[FROM “THE TIMES OF INDIA,” NOVEMBER 8TH, 1890.]
_To his Excellency the Viceroy and Governor-General of India._
May it please Your Excellency.—The undersigned ladies, practising
medicine in India, respectfully crave your Excellency’s attention to
the following facts and considerations:—
1. Your Excellency is aware that the present state of the Indian law
permits marriages to be consummated not only before the wife is
physically qualified for the duties of maternity, but before she is
able to perform the duties of the conjugal relation, thus giving rise
to numerous and great evils.
2. This marriage practice has become the cause of gross immoralities
and cruelties, which, owing to existing legislation, come practically
under the protection of the law. In some cases the law has permitted
homicide, and protected men, who, under other circumstances, would
have been criminally punished.
3. The institution of child-marriage rests upon public sentiment,
vitiated by degenerate religious customs and misinterpretation of
religious books. There are thousands among the better educated classes
who would rejoice if Government would take the initiative, and make
such a law as your memorialists plead for, and in the end the masses
would be grateful for their deliverance from the galling yoke that has
bound them to poverty, superstition, and the slavery of custom for
centuries.
4. The present system of child-marriage, in addition to the physical
and moral effects which the Indian Governments have deplored, produces
sterility, and consequently becomes an excuse for the introduction of
other child-wives into the family, thus becoming a justification for
_polygamy_.
5. This system panders to sensuality, lowers the standard of health
and morals, degrades the race, and tends to perpetuate itself and all
its attendant evils to future generations.
6. The lamentable case of the child-wife, Phulmani Dassi, of Calcutta,
which has excited the sympathy and the righteous indignation of the
Indian public, is only one of thousands of cases that are continually
happening, the final results being quite as horrible, but sometimes
less immediate. The following instances have come under the personal
observation of one or another of your Excellency’s petitioners:—
A. Aged 9. Day after marriage. Left _femur_ dislocated, _pelvis_
crushed out of shape, flesh hanging in shreds.
B. Aged 10. Unable to stand, bleeding profusely, flesh much lacerated.
C. Aged 9. So completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical
repair. Her husband had two other living wives, and spoke very fine
English.
D. Aged 10. A very small child, and entirely undeveloped physically.
This child was bleeding to death from the _rectum_. Her husband was
a man of about 40 years of age, weighing not less than 11 stone. He
had accomplished his desire in an unnatural way.
E. Aged about 9. Lower limbs completely paralysed.
F. Aged about 12. Laceration of the _perineum_ extending through the
_sphincter ani_.
G. Aged about 10. Very weak from loss of blood. Stated that great
violence had been done her in an unnatural way.
H. Aged about 12. Pregnant, delivered by _craniotomy_ with great
difficulty, on account of the immature state of the _pelvis_ and
maternal passage.
I. Aged about 7. Living with husband. Died in great agony after three
days.
K. Aged about 10. Condition most pitiable. After one day in hospital
was demanded by her husband for his “lawful” use, he said.
L. Aged 11. From great violence done her person will be a cripple for
life. No use of her lower extremities.
M. Aged about 10. Crawled to hospital on her hands and knees. Has
never been able to stand erect since her marriage.
N. Aged 9. Dislocation of _pubic arch_, and unable to stand, or to put
one foot before the other.
In view of the above facts, the undersigned lady doctors and medical
practitioners appeal to your Excellency’s compassion to enact or
introduce a measure by which the consummation of marriage will not be
permitted before the wife has attained the full age of fourteen (14)
years. The undersigned venture to trust that the terrible urgency of the
matter will be accepted as an excuse for this interruption of your
Excellency’s time and attention.
(Signed by 55 lady-physicians.)
The memorial as above was initiated by Mrs. Monelle Mansell, M.A., M.D.,
who has been in practice in India for seventeen years, and it received
the signature of every other lady doctor there. The cases of abuse above
specified are “only a few out of many hundreds—of cruel wrongs, deaths,
and maimings for life received by helpless child-wives at the hands of
brutal husbands, which have come under Dr. Monelle Mansell’s personal
observation, or that of her associates.”
With regard to case K, and “lawful” use, compare what is said by Dr.
Emma B. Ryder, who is also in medical practice in India, concerning the
“Little Wives of India”:—“If I could take my readers with me on my round
of visits for one week, and let them behold the condition of the little
wives ... if you could see the suffering faces of the little girls, who
are drawn nearly double with contractions caused by the brutality of
their husbands, and who will never be able to stand erect; if you could
see the paralysed limbs that will not again move in obedience to the
will; if you could hear the plaintive wail of the little sufferers as,
with their tiny hands clasped, they beg you ‘to make them die,’ and then
turn and listen to the brutal remarks of the legal owner with regard to
the condition of his property. If you could stand with me by the side of
the little deformed dead body, and, turning from the sickening sight,
could be shown the new victim to whom the brute was already betrothed,
do you think it would require long arguments to convince you that there
was a deadly wrong somewhere, and that someone was responsible for it?
After one such scene a Hindoo husband said to me, ‘You look like feel
bad’ (meaning sad); ‘doctors ought not to care what see. I don’t care
what see, nothing trouble me, only when self sick; I not like to have
pain self.’... A man may be a vile and loathsome creature, he may be
blind, a lunatic, an idiot, a leper, or diseased in a worse form; he may
be fifty, seventy, or a hundred years old, and may be married to a baby
or a girl of five or ten, who positively loathes his presence, but if he
claims her she must go, and the English law for the ‘Restitution of
Conjugal Rights’ compels her to remain in his power, or imprisons her if
she refuses. There is no other form of slavery on the face of the earth
that begins with the slavery as enforced upon these little girls of
India.”—(“The Home-Maker,” New York, June, 1891, quoted in the _Review
of Reviews_, Vol. IV., p. 38.)
And the _Times_ of 11th November, 1889, reported from its Calcutta
correspondent:—“Two shocking cases of wife-killing lately came before
the courts—in both cases the result of child-marriage. In one a child
aged ten was strangled by her husband. In the second case a child of ten
years was ripped open with a wooden peg. Brutal sexual exasperation was
the sole apparent reason in both instances. Compared with the terrible
evils of child-marriage, widow cremation is of infinitely inferior
magnitude. The public conscience is continually being affronted with
these horrible atrocities, but, unfortunately, native public opinion
generally seems to accept these revelations with complete apathy.”
For what slight legislative amendment has recently been effected in the
grievances mentioned by Dr. Ryder, see Note XXIV., 4. The “Restitution
of Conjugal Rights,” so justly condemned by her, does, indeed, appear to
have had—by some inadvertence—a recognition in the Indian Courts which
was not its lawful due. But for some fuller particulars on this matter,
both as concerns India and England, see Note XXXVI., 6.