[Illustration: A BOMBAY LADY]
WOMEN OF INDIA
_BY_
OTTO ROTHFELD, F.R.G.S., I.C.S.
AUTHOR OF
‘INDIAN DUST,’ ‘LIFE AND ITS PUPPETS’
‘WITH PEN AND RIFLE IN KISHTWAR’
_ILLUSTRATED BY_
M.V. DHURANDHAR
BOMBAY
D.B. TARAPOREVALA SONS & CO.
_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
DEDICATED
WITH THE DEVOTION OF A LIFETIME
TO THE KINDEST OF FRIENDS
MRS ARGYLL ROBERTSON
A CONSTANT WELL-WISHER OF
INDIAN WOMANHOOD
Contents
CHAP. PAGE
I. AS THEY ARE 1
II. MARRIAGE IN INDIA 15
III. THE HINDU WOMAN IN MARRIAGE 31
IV. THE LADIES OF THE ARISTOCRACY 61
V. THE MIDDLE CLASSES 89
VI. THE WORKING AND ABORIGINAL CLASSES 127
VII. THE DANCING GIRL 149
VIII. WOMAN’S DRESS 175
IX. THE MOVING FINGER 197
List of Illustrations
NO. FACING PAGE
1. A BOMBAY LADY _Frontispiece_
2. A PATHARE PRABHU 7
3. WATER-CARRIER FROM AHMEDABAD 8
4. SWEEPER 10
5. FISHER WOMAN OF SIND 19
6. MUSSULMAN ARTISAN FROM KÁTHIAWÁD 23
7. PATHAN WOMAN 26
8. BORAH LADY FROM SURAT 30
9. A BRAHMAN LADY GOING TO THE TEMPLE 37
10. FROM JODHPUR 44
11. A MILL-HAND 53
12. A MAHAR WOMAN 60
13. LADY FROM MEWÁR 69
14. RAJPUT LADY FROM CUTCH 76
15. MAHRATTI LADY 78
16. NAIR LADY 83
17. MUSSULMAN LADY OF NORTHERN INDIA 87
18. FROM BURMAH 90
19. LADY FROM MYSORE 94
20. A SOUTHERN INDIAN TYPE 97
21. BENGALI LADY 99
22. A NÁGAR BEAUTY 101
23. JAIN NUN 108
24. BHATIA LADY 110
25. KHOJA LADY IN BOMBAY 112
26. MEMAN LADY WALKING 117
27. PARSI FASHION 124
28. DYER GIRL IN AHMEDABAD 129
29. MUSSULMAN WEAVER 131
30. CAMBAY TYPE 133
31. THE MILKMAID 135
32. A FISHWIFE OF BOMBAY 138
33. TODA WOMAN IN THE NILGIRIES 140
34. GOND WOMAN 142
35. BHIL GIRL 145
36. DANCER IN MIRZAPUR 154
37. MUSSULMAN NAUTCH-GIRL 160
38. DANCER FROM TANJORE 165
39. NAIKIN IN KANARA 172
40. GIPSY WOMAN 177
41. A GURKHA’S WIFE 181
42. A GLIMPSE AT A DOOR IN GUJARÁT 183
43. A WIDOW IN THE DECCAN 186
44. A WOMAN OF THE UNITED PROVINCES 188
45. IN THE HAPPY VALLEY OF KASHMIR 208
46. A DENIZEN OF THE WESTERN GHAUTS 213
47. A WORKING WOMAN AT AJMERE 216
48. BORN BESIDE THE SACRED RIVERS 220
As they are
“Oh hail! O bright great God, in the form of that brown-eyed
beautiful thing before me, that fills me with astonishment and
laughter and supreme delight.”
_A Draught of the Blue._ PROFESSOR BAIN.
Chapter I
AS THEY ARE
Others had written even before Vatsyana the Wise wrote his “Gospel
of Love.” At that time the power of the Yávans and the Sákas was
outstretched over the land. They were peoples that had come out of
Persia and Bactria and obscure Scythia, many of them men with the blood
of those Ionian soldiers who had marched with Alexander and settled
with Eastern wives under Eastern skies. The teachings of Gautama, the
Indian prince, they had made their own; and to the countries in which
they ruled they had brought the peace of Buddha and the temperate
fruitions of Greece. On all the great trade-routes were monasteries
of Buddhist monks and large caravanserais for merchants and pilgrims.
Even as far as the sands of Lopnor, far across the roof of the world,
and to the Gobi desert, where the Chinese land begins, the tribes that
gave rulers to India had set their posts and planted their colonies.
