THE HINDU WOMAN IN MARRIAGE
Marriage under the Hindu system is by no means easy to describe as
in actual fact it is. The definitions and classifications given in
the legal textbooks or Scriptures of the Hindus are little better
than abstractions--deductions from assumed premises of a theological
kind, with only a slender tie to the actual life of Hindu societies.
The difficulties of practice arise from the vast complexities and
fluid conditions of the great masses of peoples and races, with
divergent levels of culture and inconsistent ideas, that compose the
aggregate which for convenience is distinguished from all others by the
collective name of Hinduism. For Hinduism is, of course, in no real
sense a church or creed. It has no definite tenets and no articles
of dogma. The acceptance of a certain social system, centring upon
the existence of hereditary priesthoods with divinely-given powers of
interposition and interpretation, is its final criterion. This system
and its practical consequences once accepted, the man is free to
believe and follow what creeds or philosophies he may please.
Yet through it all there is a certain rather vague and elusive unity
of idea, a spirit, one might say, that in various forms penetrates
and transmutes the varying material of creed and caste, of blood and
race with which it is presented. In essence this is the spirit which
regards the whole world as an unreal dream, an illusory changing
scene of transformations, stretched over the realities of a higher
ultimate world of Divine unity. Laws and customs are based not on a
reasoned pursuit of the good as existent in this life; but upon the
means, magical or supernatural, of acquiring merit in a supposed
ultimate universe of timeless and permanent reality reached after
final severance from the circle of birth and death. It is a spirit
diametrically opposed to that Greek thought which placed before man
as his final and only aim happiness or the excellent performance of
function in the world we know. Hardly less is it opposed to the Semitic
creeds which project the purposes and rewards of virtue into a similar
world of similar perceptions and individualities conceived as existent
on a higher plane attainable after death. For the unifying spirit of
Hinduism, so far as it can be grasped as in any way _one_, rejects
the world altogether as a reality and places its virtues not in any
reasoned balance of human rights and duties, but in the observance of
rituals and austerities commended by the authority of a hierarchy.
Hence marriage also, as far as it approaches the ideal, is based upon
considerations that are non-rational and belong rather to a mystical
or supernatural way of regarding life. Marriage to the Hindu thinker
and idealist has nothing to do, in its ultimate causes, with the
preferences of one man or one woman, nothing to do with the pursuit
of happiness in a palpitating finite and human life. He sees in it
no free union of two human wills, joined for their own contentment
in an isolated human relation. Rather it is the connection of two
incarnations of the world spirit during an unreal moment of illusory
existence. The proper husband and wife are recognized and selected
by magical arts exercised under the authority of the Sacred Books
by certain classes of the priesthood. They are joined under a right
conjunction of the stars, interpreted by an hereditary expert in the
magic art of astrology. Their marriage is sanctified by miraculous
rites and blessed and transformed by the repetition of mysterious
Sanskrit phrases. They enter their new state purified as by a
consecration. In a word, they deal with a sacrament, not with a human
contract. It is not the satisfaction of human feelings that is sought,
but the fulfilment of a ritual duty to the family, in its relation to
the Divine Spirit.
This view of marriage, as an ordained sacrament, is manifested
throughout the actual ceremonies of the wedding, at least among the
castes that claim the higher ritual ranks. The bride and bridegroom
must belong to the same subdivision of the caste and yet must not be
related by a common descent from the same mythical founder of the
family. Before they can be betrothed, the horoscopes must be studied
by an hereditary astrologer to see that the proposed union does not
traverse any of the influences of the stars in their conjunctions.
Nowadays it is true that horoscopes have fallen somewhat into neglect
among the more “advanced.” These allege that the time is wrongly
found on any horologe except the old-fashioned water-clock and they
insinuate--what is no doubt often true--that the verdict of the
astrologer depends upon his emoluments. Thus even the most advanced of
Hindus, if they do without such advice, do so on the ostensible ground
that horoscopes are incorrectly delivered, not that in themselves they
are unreasonable. Again the marriage is made between children, so
that desire or personal preference shall not disturb the ordinances
of heaven. The ceremony can take place only in the auspicious months
when the constellations of Jupiter and Venus are in conjunction with
the sun. At the wedding symbolic presentments of the boy’s and girl’s
ancestors make more clear the significance of the wedding, as a mere
phase in a family existence, in which the individual is as nothing and
the race is all. When the moment approaches, the bride and bridegroom
sit, face to face or side by side before the objects of worship, their
right hands joined, a strand of red cotton round their necks, a cloth
drawn as a screen between their faces. The priests chant Sanskrit
verses, while the astrologer consults the water-clock, which is needed
to read the exact sacerdotal hour. Then when the moment has come and
the cloth is drawn, the pair turn round the sacred sacrificial fire,
and the seven steps are taken which make the marriage indissoluble
and eternal. The bridegroom turns to his wife and utters the sacred
verse, “Oh! bride! give your heart to my work, make your mind agreeable
to mine. May the God Brahaspati make you pleasing to me.” Then for
himself he swears not to transgress, whether for wealth or love. And
then they go out and look upon the Polar Star, that star which guided
the first Aryan wanderers across Asia.
