suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences of a
well-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places in India.
The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last been exterminated,
but the English Government has not yet been able to end the activities
of those who regard the plunder of the public as their immemorial
right. In Delhi a friend of mine told me that the watchmen are known
to be of the robber class. "You hire one of them to watch your house
at night, and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that
mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left his
shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection enough, as the
robbers would see that I had paid the proper blackmail by hiring one
of their number as chowkidar."
In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element carrying
things with a much higher hand. "There's where they live," Dr. J. P.
Jones, the well-known writer on Indian affairs, said to me as we were
coming home one nightfall, "and the people of Madura pay them a
tribute amounting to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of
their own whom they always consult before making a raid. If he
signifies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise,
not--though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with the
verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the great
majority of cases."
India's most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping down roots
from a score or a hundred limbs; these roots fasten themselves in the
earth and later become parent trees for other multiplying limbs and
roots, until the whole earth is covered. In much the same fashion the
Indian caste system has {232} developed. Instead of the four original
castes there are now more than five hundred times that number, and the
system now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what social
station the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to the grave
(or from the time the conch shell announces the birth of a man-child
till the funeral pyre consumes his body, to use Indian terminology),
but also decrees almost as irrevocably what business he may or may not
follow. A little American girl of my acquaintance once announced that
she hadn't decided whether she would be a trained nurse, a
chorus-girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any such
embarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or a thief is
largely decided for him before he knows his own name.
"But isn't the system weakening now?" the reader asks, as I have also
asked in almost every quarter of India. The general testimony seems to
be that it is weakening, and yet in no very rapid manner. Eventually,
no doubt, it will die, but it will die hard. A few weeks ago, a
Parliament of Religions was held in connection with the Allabahad
Exposition, with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as the
presiding officer. In the course of his "Presidential Address" the
Maharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system, resorting in
part to so specious an argument as the following:
"If education means the drawing forth of the potentialities of a boy
and fitting him for taking his ordained place as a member of society,
then the caste system has hitherto done this work in a way which no
other plan yet contrived has ever done. The mere teaching of a youth
a smattering of the three R's and nothing else in a primary school
is little else than a mere mockery. Under the caste system the boys
are initiated and educated almost from infancy into the family
industry, trade, profession, or handicraft, and become adepts in
their various lines of life almost before they know it. This unique
system of education is one of the blessings of our caste
arrangement. We know that a horse commands a high price in the
market if it has a long pedigree behind it. It is not unreasonable
to presume that a carpenter whose forefathers have followed the same
trade for centuries will be a better carpenter than one who is new
to the trade--all other advantages being equal."
{233}
In the phrase, "his ordained place as a member of society," we have
the keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole caste system rests.
It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to have the people believe that his
sons were "ordained" of Heaven to be rulers, even if "not fit to stop
a gully with," and the Sudra's sons "ordained" to be servants, no
matter what their qualities of mind and soul. But the caste system is
rotting down in other places and some time or other this "ordained"
theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric will totter to the
ruin it has long and richly merited.
The introduction of railways has proved one of the great enemies of
caste. Men of different rank who formerly would not have rubbed elbows
under any considerations sit side by side in the railway cars--and
they prefer to do it rather than travel a week by bullock-cart to
reach a place which is but a few hours by train. Consequently the
priests have had to wink at "breaking caste" in this way, just as they
had to get around the use of waterworks in Calcutta. According to the
strict letter of the law a Hindu may not drink water which has been
handled by a man of lower caste (in Muttra I have seen Brahmins hired
to give water to passersby), but the priests decided that the payment
of water-rates might be regarded as atonement for the possible
defilement, and consequently Hindus now have the advantages of the
city water supply.
Foreign travel has also jarred the caste system rather severely. The
Hindu statutes strictly forbid a man from leaving the boundaries of
India, but the folk have progressed from technical evasion of the law
to open violation of its provisions. In Jeypore I saw the half-acre of
trunks and chests which the Maharaja of that province used for
transporting his goods and chattels when he went to attend the
coronation of the King of England. The Maharaja is a Hindu of the
Hindus, claims descent from one of the high and mighty gods, and when
he was named to go to London, straightway declared that the {234}
caste law against leaving India stood hopelessly in the way. Finally,
however, he was convinced that by taking all his household with him,
his servants, his priests, material for setting up a Hindu temple, a
six-months' supply of Ganges water, etc., he might take enough of
India with him to make the trip in safety, and he went. Now many are
going without any such precautions, and a moderate fee paid to the
priests usually enables them to resume caste relations upon their
return.
Sometimes, however, the penalties are heavier. A Hindu merchant of
Amritsar, who grew very friendly with a Delhi friend of mine on a
voyage from Europe, said just before reaching Bombay: "Well, I shall
have to pay for all this when I get home, and I shall be lucky if I
get off without making a pilgrimage to all the twelve sacred places of
our religion. And in any case I shall never let my wife know that I
have broken caste by eating with foreigners." My impression is,
however, that only in a very few cases now is the crime of foreign
travel punished so severely. In Madras I met one of the most eminent
Hindu leaders, Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer. "Caste has kept me from going
abroad until now," he told me, "but I have made up my mind to let it
interfere no longer. Just as soon as business permits, I shall go to
Europe and possibly to America."