On cunningly-sealed wedges of wood they sent their royal orders to
the wardens of their frontiers and on palm-leaves from the Indian
coasts they inscribed the lore that gave the illumination of God to
settlements on the mountains and in the Central Asian deserts. In
the shrines or stupas that they raised to Buddha, the wise teacher,
they had dadoes and frescoes painted in tempera by some Titianus or
Heliodorus from the Hellenized Levant, adventurers of a fine Grecian
courage, who scattered their harmonious energies and their joy in
life over the Indian world. Along the trade-routes marched merchants’
caravans, burdened with silks and rare spices, that found their way
from China to the Black Sea or the precarious ports on the Arabian
Coast.
“Women,” wrote the professors of love, in that time of peace and
enjoyment, “can be divided into four classes. There is she who is
a pure lotus, and she who is fair as a picture, she whom they call
hag and witch, and she who can be likened only to the female of the
elephant.” Of her who is as a lotus they wrote: “Her face is pleasant,
like the full moon: her plump body is tender as the mustard flower:
her skin is fine and soft as the golden lotus, fair and undarkened.
Bright and beautiful are her eyes like those of the antelope, clear-cut
and healthful. Her breast is firm and full and uplifted, and her neck
shapely: her nose is straight and delightful. The scent of her body
is like a lily newly burst. She walks delicately like a swan and her
voice is low and musical as the note of the cuckoo, calling softly in
the summer day. She is clothed in clean white garments and she delights
in rich jewels and adornments. She is gracious and clever, pious and
respectful, a lover of God, a listener to the virtuous and the wise.”
Of the manner of living of a virtuous woman it is further written by
Vatsyana the Wise: “A virtuous woman that hath affection to her husband
shall in all things act according to his wishes as if he were divine.
She shall keep the house well-cleansed and arrange flowers of every
kind in the different chambers and surround the house with a garden
and make the floor smooth and polished, so that all things be meet
and seemly. Above all she shall venerate the shrine of the Household
Deities. To the parents of her husband she shall behave as is meet and
proper, speaking to them in few words and softly, not laughing loud in
their presence, but being always quiet and respectful without self-will
and contradiction. She shall always consider in the kitchen what her
husband likes and dislikes and shall seek to please him. Always she
will sit down after him and rise before him: and when she hears his
footsteps as he returns home, she will get up and meet him and do
aught that he desires. If her husband do wrong, she shall not unduly
reproach him, but show him a slight displeasure and rebuke him in words
of fondness and affection. And when she goes to her husband when they
are alone, she will wear bright coloured garments and many jewels and
anklets and will perfume herself with sweet ointments and in her hair
place flowers.”
Many generations have passed and other races--Hunas and Gujjars and
Mongols--have invaded India. And asceticism has squeezed the people in
its dry hand, and there has been war and bigotry and pestilence. Yet
even now the teachings are not quite forgotten. Many a one there still
is among the women of India, of whom it can with truth be said: “She is
even as a golden lotus.”
Now, again, the sovereigns of India rule over many regions and send
their royal messages to the uttermost ends of the earth. Again the
great trade-routes pass through India and the merchandise of East and
of West meet in the harbours of Bombay and Calcutta. Castes and peoples
feel their way to a common nationality and a fresher spirit, and before
their eyes breaks the morning light of a new Renaissance. And in the
women of new India the old texts revive to a more vigorous flesh and
spirit.
[Illustration: A PATHARE PRABHU]
Stand of an evening on the Queen’s Road in Bombay, looking over the
wide curve of Back Bay, where the lights of the city fade away into
the distances of the sea and on the right the hill throws its contour
against the darkening sky. They pass here, brightly-clad, quietly
smiling, modestly distant, the women of India at their newest and
most modern, yet in essentials formed by the ancient rule. They are
discarding perhaps the habits of dark ages of misrule and superstition,
but they cling none the less to the spirit of old India--to those
principles hallowed at its best and freshest age. In their cars
the wives and children of rich merchants glide through the crowd.
On the back seat, in the shadow of the cabriolet top, a glimpse of
gold-brocade can be caught or the tone of a fair brown skin. Here a
Bhatia lady passes, come originally from the hot plains of the Cutch
Peninsula, the wife of a millionaire cotton-spinner or a financial
agent. Or there, in gracefully-draped mantle[1] and Paris-made shoes
and stockings, a Saraswat Brahman lady or a Pathare Prabhu, with that
lustrous pallor that is brought by the warm breezes from the sea, goes
on her way to her club to play tennis or drink afternoon tea. Seated in
open carriages or strolling along the pavement to taste the freshness
of the sea-breeze, are hundreds of Parsi girls, in dresses of every
hue, with the heavy velvet borders that they affect, gossiping, nodding
to their friends, laughing and chattering. Poorer women dart across
the street, pulling children after them through the busy traffic, and
carrying their youngest on their hip astride. A sweeper woman brushes
fallen leaves into the gutter. Through all the noise of motors and of
the trains that dash along the disfiguring railway, the sound of a bell
clanged at the temple door by a worshipper may be heard and, at sunset,
the call to prayer from the minaret of a mosque. Behind a high wall,
half-way down the fashionable drive, a red light rises against the
darkness from the flames which consume the city’s dead.