[Illustration: A BRAHMAN LADY GOING TO THE TEMPLE]
A marriage of this kind, so solemn and so sacramental, cannot in the
lifetime of its partakers be severed or dissolved. Only the will of
God, executed by the cold scythe of Death, can grant a divorce. Until
death come, the pair is inevitably joined, to labour and pray together,
and to engender and bear the children who in time shall release
their parents’ souls from the purgatory of unfulfilled duties. The
Hindu theory is a deduction from two principles, one, the unreality
of individual appearance, the second, the unworthiness of sensuous
illusion.
Marriage is a union of ephemeral beings for the sake of family and
community, and for the attainment of a worshipful elevation over
sense and the world of illusion. It is at once a consecration and
an initiation. The absence of that strong sexual passion which we
have clad in the jewelled veils of poetry and have baptized in the
romantic waters of love is not to the Brahman eye an impediment or a
disappointment. At the most the hope is for an ordered affection and a
disciplined devotion.
But the facts of human nature cannot with impunity be ignored. Ideals
based on a non-natural order of things may inspire noble poetry: but
they must fail when they are applied to large bodies of men and women.
Contracts founded upon causes and effects that are traced by reason can
be applied without much hindrance and at any rate without hypocrisy by
all those who can recognize facts. But there are few who are worthy of
or can benefit by a sacrament. The Hindu spirit has created splendid
images and has embodied in literature the characters of Sita and of
Damyanti, the wife who is all devotion and sacrifice, nobly courageous,
nobly patient. But, by its very distance from actuality, it leads in
the practice of every day to great hypocrisy and unnecessary hardship.
The danger has been foreseen by the lawgivers themselves: and they
have not dared to apply their ideal, even in theory, to others than
the highest castes of the hierarchy. For the warrior, the cultivator,
and the menial classes they have allowed different practices and
divergent ideals. Even in the practice of those Brahmans, to whom the
system should apply in its entirety, considerable concessions have
been authorized. In the unauthorized acts of every day life there
are even greater deviations. In one sense, of course, it may be said
that the theory of the highest Hinduism in regard to marriage is one
and indivisible; but marriage is, after all, the concrete contact and
companionship of a living, feeling man and woman, and the application
of the theory an affair of national character. Race and climate and the
influences of history have played their part in the Indian Continent
at least as much as in other regions of equal area. Even in the
priestly Brahman caste, the Brahman of the Deccan is as different from
him of the Punjáb as an Italian Marchese could be from a Prussian Graf.
They come from different strains, they live in different surroundings:
and the one bond is a common social system with some common ideals
under which they have both obtained their power.
In general, it may be said that the ideal has been humanized and
softened in all those parts of India in which Rajput or Mussulman
influences have at any time been powerful. In such regions, in Gujarát,
for instance, or in Káthiawád, the people have never taken kindly to
the mere negation of desire. A certain practical genius has always
turned their glance to the fruits of the earth and the pleasures of
the senses. Commerce brought them wealth and the desire for comfort;
from chivalry they learnt the lessons of gaiety and enjoyment. Among
them beauty is esteemed and desired; pleasure sought or demanded. From
a wife is expected charm and companionship, passion and pleasure. She
is treated as a human being, with the ordinary human capacities and
frailties; and she can exercise power and influence by her charms. She
may be loved as a woman; and she is often the object of jealousy; but
she is seldom deadened by that chilling respect which shrivels fresh
desire.