Christianity is another mightily effective foe of Caste. As in the
olden days, it exalts the lowly and humbles the proud. In Muttra I
found a converted high-caste Brahmin acting as sexton of a Christian
church whose members are sweepers--outcast folk whom as a Hindu he
would have scorned to touch. On the other hand, the acceptance of
Christianity frees a man from the restrictions imposed upon a low
caste, even though it does not give him the privileges of a higher
caste and thus often wins for the Christianized Hindu higher regard
from all classes. Thus there was in Moradabadad some years ago the son
of a poor sweeper who became a Christian, and was a youth of such fine
promise that a way was {235} found for him to attend Oxford
University. Returning, he became a teacher in Moradabadad Mission
School and won such golden opinions from his townspeople that when he
died the whole city--Hindus, Mohammedans and Christians alike--stopped
for his funeral.
In its present elaborate form the caste system is undoubtedly doomed.
It is too purely artificial to endure after the people acquire even a
modicum of education. Perhaps it was planned originally as a means of
preserving the racial integrity and political superiority of the Aryan
invaders, but for unnumbered centuries it has been simply a gigantic
engine of oppression and social injustice. At the present time no
blood or social difference separates the great majority of castes from
the others: each race is divided into hundreds of castes; and so high
an authority as Mr. Krishnaswami Iyer assured me that even in the
beginning all the castes save the Sudras were of the same race and
blood.
If the purpose of caste, however, be in part to prevent the
intermarriage of radically different races, this may be accomplished,
as it is accomplished in our own Southern States, without restricting
the right of the individual to engage in any line of work for which he
is fitted or to go as high in that work as his ability warrants.
Booker Washington, born in the South's lowest ranks, becomes a
world-figure; had he been born in India's lowest caste, he would have
remained a burner of dead bodies. To compare the South's effort to
preserve race integrity with India's Juggernaut of caste is absurd.
Bombay, India.
{236}
XXIV
THE PLIGHT OF THE HINDU WOMAN
In India marriage is as inevitable as death, as Herbert Compton
remarks. There are no bachelors or old maids. Children in their
cradles are not infrequently given in marriage by their parents; they
are sometimes promised in marriage (contingent upon sex) before they
are born.
"You are married, of course?" the zenana women will ask when an
American Bible-woman calls on them; and, if the answer is in the
negative, "Why not? Couldn't they get anybody to have you?"
"Every girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow," is an
Indian saying almost unexceptionally true. And the lot of woman is
hard if she be a wife; it is immeasurably harder if she be a widow.
Hinduism enslaves a majority of the men within its reach; of the women
within its reach it enslaves all.
I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of a
civilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept this
standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom.
In the great temple at Madura are statues of "The Jealous Husband" who
always carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; and
the attitude of the man in the case is the attitude of Hinduism as a
system. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that
woman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "Dharma
Sastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: "It is the nature
of woman in this world to cause men to sin. A female is able to draw
from the right path, not a fool {237} only, but even a sage." And the
"Code of Hindu Laws," drawn up by order of the Indian Government for
the guidance of judges, declares:
"A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in
subjection that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions.
If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung
from a superior caste, she will behave amiss. A woman is not to be
relied on."
"Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman,
without doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar."
In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman has been
divided into "the three subjections." In childhood she must be subject
to her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sons
or--most miserable of all!--lacking a son, to her husband's kinsmen.
Her husband is supposed to stand to her almost in the relation of a
god. "No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands,"
says Manu, "no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife
honors her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven." And a recent
Hindu writer says, "To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas (the
Hindu scriptures). To worship the husband is to worship the gods."
Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are doubly hard on the
women. The women may no more rise above their caste than the male
members of the family; and they are predestined to take up life's most
serious duties before their fleeting childhood has spent itself. No
wonder they look old before they are thirty!
If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, a trip
through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. A law enacted
by the British Government a few years ago decrees that while the
marriage ceremonies may be performed at any age, the girl shall not go
to her husband as his wife until she is twelve years old; but it is
doubtful if even this mild measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I
attended an elaborate {238} and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was
told that the bride was "eleven or twelve" and would go to her
husband's home (he lives with his father, of course) the following
week. My travelling servant told me that he was married when he was
sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years longer with
her parents before coming to him. The first American lady I met in
India was telling of a wedding she had recently attended, the bride
being a girl of eleven and the groom a year or two older. In
Secunderabad a friend of mine found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who
had been given in marriage, and in the house where he visited was a
ten-year-old girl who had been married two years before to a man of
thirty.
In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls Manu
named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maximum. The father who
delays finding a husband for his daughter until after she is twelve is
regarded as having committed a crime--though it must always be
remembered that girls and boys in India mature a year or two younger
than boys and girls in the United States.