[1] The _sari_ has throughout this book been rendered by
the English word “mantle,” though as an equivalent it is
misleading. For a description of the _sari_ as it is, see
Chapter VIII.
Chiefly the notes that strike are of nature and sex. These women are
so thoroughly women, beyond and above all else. Except perhaps among
the Parsis, where English customs have been sometimes too closely
copied, there is no trace of the beings, women in age, but stunted
and warped and with the ignorance of children, that, seen in other
countries, create an uneasiness as at the touch of something unnatural
and perverse. Here are the clear brows and smiling faces of those
who _know_, to whom sex is a necessary part of life, and motherhood
a pride and duty. They dress and adorn themselves, because they are
women, with a husband to please and to govern. Their sex is frank and
admitted: as women they know their place in the world and as women
they seek a retiring modesty. Their very aloofness, their seclusion,
gives them half their charm: and they know it. Not for them, for
instance, the dismal methods of American schools, where mixed classes
and a common play-ground rub away all the attraction of the sexes and
make their growing pupils dully kin like brother and sister. In India
women are so much valued and attain half their power because they are
only occasionally seen and seldom met. It is the rarest flowers that
are sought at the peril of life itself. It is for the women who live
veiled and separated that men crave, captives of passion at a first
quick-taken glance. A wife who is not the familiar companion of every
walk or game, who is never seen through the long business hours--with
what delight the husband, unjaded by the constant sight of women in
street or office, seeks her at last in the inner apartments where she
waits with smiles and flowers!
[Illustration: WATER-CARRIER FROM AHMEDABAD]
How natural they are--true, that is, to the natural instincts and
purposes of women, not without womanly artifice--is most apparent
from a contrast. Their shyness, even their self-consciousness with
men, is of a woman’s nature. Their love of jewelry, their little
tricks of manner, why, the very way they stand are, after all, the
natural derivatives of womanhood. Of motherhood they have no shame:
they celebrate marriage and childbirth frankly with a fine candour.
Their garments drape them in soft flowing lines falling in downward
folds over the rounded contours of the body--draperies full of grace
and restful. In Europe women still adhere to a deformity brought in
by German barbarism in the dark ages. With curious appliances, they
distort and misshape the middle of their bodies from quite early
childhood till--the negation of all beauty--in place of a natural human
figure appear two disjunct parts joined, as it were, mechanically
by a tightened horizontal band. From their passive acceptance of
routine, women will bear traditional deformity, in spite of illness
and the constant weariness of nervous disorders. What is difficult to
understand is that--with all their wish to please--they can endure
its patent ugliness. Pleasing is the contrast of the Indian mantle,
gracefully draped over head and shoulders and falling in vertical folds
to the feet, and of the gaily-stitched and neat little fitting bodice
of the Hindu lady. Her head with its smooth hair, decked with simple
gold ornaments or fresh flowers, half covered by the silken veil, is
well poised and beautiful.
She poses on it no twisted straws, dyed in metallic colours, no
fantastic covering, hung with pieces of dead bird.
The step of the Indian woman walking is a thing of joy. It has in it
nothing of the mincing awkward shuffle or of the disgracious manly
stride. But at her best see her walking in the country villages, where
her frame is trained to a graceful poise by the constant carriage of
water-pots balanced on her head as she steps unshod down the dusty
lanes or the sloping banks of the river.