In the arid, ascetic Deccan, on the other hand, the woman is more
commonly disregarded. There she lives in an atmosphere where
sensuousness is reproached, though it may be practised. A man indulges
passion, if he do so at all, as a thing shameful in itself and
abominable, with stealth and self-abasement, in the grossest and least
urbane manner. If he yield to a sexual desire, it is without esteem or
regard for the partner in his sin. Towards the wife of a consecrated
marriage he preserves an attitude, which may be irreproachable, but
must certainly be unflattering to her womanhood. In the light of
religion, she may be regarded as a partner in a mystic union: but in
the household she is often little better than a housekeeper, contemned,
neglected, and never warmed by the glow of desire nor wooed with those
attentions by which men seek to please. Between Gujarát and the Deccan,
it is again the contrast, only intensified, between France and England.
On the one hand, power and pleasure and the charm of life--with perhaps
jealousy and a certain sense of the possibilities of human frailty. On
the other, coldness, a real contempt, and that callous reliance on an
unswerving chastity, which some have been pleased to call respect--and
which is so annoying even to the plainest woman.
Religion again effects a distinction. Those who adhere to the worship
of Shiva, the God of Destruction, the Lord of Death, the Master of
Ascetics, are apt to turn from the goods of this life to a final
absorption in an abstract oneness. But in Krishna, the very human
incarnation of God the Preserver, the inhabitants of the richer and
more fertile tracts of the continent have found a congenial saviour.
From the devotees of his creed he demands only love, a constant and
all-absorbing offering of the heart: and he bestows upon them in return
the free ease of the world through which they are passing on the way
to the love-laden groves of Paradise. While the followers of the
theology that centres upon Shankar see the universe as one, an abstract
God-in-himself, indivisible, unchanging, a pure spirit that alone _is_
and has being, and define the aim of life as, after reiterated births
into further action, the final liberation from the senses by absorption
into this infinite and unqualified spirit, the worshippers of Krishna
adopt a teaching which admits an eternal dualism. Force and nature,
spirit and matter, are to them an everlasting pair, which can never be
finally united. So they tend readily to a view of life in which man
and the Deity, as he can know Him, are circumscribed by nature, and
in which man can find salvation in the love of all things. And in the
love of all things, if there be inward grace, the enjoyment of the
nature that God has granted to the world must be allowable. Freedom is
attained when the enjoyment is unconditioned and the soul is wholly
united to the spirit of all nature. It is only the conditions of life,
and the need for transcending the wants of the world in order to reach
that grace in which God is directly felt, which can impose restrictions
and prohibitions. So, naturally enough, the disciple of the gracious,
kind, and loving Krishna is more likely to demand love from the
companion of life than the ascetic votary of Shiva. The practical
meaning of marriage is again very different in the warrior caste, now
represented by the Rajput clans. Comparatively recent invaders of mixed
Scythian and Turkish or Hunnish tribes, they almost alone in India have
become what in Europe is meant by a gentry or an aristocracy. Feudal in
their concept of the state, cavaliers and men-at-arms, seeking in war
a profession, in the acquisition of landed estates their fulfilment,
and in sport their relaxation, they have brought to the brown monotony
of India the splendour of gallantry, chivalry, and romance. Exempted
even by priestly ordinance from the oppressive asceticism that is in
general obligatory to the Hindu mind, they have formed for themselves
a code of honour coloured by the legitimate hopes and enjoyments of a
warrior clan. In the traditions of their caste they still preserve the
memory of the bride’s choosing. The suitors sat assembled, each in his
own place, in the palace hall, with sword and shield to his hand. The
curtain was uplifted and the bride stepped round the hall, a garland
of flowers on her arm. Then when she reached the man whom she chose to
be her own prince and beloved husband, she slipped the garland on his
neck. Thus they became man and wife, and no one could deny their will.
That time is long since gone, and no bride has now such a choosing.
Yet to this day the heroines of all Indian plays and the great women
of Indian poetry are all of the Rajput class. Marriage is with them
even now a practice adapted to the aristocratic temper partly from the
earlier Brahman books and partly from the traditions of Central Asia,
tinged also by the fashions set by Mussulman emperors in the Courts at
Delhi. Polygamy is recognized as lawful and is practised by the Ruling
Chiefs and the richer of their cadets. The maid-servant may be the
concubine of her master and the dancing girl who enlivens the Courts is
often in private a mistress. But great is the power of the wife behind
the curtain, deep and warm-blooded the love she hopes to win, great
also her valorous devotion. And through the whole fabric runs a woof as
of old, half-faded brocade, a thread of chivalry and pure reverence and
protective delight. A strand of silk at the wrist may make the Rajput
gentleman at any moment the knight-errant of a lady whom he shall never
see, and for whom his honour shall yet be as a brother’s.