One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost increases
with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies in all cases are
expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish about as much excitement
as circuses at home. My first introduction to a Hindu wedding was in
Agra one Sunday afternoon--though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is
the same as any other day--and the shops were in full blast (if such a
strenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless Hindu
merchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy as they ever are.
From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, and as the deafening
hullabaloo came nearer its volume and violence increased until it
would have sufficed to bring down the walls of Jericho in half the
time Joshua took for the job. Just behind the drummers came two
gorgeously clad small boys astride an ass begarlanded with flowers;
and when the musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so
as {239} to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the
meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-year-old
small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and gauze and who
ought to have been at home studying the Second Reader, was on his way
to be married, and the little chap riding behind him was the brother
of the bride. It was very hard to realize that such tots were not
merely "playing wedding" instead of being principal participants in a
serious ceremony!
The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged for a couple
who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, and though no one
could have asked for a more gracious welcome than my American friend
and I received, I very much doubt if any one of the high-caste folk
about us would have condescended to eat at the same table with us even
to end a three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was a
nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently
pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been a
three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's house, we were
told, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feasts
arranged by the groom's father. One thousand people had been invited
and, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served,
I should think that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5000
rupees, or $1633, was none too high.
Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or a
father with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strain
his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that among
the humbler classes a father will sometimes mortgage his wages for
life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker
or middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story that
the bride is "as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young
elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's"--he must also be
paid for his indispensable services.
{240}
Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her
childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man--whose face
she may never have seen but once or twice--to take up the hard life of
a Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet
from her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion
of the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so
galling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at
the same table with her husband, but must be content with what he
leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the people
to a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. "Some of my
girls are engaged to be married," Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home
in Calcutta, said to me, "and when their fiances come to call, after
the Christian fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors
while the boys are seated."
Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that her
husband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If she
lives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husband
is authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and in
nearly all such cases the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W.
J. Wilkins says that a servant in his employ married a second wife and
insisted that the first should not only support herself but contribute
the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. The older wife is
tantalized by the thought that she herself was selected by the parents
of her husband, while the new wife is probably his own choice; and
another cause of jealousy is found in the new wife's youth. For no
matter how old the man himself may be--forty, fifty or sixty--his
bride is always a girl of twelve or thereabouts--and for the very
simple reason that practically no girls remain single longer, and
widows are never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay of
a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an agent to
his native village and caste with power to negotiate.
{241}
[Illustration: THE TAJ MAHAL FROM THE ENTRANCE GATE.]
The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful
than the building itself.
{242}
[Illustration: GUNGA DIN ON DRESS PARADE.]
Ordinarily the Indian water carrier, or _bhisti_, is attired more
nearly after the manner described in Kipling's poem:
"The uniform 'e wore
Was nothing much before
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind.
For a twisty piece o' rag and a goatskin leather bag
Was all the field equipment 'e could find."
{243}
"My friends have persuaded me that I ought not to marry a very young
girl," he said to the agent, "get an older one therefore--oh, it
doesn't matter if she is twenty-four."
The agent left and two days thereafter the Hindu received this
message: "Can't find one of twenty-four. How about two of twelve
each?"
The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing to the
troubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brahminism is that she is
responsible through some evil committed either in this existence or a
previous one, for the death of her husband, and the cruelest
indignities of the Hindu social system are reserved for the bereaved
and unfortunate woman. If a man or boy die, no matter if his wife is
yet a prattling girl in her mother's home, she can never remarry, but
is doomed to live forever as a despised slave in the home of his
father and mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved;
and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humiliation the
gods are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her. In a school I
visited in Calcutta I was told that there were two little widows, one
five years old and one six.
Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped the
practice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow's duty
to burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. "It is proper for
a woman after her husband's death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws,
"to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus
burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000
years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve
an inviolable chastity." This rite of self-immolation was known as
suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the suttees
numbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stone
with carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where a
widow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find these
gruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indian
roadsides. {244} Moreover, the present general treatment of widows in
India is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare
that they would prefer the suttee.
And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that a
kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blacken
the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customs
and sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu and
Mohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in
the case of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows
of their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict
letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good
by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his
womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about.
Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one
day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and
lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding
into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said
to me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it."
Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless while
the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument
ever erected in memory of a woman's love. True, Shah Jehan, the
monarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet
Mohammedanism, although its customs are less brutal, places woman in
almost the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status of
woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great religions
of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an end by
referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. Of all that I
saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of the Himalayas
from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the view of the Taj
Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon.
The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, "Only the Pure
in Heart May Enter the Garden of God," {245} is enough to assure one
that Arjmand Banu, "The Exalted One of the Palace," whose dust it was
built to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was in
form and feature. We know but little about her. There are pictures
which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; there are
records to show that it was in 1615 that she became the bride of the
prince who later began to rule as "His Imperial Highness, the second
Alexander (Lord of the two Horns) King Shah Jehan," and we may see in
Agra the rooms in the palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian
Nights-like splendor characteristic of Oriental courts,