[Illustration: SWEEPER]
In the villages, indeed, it is round the well that woman’s life
circles. Where the dry plains stretch away westward from Ahmedabad
over land cast back by the sea, the walls of mud-built villages stand
square against the blank horizon, where they were raised against the
raids of Kathi or of Koli freebooters. Here in the hot spring months
from March to July, before the grey rains turn the land to a sticky
swamp, the sun from dawn to its setting beats savagely; on the sand. In
these little townships, high-walled, with iron-studded gates, the women
have to seek the well early. An hour before the day, before even the
false dawn throws its silver flicker over the sky, they come from every
quarter to the one great well which supplies the place. Oh! the early
morning chatter which wakes one from his sleep! Ropes and buckets
splash upon the water and pot rings against brass pot. They come in
scores, of every caste and age, merchants’ wives and pretty _noblesse_,
cultivators and labourers, old women, widows and mothers, and little
naked children--how frail and tender their lines!--hardly able to
stagger homewards under the load. With hurried prattle they talk of the
night and the coming day, of the prices of the bazaar and the scandal
of a wanton neighbour or the coming visit of a priest. The day dawns
and the full white orb of the sun, white living heat like molten metal,
rises suddenly into the level sky. The women finish drawing water as
best they can and turn home. They walk straight, those women, two
copper pots balancing easily on the head, another large pitcher lightly
held against the hip, easily moving as they talk and smile. No wonder
if a young man, idly, may sometimes stroll towards the well. For some
there are who looking on these women of Káthiawád passing, with golden
skins and full oval faces, must say to themselves, as said Solomon,
“How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights: this thy
stature is like to a palm-tree and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.”
Next to the well, it is at the temple that the life of a woman centres.
For her every thought and act is moulded from childhood to the day
of death by the present reality of religion. Her childhood is an
adoration, marriage a sacrament, wifehood an oblation: in motherhood
she finds at once sacrifice and worship: while life and death alike
are a quest and a resignation. Life, as to herself she interprets it,
is not so much action as a response to divine ordinance, receptive
and submissive. She awaits love and may yield to joy: but she expects
them as a handmaiden, humbly, without striving and without insistence.
And the daily ritual in which her life of service finds its symbol is
the scattering of flowers upon the images of God, the singing of His
praises, and the circumambulation of His sacred shrine. At the temple
she makes her humble vows, for a husband’s kindness or the supreme gift
of childbirth. And there, from the fulness of her heart, she pours out
thanksgiving for the blessings of her state. And if at the end perhaps
she die childless and a widow, it is not singular if she leave her
wealth to the further endowment of the temple and the greater glory of
God Rama and his Sita, the divine pair of her worship.
The heroism of Indian womanhood has found its loftiest expression in
the Rajput nobility, with the great Queens who have fought and been
slain in battle or self-immolated on the funeral pyre: its piety is
a transfiguration in the Brahman and the merchant class: and woman’s
love with its transcendent ecstasy burns like a glowing ember on the
hearth of every soul. But for devotion to labour, uninspired by any
ideal other than its mere fulfilment, one turns to the menial castes
that, from century to century, have lived closest to their own soil.
Thus on the stony uplands of the Deccan, the women of the untouchable
Mahars--descended probably from some once ruling race, long tragically
overthrown--labour without respite in the hard fields at their
husbands’ sides. But, furthermore, they bear and suckle children, cook
the family food and do the work of their poor household. Ceaseless
labour it is, done without bitterness, in a humble resignation. A rough
life, yet not without redemption! Their hardships are recognized and
their pleasures shared: they stand side by side with their menfolk,
comrades by their service. They hold themselves upright, not without
the pride of service, and to the eye that comprehends, they have even a
rough attraction, like a picture by Millet, in their sturdy strength,
earthy and fruitful.
The book of Indian womanhood has many pages, and each page is
different, one from the other. Living in a wide continent, the speech
of one group of women is not as the speech of another. And in faith
they are not one, nor in blood nor habit. But though the leaves of the
book are of various type, yet they are all of one shape, bound in one
cloth and colour. For to all of them, above all else, is contentment
with their own womanhood, faith in religion and the natural hope of
love. An unremitting devotion and an unfailing tenderness, that is
the Indian woman’s service in the world; and it is her loving service
that has given its best to the land. India has had great preachers and
great thinkers, it has had and has brave soldiers. But more than the
men, more even than their best and bravest, it is the women who have
deserved well of the country. What they have won is the respect with
which all men behave to stranger women. It is a rule of Indian manners
that they should pass unnoticed and unremarked, even in the household
of a friend, and, except perhaps among the lowest ruffians, there is
none who would offend the modesty of a woman even by a gesture or an
unseemly recognition. They can pass in the midst of crowds, as nurses
pass in the most evil back-streets, without molestation or insult. For
the women of India have raised an ideal, lofty and selfless, for all
to behold: and they have come near its attainment. And with all its
self-sacrifice and abnegation, with all its unremitting service, the
ideal is not inhuman nor is it alien to the nature of womankind. It
allows for weaknesses, it is kind to faults, and it aspires frankly to
the joys of a fulfilment deserved by service. Not without reason did
the writers of old India liken the perfect woman of their land to a
lotus, in that she “is tender as a flower.”
Marriage in India
“Thilke blissful lyf
That is betwixe an housband and his wyf:
And for to live under that holy bond
With which that first God man and womman bond.