But to the Rajput lady of a ruling house there is one special terror.
If death puts his finger on her husband, her life is too often
overwhelmed to an extent unnecessary and cruel. For herself remarriage
is forbidden: and a love-affair is often requited with secret poison by
her husband’s successors. For there are many who still hold that the
family honour can be stained indelibly by a woman’s lightness. Then
in her husband’s place may sit on the throne a rival’s son, who from
childhood has had his ears filled with bitterness. Her jointure may be
insufficient; even an administration is only too often unsympathetic
or unduly sparing of money; or the successor may by force or intrigue
attenuate the estate that was bequeathed. She finds interest no
doubt in the management of the lands that form her jointure, but her
seclusion places her largely in the hands of interested advisers. As
a rule, the downfall is more lamentable even than that of the Dowager
in Europe, except perhaps in Royal families. Suicide (_Sati_) on the
funeral pyre was in the past almost a release for the Rajput widow.
Among the smaller Rajput yeomanry, the case is better. Remarriage is
not unseldom allowed. At the worst, the wife has had no rival and
her own child succeeds; while, failing children, she finds with her
relatives the respect and kindness to women which is general in this
caste of manly gentlemen.
[Illustration: FROM JODHPUR]
Another group consists of the lower, but thoroughly Hinduized, working
castes. These run from the very low untouchable castes who are the
usual domestics of the European officer to the skilled artisan and
the cultivator. Their matrimonial regulations are a compromise (like
most compromises hardly “working”) between Brahman theory, economic
necessity, and obsolete primitive custom. They are influenced vaguely
by the usual ideals. Widow remarriage is however tolerated and
commonly practised, though somewhat looked down upon in the popular
regard. When the parties to the association are working men and women,
miserably poor for the most part, illiterate and unprogressive, it
follows naturally that the action of the system is conditioned mainly
by economics. Toil and labour, in field or factory or shop, is the
part of both, and the woman’s household work and the assistance of
the growing children are incentives to and conditions of the marriage.
They have no leisure for the finer sensibilities and, like the poor
in all countries, must have an eye ever open to the needs of food
and nutrition. Without much education and with little capacity for
refined emotion, it is not unnatural if there is sometimes disunion,
and if they seldom attain the heights. The husband in his cups may
occasionally beat his wife, or may have to sit with bowed head before
the storm of her boisterous abuse. Yet they compare favourably with
similar classes in other countries; and at the worst they shame the
terrors of European slums, the brutal wife-kickers and procurers who
lurk in the blind alleys of industrial life. It is true indeed that
the rapid growth of industrial labour in India also has adversely
affected the marriages of that class and that only too often an unhappy
union ends in elopement or prostitution. Generally, however, it may be
said that the Hindu husband even in this class seldom descends to the
grossness and cruelty so often found in the lower quarters of European
cities: while the wife forms and maintains a higher standard of womanly
conduct and devotion. An easier toleration marks their conjugal
relations and the Hindu character at its worst is commonly free from
the extremer modes of brutality.
Among the aboriginal tribes, the Bhils for instance, marriage is still
in a very fluid condition. The actual form that in practice it takes
depends inevitably on the extent to which the tribe has succumbed to
Hindu or rather Brahman influence. As it becomes subjected to that
influence, and as in consequence it aims at raising its rank within
the Hindu social system by the aping of higher castes, so it the more
readily adopts the worst accretions to Hindu matrimony, child-marriage,
for instance, and large dowries. But in general it may be said that
marriage among such tribes is a free association between youthful
adults, promulgated by certain payments of money or service to the
bride’s parents and relieved, if barren or unhappy, by an almost
unrestricted right of divorce. Pre-nuptial chastity is hardly looked
for, and neither man nor girl is much blamed for an early slip. After
marriage chastity is the usual rule. The attitude is in practice not
very dissimilar from the reasonable and natural outlook of the Scottish
peasant; and, as in Scotland, the net result is a state of general
happiness, easy and equal companionship, and very remarkable mutual
trust. The woman has much weight in affairs and not unfrequently holds
the purse. As in the country districts of Scotland, prostitution is
unknown, and the cruel ruin of a woman who has loved too soon is
practically unheard of. Widows of course remarry, and there is much
homely love between husband and wife and parents and children.
