-band and necklet, were translated. At the
door, hand in hand and very shy, stood two of the quaintest oddities
I have ever seen--_my_ Babies, sure enough, but dressed as English
widows, crêpe veil and all, with long false curls of rusty black hair
adown their poor little black-gowned backs. Oh! but how I laughed! And
they stood by, rueful and disappointed, while I stripped them, even to
their natural clothing.
“Then the Miss Sahib loved not the English clothes; nor” (with a gasp
of wonder) “the hair of another.”
“_No! No!_”
And two pairs of brows knit themselves in solemn puzzlement over this
contrariety. Then, “But the Miss Sahib said she loved the children
people of the English.”
“Yes! what then?” (but I had guessed). “We want the Miss Sahib to
love us.” ... The darlings! Then it was all made clear, helped out by
the _Amla_. They had, even as they said, laid their little plot to
win love. They would dress like the children-people of the English.
But how to compass this! Their Mother undertook to arrange; and a
clever _Amla_ went to a second-hand clothes shop near by, which often
supplied Theatrical Companies. “No! they had no dress of the English
children-people; but stay--an English Mem-Sahib had sold them a dress
not long since. They could make two small copies of this.” And the
Babies were reproduced in the sad image of some English widow (curls
and all), who had evidently fallen on evil days or the brighter days of
second marriage, and got rid of her panoply of mourning.
I think my Goddess of Learning and “Lightning-Beloved” know by now that
these foreign arts are unnecessary in the way of love. I have had no
widow repeats, but in my heart I hide the realization of a pathos and
charm hitherto unsuspected in the consciousness of Babydom.
It was in connection with “Lightning-Beloved,” whose Mother was seeking
a husband for her four-year-old, that I came across the “orphanless
child,” as he was described in a petition. She explained to me that
as she was sonless, “Lightning-Beloved” must be married quickly to
someone without fortune or family, though of the right caste. He would
then be even as her son, and be supported by her in return for the
honour of an alliance. This extraordinary position, “domesticated
son-in-law,” as it is called, has been accepted even by adults, and is
very familiar in Bengal. I know of one instance where a man waited to
propose to the lady of his choice (it was a reformed Hindu family),
till he could prove himself capable of supporting her, only to discover
that a younger and rather lazy brother had forestalled him by accepting
the position of the “domesticated.” However, it was useless arguing
the indignity of dependence with “Lightning-Beloved’s” mother, and
one’s only chance lay in expounding Sanskrit scripture as to the
possibility of waiting for marriage till a later age. Unfortunately, it
is a question of Priest-gifts desired at this particular moment, and
counter-texts are produced for my consideration, proving that delay
means risk of a first-class heaven; so that nothing but the woman’s
faith in my assurance that I will use my influence with the spiritual
Powers to secure her the coveted position, nevertheless, saves the
situation.
For the Goddess of Learning is desired an adopted son, heir to a Raj. I
am pleased with this choice, the boy has a face like Rossetti’s Blessed
Damozel, and a charming disposition; and we have just been in time to
save a threatened repudiation of him by his adoptive Mother. It would
have been a dreadful thing, for having by adoption lost for ever all
spiritual rights in his natural family, he would, on repudiation of
adoption, be left without ancestors for whom to pray; and this, for a
Hindu, is terrible indeed.
A new little settler has lately sought the shelter of this Raj, a
six-year-old Baby in self-protective exile from her own Estate.
Under local law she succeeds as the only unmarried “female” to
a considerable inheritance, and as a consequence all around her,
grandmothers and sisters included, are interested in her death. They
have been drugging her, and she has been brought into headquarters
under Police guard. I found her in a wretched house set down in a
swamp, and furnished with a hard plank-bed and a box. “Lotus-born,”
that is her name, is a miserable shrimp of a Baby, arms like sticks,
and a plaintive long-suffering little face, like a cry for help
sounding in my ears to this day. She was very ill indeed, burning with
malarial fever, and aching, she said, in every limb. She lay on the
hard “_takht-posh_,” and beside her sat her nurse, another baby, eight
years old. She sat like a frog, legs crunched up, and her nursing
consisted in giving the sufferer a loving pinch every now and then,
murmuring, “There! that makes it better.” And the six-year-old, in a
monotonous little voice which struggled after cheeriness, would answer,
“Yes! Oh! yes.”
I found that the Nurse had tied herself to “Lotus-born” in friendship
by a ceremony peculiar to this part of the country. Two tanks are
dug, contiguous, and the children make a play with fishes and boats,
floating them in the water, and offering rice and feastings on the
grass. Quaint songs are sung.
“Who is worshipping the water with garlands of flowers while the sun is
overhead?”
“It is I, chaste and virtuous, lucky sister of a Brother. May I have
sons who will not die.”
But “Lotus-born” lived not long enough to find fulfilment of her
prayer. Better nursing came too late, and the petals of the Lotus
curled together in eternal sleep.
* * * * *
The mother of “Lightning-Beloved” is in great spirits this morning. The
son-in-law elect was ill, and I had pointed the moral about letting
children get past baby troubles before you betroth them; it is so one
lessens the risk of widowhood.
“Well! at any rate,” she said, “you should be pleased with me. Your
‘Lightning-Beloved’ is not yet a widow. I saved her from being _born_ a
widow.”
This was startling, but I waited explanation.
“When ‘Lightning-Beloved’ was on the way to life,” she said, “there
came a Guru from a far country who told my Guru of a game the women
play there. Two women who are friends, and are about at the same time
to be dowered with the life-gift, betroth two balls of flowers. If both
children are of the same sex there is no result of the ceremony, but if
of opposite sexes and one die the other is a widow.... She may even be
_born_ a widow.”
“But you would not hold to that?”
“Where it is the custom who can escape? Yet ‘Lightning-Beloved’ was not
born a widow; for this I should have praise from the Miss Sahib.”
“But it is not your custom.”
“What matter? I should have praise. She is not a widow!”
* * * * *