‘Non other lyf,’ sayde he, ‘is worth a bene:
For wedlock is so esy and so clene,
That in this world it is a paradys.’”
_Marchantes Tale._ CHAUCER.
Chapter II
MARRIAGE IN INDIA
In all countries, for a woman marriage has a significance not only
greater than but different in quality from the significance it has for
a man. It is not merely that to the man marriage is only one incident,
however far-reaching in its effects and values, among the recurrent
vicissitudes of life; while to the woman, even if it be so regarded,
it is at least the most conclusive of all incidents--that from which
depends not alone her own comfort but rather the fulfilment of her
whole being and function. A man’s life is made up of the intermittent
pursuit of many a quarry at the impulse of divergent passions,
projected from time to time in varying light upon the evenly-moving
background of the sub-conscious activities. He studies and his soul is
engrossed in the niceties of the arts or the subtleties of philosophy.
He finds satisfaction for his intellect and even his emotions in the
choice of the fitting phrase for a description. At another time he
rushes to sport, and, for many hours in the day and many days in the
month, finds pleasant fatigue and final occupation in stalking the stag
through the forest with its dry crackling leaves. In administration
he makes a career: and he may be busy day and night with problems of
finance, the just use of authority or the thousand questions of policy
in a developing civilization. Whatever his profession may be, his work
engages the greater portion of his life and all his highest and most
useful energies. A man’s pulse quickens its beat rapidly, and as easily
falls again to a slow extreme of indolence and indifference. He does
his best and finest work in the hours of rapid energy. It is then that
he fulfils those functions of creation and fruitful activity which
appertain to the male in the self-ordered organization of the world.
But among those his union with his mate is not the most important.
Rather it may be called the expenditure of a superfluous energy.
He needs his mate only in the moments of excited passion, when his
energies, unexhausted by duties that he counts more valuable, are at
their strongest. But as a companion he values the woman that is given
to him mainly in the hours of repose and leisure--those periods when
the over-stimulated mind and body sink to the level of an indolent
passivity. Companionship he seeks that his surroundings should be easy
and congenial, when his work is done and he is weary. Again, when a man
marries, he either has loved or will love other women and he knows in
his heart that the wife, who is to share and make his home, can be only
one, though perhaps the tenderest and sweetest, of his loving memories.
Herein, for the woman who gives him her love, is the irony. Only with
the man to whom all love is ashes and who can never kindle the fierce
flame of passion, can she expect the sole and exclusive possession to
which she is inclined by her own nature. From the man who can promise
her his only love, the gift is of little value and his love but the
thin shadow of a spectre. But she knows the man whose love is as a robe
of purple or a diadem of rubies cannot be for her alone, wholly hers.
[Illustration: FISHER WOMAN OF SIND]
To the woman, however, marriage is the incident of all incidents, that
one action to which all else in life--even the birth of her first
male-child--is subsidiary and subordinate. She goes to her mate, in
shyness and modesty, as to one who for the first time shall make
her truly woman. At his touch the whole world changes and the very
birds and flowers, the seas, the stars, and the heaven above, put
on a different colour and murmur a new music. In a moment the very
constitution of her body alters and her limbs take nobler curves and
her figure blooms to a new splendour. Her mind and emotions grow: and
the dark places which she had feared are seen to be sun-lit and lofty.
Marriage is to her more than an incident, however revolutionary. It
is rather the foundation of a new life, indeed a new life itself. For
her, henceforth, her whole existence is but the one fact of being
married. It is her career, her profession, her study, her joy, her
everything. She lives no longer in herself but rather as her man’s
wife. “Half-body,” the Sanscrit poets say, not untruly of the married
woman.
In India, even more than in Europe, certainly more than in Northern
Europe, marriage is to a woman everything. In early childhood she
becomes aware, gradually and almost unconsciously, of the great central
facts of nature. She lives in a household in which, along with the
earning of daily bread, all talk freely of marriages and the birth
of children. When a brother or sister is born, she is not excluded,
and no one tells her tales of mysterious storks or cabbages. As she
grows older, she hears the stories of Sita, the divine wife, and of
Sakuntala, the loved princess: and the glowing winds of spring and the
burning sun help to bring her to a quick maturity. Around her she sees
her girl friends given in marriage to flower-crowned boy bridegrooms,
brought on gold-caparisoned horses with beating of drums and bursting
fire-works and much singing to the bridal bower and the sacred fire.