Another system still survives among the inhabitants of the southern
coast lands where the Arabian Sea beats against the palm groves of
Malabar. Here the tribes of the Nairs, formerly warlike and still
brave, headed by the ruling house of Travancore, maintain a marriage
system that dates from the earlier Dravidian culture which preceded
the Aryan invasions. Both among the Nairs--the noble class--and among
the priests, the Nambutiri Brahmans, an ecclesiastical and land-owning
aristocracy of peculiar sanctity, the customs of matriarchy prevail
in various degrees. Among the Nairs, for several centuries, the law
was of polyandry, pure and simple, the wife having several husbands
according to her own good pleasure. In late years the actual habit of
polyandry is to all intents defunct and only in very few cases, if
at all, could a Nair lady be found who consorts with more than one
husband. But succession is still traced through the female line and a
boy succeeds to his mother’s brother, not to his father. And in other
subtler ways the effects of polyandry are still manifest. Perhaps the
most curious survival is that the religious ceremonial of marriage--an
expensive and public rite--is performed at an early age with a man,
with whom the girl has no other connection than formal participation
in this ineffective sacrament. Much later comes what, in the European
sense, would be called the real marriage, with the husband whom she is
to cherish. This is a contract, entered into freely by both parties,
dissoluble at will. One of the elements of its popularity and success
is in this very freedom which has given the Nair ladies a position
enjoyed by few other Indian women. An attempt absurdly made to limit
this freedom by legislation, which gave an option to the parties
by an act of registration to introduce the usual disabilities of a
rigid matrimony, has proved an utter failure. An accompaniment of
the polyandrous or matriarchal system, which still prevails, is that
husband and wife do not live together. The Nair house is the abode of
a whole large family, based upon joint descent from a common female
ancestor. In the house or family mansion the apartments of the women
are together and are entirely separate from that part of the house in
which the men live. In this house the husband has no part or share;
but he comes to visit his wife in her apartment just as she goes
occasionally to visit him in the similar household in which, by his
descent on the mother’s side, he has a right to live. On the freedom
of choice exercised by a Nair lady in her mating there is little
restriction, save only the one that she must not choose a man of lower
station.
The Nambutiri Brahmans, on the other hand, though they live among
the Nair tribes and are their priests, have gone no further than a
compromise between this system and the arrangements usually prevalent
among Brahmans. The results, like those of most compromises, have
been disastrous. Only the eldest son of a family marries. The rest,
when study of Scripture and the practice of ascetic simplicity
prove unsatisfying, seek consolation in indiscriminate seduction.
The immediate results of a theory so unnatural are polygamy,
burdensome dowries, marriages for wealth alone, and the seclusion and
bondage of women. In spite of the simplicity and candour of these
Brahmans--qualities which make them personally loveable even to
those who deplore their influence--their community has been gravely
injured by such marriages. Only the simplicity of their desires and the
earnest conservatism of their faith have made them tolerate a system so
unnatural and injurious. They bow with pious resignation to the will of
God, by which they mean the results of their own human folly.
Bitter must the contrast be to the secluded and austere Nambutiri
ladies when they see their Nair neighbours at the annual winter
festival which commemorates the death of Kámdev, the Hindu God of Love.
Long before daybreak, every Nair girl of any position is out of bed
and goes with her girl friends to the nearest tank. Plunging into the
water together, they sing in unison the song which is sacred to the
God of human hearts. As they sing, they beat the water, with the left
hand held immediately under the surface and the right brought down
upon it in a sloping stroke, splashing and sounding deep. Stanza after
stanza, song after song they sing till the first light of dawn peeps
over the cocoa-nut palms. Then they go back to their homes to dress in
their best and enjoy their holy day. They darken their eyelids with
collyrium and make their lips red with betel leaf. In the gardens they
play on swings with their friends. Then they sit down in merriment and
enjoyment to the noon-day meal of arrowroot and molasses with ripe
yellow plantains and green cocoa-nuts. Afterwards they again sing and
dance, while all good husbands on this day of days visit their wives in
their family mansions and make themselves pleasant to the ladies of
the family and bring little presents and friendly good wishes.
This system, strange though it appears to those who are familiar only
with Jewish and Teutonic customs, has been particularly successful in
securing the ends of every marriage--comfort, free development, and
the worthy upbringing of healthy children. In no class in India is
education better appreciated and more widely shared by the sexes. Every
Nair girl is sent to the village school, her education as much a matter
of course as her brothers’; while there are many who have matriculated
at the Madras University. At the same time, by the universal admission
of those who know them, there are few women in India who have greater
charm or exercise as valuable an influence on the manners and morals of
society.