She learns of widowhood and the life-long austerities imposed on a
woman whose sin-haunted destiny drags her husband to the grave. In the
household prayers she sees that her father needs her mother at his side
for the due offering of oblations and the completion of the ritual. Of
a woman unmarried, not a widow, she never hears and the very notion can
hardly frame itself on the mirror of her mind. No wonder that, with her
earliest reflections, she bends her thoughts upon the husband that is
to come and to be her lord, to whom she will hold herself affianced by
the will of God through all the moving cycle of innumerable deaths and
existences.
Matrimony in India, in nearly every case, is stamped by one of
two types, the marriage-contract of the Mussulmans, or the unions
sanctified in the vast and extremely complex social system that is
comprised under the general name of Hinduism. In theory, legally one
might say, marriage among the Mussulmans of India is a contract that
should in no way differ from that practised in other countries of
Islam. A man and a woman bind themselves or are bound by a voidable
contract which confers certain rights of maintenance and succession,
in consideration of mutual comfort and cherishing. The contract, but
not its sanction and consequences, can be repudiated at the man’s will
and, subject to certain intelligible limitations, at the claim of the
woman. In all cases proper and ample provision is and must be made
for the children. The woman who is divorced, or widowed, is in no way
prevented from entering upon a fresh contract with another husband,
rather she is encouraged and assisted so to do. Broadly speaking,
this is the legal position in every Mussulman marriage. No other
world-wide system has ever been so reasonable and so human. It is a
legislation passed through the mouth of its Founder for all followers
of the faith, as human beings bound in their relations to other men
and women only by justice, which is the ultimate morality of the
world. The interpretation of the Legislator’s act has varied slightly
in the jurisprudence of the “Four Pillars of the Faith,” the talented
authors of the four great law-schools of Islam. Among the Shiah sect
in Persia, also, the rulings have been somewhat modified and extended
in the judge-made law of the ecclesiastical courts: and contracts
for temporary marriages--marriages limited to a stated, sometimes a
short, period--have for example been recognized and ratified. But these
are all variations which show the more clearly how, in essence, the
matrimony of Islam is a thing of law, an agreement for certain purposes
and with certain consequences, between human beings regarded in their
capacity as agents in a very human world. That this should be so is, in
fact, a necessary consequence from the whole character of Islam. For
the very essence of Islam is its rationalism. God created the world
that He might be _known_. From the children of Adam He expects praise
and He exacts obedience and resignation. By His strength and will He
divides among them their shares of blissful or unkind environment.
But in the activities of human life, when they have satisfied the
requirements of prostration to the All-Powerful Creator, He leaves
them free to move as they will under the guidance of the highest human
morality--justice. In the verses that are concerned with the relations
between man and man, the Book of the Qor’an is as rational as the
ethics of Aristotle or the commentary of a student. Even the Persian
mystics, that were clad in wool, the children of the Tasawwuf--they who
represent Indo-Aryan mysticism outcropping from the level calculations
of the Semitic faith--sought, in the main, only to modify the attitude
of man to God. In place of obedience, with its scale of service and
reward, they set up a spiritual ecstasy of love, and in this love they
hoped to unite the human consciousness with the divine thought of
which it is a manifestation and in which it seeks absorption. But the
way with its four stages of ascent, by which they pointed the road to
final union with absolute Being, rarely traversed the ethics of human
action in the phenomenal world. With the commands of justice and with
the contracts which made possible and legitimate the companionship and
love of man and woman they never really sought to interfere.
[Illustration: MUSSULMAN ARTISAN FROM KÁTHIAWÁD]
This then is the plan, clear, reasonable, and humane. But in the
practice of India, it must be confessed, there have been many
deviations. They live after all, the Mussulmans of India, among a
population, of which they form but the seventh part, highly religious,
mystical, seeing in all things magic and the supernatural. In great
part they derive from the castes and tribes of Hindu India, converted
to the creed by conquest, interest, or persuasion. Large sections
still retain and are governed by the Hindu customary law of their
former tribe. The rich Mussulman merchants of Bombay, who traverse the
ocean like other Sindbads and seek their merchandise in the Eastern
Archipelagoes or in the new colonies of the African continent, peaceful
merchants of whom a large sect still perpetuates the doctrines of the
Shaik of the Mountain and reveres the memory, without the practice, of
the Assassins, follow in their domesticities and the laws of succession
rules whose significance depends from the mystic teachings of the Hindu
sages. In Gujarát the Mussulman nobility preserve with respect the
names and practices of the Rajput chiefs from whom they are descended.