Marriage in Hindu India is, therefore, very various both in practice
and in theory according to the locality and the race or caste.
But regarded as a whole it presents, one may say, some common
characteristics. It is invariably a religious rite, sanctioned by
magical ceremony, really sacramental. Only in castes which allow
a widow to remarry is the second union divested of most of this
supernatural sanction, to become almost a free contract. Again
marriages are in general arranged by the parents or relations--with
the advice of priests and astrologers--while the husband and wife
are still children, either in real childhood or shortly after their
puberty. Further, in all the higher castes, and in lower castes as
they assume or usurp a higher position, widows are forbidden a further
marriage. Normally the idea of marriage in the classes in which Brahman
influence is most firm is accompanied by a certain ascetic thought,
which holds sensuousness and enjoyment to be something debasing and
earth-bound. The world of action being illusory and unreal, and each
action entailing its answering reaction, deliverance from illusive
appearances and absorption into the one final reality can be gained
only by passive withdrawal from activity. But all action springs from
desire: and the strongest and most attractive of desires is love.
Hence in marriage there should be no overpowering desires, none of
those impulses of emotion which keep the man bound during thousands
of incarnations to the idly-turning wheel of illusion. Only as a
deliverance from conflicting desire and as the means of continuing
family life is marriage in itself to be valued. Its happiness and
fruition are to be sought not in the tumults of passion but in the calm
and ordered affection of a disciplined and worshipful pair. From the
husband protection and self-restraint are due; from the wife to the
lord, whom heaven has given her, unflinching devotion, constant respect
and obedience, unwavering chastity.
But in some castes and places the ideal has been altered largely
by feudalism and chivalry, by luxury and an appreciation of human
happiness, and by the influences of a kindly humanizing belief. There
we find love welcomed and pursued, and the beauteous wife elevated
like a substantiation of that Krishna-spirit in which man attains on
earth to the love which is unending.
In general, Hindu marriage does undoubtedly, to a marked extent, reach
very closely to the purposes which it seeks. In general, it produces a
very real, if somewhat colourless, affection, an affection maintained
by common interests and the great bond of constant association. The
defects which it has are in the main the excrescences of a religious
system, such as are apt to grow wherever reason is displaced by
theological or supernatural commandment. When rationalism grows strong
enough to question the authority of priestly ordinance and tradition,
it will be possible without any very serious effort to prune them
safely from the sturdy trunk of Hindu life.
[Illustration: A MILL-HAND]
Child-marriage is, of course, that one of all its features which has
been most violently attacked. But it may be doubted whether those
who have attacked it have always had a clear understanding of its
significance. Real child-marriage--the wedding of children who have not
yet reached puberty--is after all nothing more than an indefeasible
betrothal. And in itself it is a logical and natural deduction
from a theory which postulates the selection of the bridal pair by
supernatural agency, working either through the divinations of an
astrologer or through the parents’ careful affection. Any element of
personal choice and free-will would be repugnant to the underlying
thoughts and must to a large extent be subversive of the social and
moral superstructure. Free-choice could be introduced generally only by
a substitution for Brahman regulation of something quite other--as the
warrior castes, for instance, extorted for themselves from a submissive
hierarchy a different scale of moral values. Moreover, in practice
child-marriage has some clear advantages. For it allows the wedded
pair to be brought up together, as children only, in their parents’
houses, till in time they become habituated to each other’s company
and affection, while gradually they come to know and learn their place
in those large households to which their future lives belong. The
Hindu married couple can live in no independent isolation like the
European. Rather they will be but one unit of a great family household
managed on behalf of all by its eldest members. The real marriage,
the consummation of their growth to man and woman, comes much later,
after many years perhaps, when the parents at last give their consent
to the grown student and the healthy maiden who helps daily in the
household tasks. Rather it is not the child-marriage that is so much to
be deprecated as the marriage that succeeds, as in some castes it does,
too quickly upon puberty. For, by an unhappy ignorance, puberty is in
India only too often thought, as it was thought in the Europe of the
Renaissance, to be maturity; and the marriage thus concluded is at once
made real.
In fact, in both cases what is needed is a little more scientific
knowledge and the embodiment of the knowledge in the Penal Code. Cases
occur only too frequently of the martyrdom of young brides, not so
much from cruelty, or even from uncontrolled passion, as from sheer
ignorance of scientific fact. It has become a superstition, supported
of course by the usual authority, that puberty means maturity, not
merely for love--which would be sufficiently misleading--but even for
child-bearing. Here it is that rational education must enter the field.
In a country in which knowledge is luckily not accounted shameful, it
is easy for education to explain that puberty is only the beginning of
a new period, and that love’s first blossoms must not be followed by
too early fruit.
In this respect the practice of Hindu marriage unhappily does show a
fault of the most serious and terrible kind. If education has still
much to do, the state of the law most certainly requires improvement.
It is sometimes said that the Penal Law of India at present does
not give adequate protection to girls who, for various reasons, are
unmarried. But silence is usually kept about the far more serious fact
that it provides practically no protection to the married girl. In
her case the age of consent has actually been fixed at twelve; and no
child of more than twelve can claim protection from the law against
the brutality of the man to whom she has been married. Obviously the
limit of age for the protection of girls should be the same in all
cases, whether she be married or unmarried, whether she be the victim
of the man to whom she has been joined beside the sacred fire or of
one who owes her no special duty. It is the most obvious confusion of
thought which fails to see that the offence, if it is one, is exactly
the same, whether or not a mystical ritual has been first observed. The
_thug_ was no better than a common strangler because he first prayed
to Bhavani before he murdered. The offence is the same in all cases;
the punishment should, if anything, be more severe to the man who is
peculiarly bound in duty and in honour to cherish the woman he has made
his wife. The State is now prepared to protect against perversion a
class of women who, on an outside estimate, do not exceed one-hundredth
of the population and who _ex hypothesi_ are of a position and
character somewhat less than reputable. But the State denies its
protection to the other ninety-nine women of each hundred, the mothers
of the country, the honoured helpmates of its households.
The harshness is made the greater by vices which, though forbidden,
have in practice become common. The sale of daughters is an offence
against which the sacred writings of the Hindus strongly and
consistently inveigh. Yet in only too many cases parents do little
else than sell their girls in marriage to the highest bidder. The sums
of money which they demand and which they use, not for the daughter’s
benefit, but for their own, are so large that they are forced to accept
a suitor of sufficient substance without regard to fitness or religious
sanction. Of the higher classes many nowadays revolt against such
conduct, which they recognize to be wicked and despicable. But in the
lower castes it is still general. The inner motive of such actions
is, of course, the ignorance, quite as much as the selfishness, of
the father. Too ignorant to comprehend that a human soul is an end in
itself and that a daughter is also a free human being, he looks on her
with besotted eye as a mere instrument of his own betterment. Hand in
hand with this evil, and dependent from it, is the terrible practice
of giving young brides to elderly husbands. In no other country could
the results be more disastrous or the girl-wife more unhappy. Vallabh,
the Gujaráti poet, has expressed that wretchedness in a beautiful song,
which has had some influence in abating this social evil. From it the
following lines are quoted, addressed to the Goddess Mother:--
“Goddess mother, old is the husband thou hast given me,
Mother, accursed is this coming to life of mine. Alas, what more can
I say?
Goddess mother, a little child am I and he a great lumbering, aged man,
My youth is like a blossom and my husband is a shrivelled mummy.
Mother, mine are just sixteen years and he has seen his eighty.
Goddess mother, of a winter’s night there is many a taste one feels,
But doltish is old age, and my husband is deaf and dumb.
Goddess mother, sportive am I and would like to play and I make my eyes
twinkle,
But, mother, he, he says, ‘I’ll beat you,’ and lifts his stick in his
hand.
Old is my husband, mother, what good can come out of age?
Goddess mother, on the festival all the girls are gaily dressed and
merry,
But my husband is tired and weak and ugly, and I bend my head in shame.
Mother, my hair is black and his head is all white or grey.
My youth is at its blooming and already my life is wrecked.
Goddess mother, why was I not strangled at birth, why was I not poisoned?
Yet if my husband die, it is my part to be true to death.
Nay, Goddess mother, with joined hands I pray at thy feet,
When I am born again, give me a husband that is young and strong.”
But as long as society tolerates the acceptance of money by a bride’s
father, so long will there be parents to be tempted by gold to sanction
their children’s ruin. And even then there will persist a deeper
reason. For girls are all early married and widows may not marry a
second time. So, even against his will, an elderly man is forced, if he
wishes to have the legitimate and socially-sanctioned companionship of
a woman, to seek in marriage one of the young girls who alone are in
India available for a suitor.