They marry within families of cognate origin and transmit their estates
and dignities by a rule that is widely apart from the jurisprudence
of Islam. But that marriage is indefeasibly binding on a woman for
all time, even after death’s parting, so that the widowed wife may
never seek another husband--these are ideas whose ultimate basis is a
view of the world as a thing moved and deflected by magic and magical
interpositions. Yet these opinions of the surrounding Hindu population
have invaded the Mussulman household also. The proud families which
claim direct descent from the Prophet of Arabia have in practice
created an absolute prohibition of remarriage. And in many families
of temporal rank the same veto is observed, as having in it something
exclusive and patrician. Even among the common people, it is only the
first marriage which is known by the significant name of “gladness,”
while the corrector Arabic term has been degraded with a baser meaning
to the marriage of a widow. In practice, too, the wise provisions of
the law for dowries and the separate maintenance of a wife have been
neglected, while divorce is much discountenanced and the claims of an
ill-used or insufficiently-cherished wife to a decree are ignored or
even forgotten. Child-marriage has become the rule, and consent to a
life-long bond under a contract which has come to be regarded almost as
inviolable, is only too often given on behalf of the young girl by a
relation indifferent to all except wealth and position.
Yet such is the radiance, so purifying the chemistry of reason that,
in spite of superstition, it continues to oxidize and revive the
body which it permeates. The inroads of Mongol tribes from Central
Asia--recent and bigoted converts--laid low the body politic of Islam.
For five dark centuries Mussulman culture was turned into a wilderness.
In India Islam has been further obscured, as has been shown, by the
encroaching customs and feelings of peoples who conceived life on an
incompatible and magical apprehension. Yet the word of rationalism
was never wholly silent, and the thought of human justice in a world
of causation persisted, however feebly, to sweeten and humanize the
relations of men and women in the fundamental contract of matrimony.
The Mussulman woman in her family wields great power and influence. She
is consulted and made much of to an extent rare in most countries. The
words of the Qor’an are a constant inspiration to her husband; and he
knows himself to be bound to cherish as best he can the woman who is
described in Scripture as a field which he should cultivate and as a
partner to whom he owes kindness and protection. Under this inspiration
he can hardly fail to estimate at its highest the value of womanhood;
for even in heaven his promised reward includes the pleasures of
beautiful and enchanting women. Thus has Omar Khayyam written in the
188th Rubaiyat:--
“They say there will be a paradise and fair women and black-eyed virgins,
And there, say they, will be pure wine and honey.
So if we adore our wine and our beloved, why, ’tis lawful
Since the end of all this business will be even thus.”
The Mussulman religion idealizes above everything manliness and the
manly virtues; and it certainly does not undervalue the place of sex
in human life. Now, it is the virile man who yields most readily to
the sway of woman. His very vigour impels him to her side: and in the
reactions from enterprise and affairs he wishes to be soothed by her
companionship and delight. So it is true that the Mussulman woman in
India has seldom cause for complaint within her household. The day’s
labour done, husband and children gather in the inner apartments, where
she rules, and devote themselves to her comfort and entertainment.
Where she suffers, if at all, is from the too rigid custom of the
_purdah_ or female seclusion. What in India distorted the modest
injunction of the Prophet that women should veil their faces before
strange men to the excessive and even fantastic _purdah_ system, is a
question still hotly debated by Indian reformers and publicists.
[Illustration: PATHAN WOMAN]
Hindus accuse the Mussulman population of introducing the system:
Mussulmans point to the more rational habit of other Islamic countries
and lay the charge to the door of the Rajput nobility. Whatever may
have been the original cause, the results are sometimes ludicrous and
injurious. Applied as it is in the houses of nobles and rich merchants,
the custom is sufficiently tolerable and even advantageous. The ladies
have gardens in which to exercise their limbs: they drive in screened
carriages to see the town or enjoy the country breezes; they have
liberty to visit at all hours the houses of their women friends and
profit by their conversation. They have light and air and reasonable
freedom. Like many other points of aristocratic ceremony, the practice
of seclusion is valued largely by the inconvenience it causes to
others. It needs little knowledge of feminine nature to appreciate the
pleasurable sense of dignity it causes the wealthy _purdah_ lady when,
at a visit, she sees all male servants and even the owner of the house
sent hurrying to hide in remote corners while she makes her stately
progress from her carriage to her friends’ apartments. On her travels
she notes with pride the tumult in the crowded station when sheets
are held across the platform to seclude her from stranger eyes as she
slowly strolls to her compartment. But to apply the same etiquette to
the middle and the poorer classes is little short of madness. Yet there
are many parts of India, where the Mussulman population, and especially
their womankind, insist with melancholy pride on these observances,
whatever their poverty and decay. There are found in little crumbling
mud-hovels, clinging to the base of ancient forts and palaces, women
who spend their useless lives crouched in a dark ill-smelling room,
where the light of day and the breath of energy and aspiration can
never reach them. They bear feeble children: fall sick of a decline or
internal ailments: and go out in premature senility like a candle in a
choked tunnel. Fortunately the sturdy Mussulman peasantry of the north
know nothing of these follies: nor in Káthiawád and Gujarát do the
Mussulman artisans, who are here pictured, ruin their homes by this
disastrous aping of an aristocracy. But even with this drawback--one
maintained, it must be remembered, mainly by the same feminine lust
for pride and precedence which in England keeps the clerk’s wife from
cooking a dinner--it is in general true that the rationalism of the
system has produced mutual respect and affection, together with much
courtesy and chivalry, between the sexes.