The prohibition of widow remarriage has also been bitterly attacked,
often by those Indians who, from education or environment, have been
affected by rationalism, sometimes by those who find a false pride
in the imitation of foreign custom. But the prohibition is not of
course universal. Those castes which have not yet set up a claim
to the higher ceremonial purities, are free to compound with human
desires by a second marriage, devoid of sacramental significance. It
is in the higher classes that the woman may have to pay for the pride
of caste by her individual austerities. Yet against the prohibition
of widow remarriage may be set the terrific wastage in Europe of
chaste and unmarried women. It has not at least entailed upon Indian
society that narrowing and unnatural education which Europe has seen
itself forced to accept, with all its consequent evils, and which is
perhaps inevitable if chastity is to be required as their highest and
sometimes their only virtue from women who are in every case condemned
to a lengthy and, in a vast number of unhappy cases, to a life-long
celibacy. In India a woman is at least allowed to _know_ and to be
natural; for an early marriage gives her in her ripening maturity the
fitting fulfilment of her womanhood. And, even at the worst conjunction
of destiny, the ideal of devotion crystallized in an unbroken widowhood
is, in itself, no ignoble aspiration. The unflinching veneration that
a son gives to his widowed mother is in India no small recompense for
her sacrifice to a sacred duty. Widowhood is recognized by all as a
state--divinely imposed--of austerity and atonement. But it has its own
quiet rewards in the family home, with its sense of duty done, like a
nun’s or a Sister of Mercy’s. It is harsh in those castes, which have
merely adopted a custom, when the inspiring ideal is not felt living
in their hearts, deep and intense. And it is also harsh in those cases
where the original thought has been warped by an exaggerated deduction
or where punishment is too rigorously exacted for illicit infringement
of the rule. At least in the case of the child-widow, betrothed indeed
by a sacrament, but never really wedded, some speedy relaxation of
the rule appears desirable: and it is probable that, with the decay
of faith and with the new scepticism about blessings conveyed by an
astrologer’s predictions, some such amendment will soon ensue.
A deeper objection to the Hindu system is one which has been seldom,
if ever, expressed. Racially, the absence of that natural selection
which expresses itself in sexual desire, cannot but be detrimental.
It is perhaps vain to expect a vigorous childhood to be born from
unions in which healthy desire is replaced by the coldness of duty or
by an instinct that has not been transfigured by personal attraction
and selection. The difficulty is inherent in a system which bases
its selection upon the supernatural and rejects the natural call of
spirit to spirit and sense to sense. And yet it must be confessed, not
without shame, that a careful selection by parents, if it could be
trusted to be rational and disinterested, might be no more injurious
than the restricted and illusory choice, too often made in ignorance,
which so far seems to be the only substitute that civilization has
learnt to provide. In general, it may be said that the Hindu rules
of marriage are, in the ordinary sense of happiness, as conducive
to the happiness of the spouses as the fast transforming systems of
modern Europe, and that their happiness is less self-centred and more
altruistic. Romantic love is, after all, most commonly, even in Europe,
the short-lived flower of life in one sex and one class. Marriage
must everywhere be in practice limited and artificially restricted.
Economic conditions are very near the base of most marriages; and
even in the richer classes must be a main constituent of the bride’s
decision. Moreover, for the lasting purposes of marriage, affection
is no bad substitute for love--affection and the sense of destined
consecration. It may at least be asserted that, in general, among the
upper castes of India the mingled feeling of duty and devotion is as
strong as, and perhaps more stable than, in the corresponding sections
of English society. In many places, however, and in many castes, the
soft bloom of companionship and emotion is bruised by the brutality of
a first union with a partner before unknown and undesired. Nor can it
be denied that the gnostic asceticism, to which Indian idealism has
so often condescended, has killed, where it could, that joy in a free
humanity which alone can invest marriage with the flaming beauty of
love. When the value of love is considered as an inspiration to art and
chivalry and, indeed, to every creative activity, then the loss, thus
self-inflicted, will appear in all its gravity. It may well be that the
deathly slumber of the arts in modern India is to no small extent due
to spiritual conditions which exclude and condemn the love which is
profane, and is therefore alive and immortal.
[Illustration: A MAHAR WOMAN]
The Ladies of the Aristocracy
“Love in full life and length, not love ideal,
No, nor ideal beauty, that fine name,
But something better still, so very real
That the sweet model must have been the same.
And oh! the loveliness at times we see
In momentary gliding, the soft grace,
The youth, the bloom, the beauty which agree,
In many a nameless being we retrace,
Whose course and home we know not nor shall know
Like the lost Pleiad seen no more below.”
_Beppo._ LORD BYRON.