The Afghan or Pathan woman is in many ways apart from her Mussulman
sister of the real India of the plains. Strong, virile, courageous, but
treacherous and illiterate, the Afghan tribes are still narrowly within
the pale of savagery. They are hillmen, living in secluded valleys
or rocky fastnesses, with the virtues of their kind, but far removed
from those urbane polities which in all languages and races have set
the type of civilization. In Islam the word for civilization is as
much derived from the word for “city,” “Medinah,” as in the languages
that trace their descent from the Latins. Of gentler qualities the
Afghans have no share. But they have strong passions, great thirst
for love, and the freeman’s respect for others’ freedom. The woman is
caressed and petted, loved with a passionate love, loaded with gifts,
and then--when old age breaks her vigour--too often cast aside with
the callous thoughtlessness of the savage. The men are jealous and she
lives always under the shadow of a knife, the long, thin, sharp-edged
knife of the Pathan, so quickly drawn across the throat at the first
whisper of dishonour. Herself passionate and hot-tempered, she too
blazes out in sudden rages, and the small dagger that she carries is
not unseldom used. Passion and excitement, quick pulsing heart-beats,
fiery love, splashing like scarlet flames upon the dusty background,
and then the slow neglected downward track of old age, that is the
Afghan woman’s life.
Mostly she is chaste and clings to her own man, till the last bullet
catches him full in the chest and his life gurgles out with the
bubbling blood. But she can also love greatly and superbly, like the
fine full-blooded creature that she is. There was such a girl once, a
child merely, fifteen years old, who from the barred windows of her
father’s house at Kabul, saw a young English officer ride past on his
charger with the ill-fated expedition. She came of royal stock and her
father was a chieftain of rank in the Amir’s service. Yet she learnt
the officer’s name, who can say with how many precautions and terrors:
and found he was still unmarried. When the troops left, she crept forth
too, this child of fifteen, and turned her face from her father’s house
and her people to follow the man she had chosen. She found her way
across the mountains by the wind-bitten passes, with little food or
shelter, till she reached the deserts of Sind and the wide stretches
of the Indus. Not till then was she safe from the avenging dagger.
Then slowly she traced her road till she came to the port of Karachi.
And there, in the new cantonment, with its strange avenues and houses,
she found the man whom she had sought. He, happily, was rich and of
distinguished family. He heard her story and married the brave girl who
had dared so much for his love. Then he brought her to England and had
her taught and trained, and she found favour at Court, and their lives
were happy.
Such the Afghan woman can be. The love which she gets--and
gives--echoes in the poetry of Lawrence Hope.
“You are all that is lovely and light,
Aziza,--whom I adore,
And, waking after the night,
I am weary with dreams of you.
Every nerve in my heart is tense and sore
As I rise to another morning apart from you.
I would burn for a thousand days,
Aziza, whom I adore,
Be tortured, slain, in unheard of ways
If you pitied the pain I bore.
…
Give me your love for a day,
A night, an hour;
If the wages of sin are death,
I am willing to pay.
What is my life but a breath
Of passion burning away?
Away from an unplucked flower?
Oh! Aziza, whom I adore,
Aziza, my one delight,
Only one night--I will die before day,
And trouble your life no more.”
[Illustration: BORAH LADY FROM SURAT]
The Hindu Woman in Marriage
ἀλλ᾿ ἐννοεῖν χρὴ τοῦ το μὲν γυναῖχ᾿ ὅτι
ἒφυμεν ὡς πρὸς ἄνδρας οὐ μαχουμίνα
ἔ πει τα δ᾿ οὕνεκ᾿ ἀρχόμεσθ᾿ ἐκ κρεισσόνων
καὶ ταῦ τ᾿ ἀκούειν κἄτι τῶνδ᾿ ἀλγίονα.
_Antigone_, ll. 61 _seq._
“But we must reflect first that we were born a woman,
Not such as to strive against men: and then that as
we are ruled by them that are the stronger, we must
obey in these things and in things yet sorer.”