THE MIDDLE CLASSES
In a vast empire with a population of over three hundred millions, in
area a continent, with some thirty-five main languages and of dialects
none can say how many, with different religions and with cultures
divided from each other by centuries of progress, anything like an
adequate description of the middle-class woman would be a task beyond
human power, and its perusal beyond the patience of the most enduring
reader. Less difficult by far would it be to head a chapter “The middle
classes of Europe,” and, within its limits, after running from Greece
and Roumania to Spain and England, to scale the heights upon which,
like an inspiration, the womanhood of France sits enthroned. But there
are at least some essentials in which the womanhood of the Indian
middle classes becomes congruous, differing therein from the women of
other countries, Europe for instance, or America or China. Perhaps it
may be tried by the selection of a few types, with the aid of contrast
and analysis, in some way to express their essential atmosphere and
habit.
Burmah must, one finds, go to the wall, not most certainly for any
fault of its own but because it lies so far apart from the total of
Indian life. For administration it is placed within the confines of
the Indian Empire, but with the Indian peoples its people has no lot
or part. To omit it seems almost a pity, so frankly independent are
its women and so fascinating--free above the women of most nations and
consonant to an unusual degree with ultimate human ideals. One sees
such a little Burmese lady sometimes, but how rarely, in India, the
wife perhaps of some English officer or of a high Burmese councillor,
so a picture may stand as reminder of smiling daintiness, like some
porcelain figurine glazed and tinted in the furnace of human freedom.
In India proper, of the middle classes, the most important, and perhaps
the most enigmatic, figure is the Brahman’s. The class is certainly an
aristocracy in one, the etymological, sense. For it is as being best
that they hold power and the power that they hold is, even to this
day, most undeniable. Aristocracy--“rule of the best”--of those rather
who are admitted to be best--if this be indeed a meaning true to fact,
then the Brahmans should be included in or alone comprise that rank.
With many of them their very appearance, their gait and self-composure,
support the role. With steady untroubled eye, straight nose and
sensitive nostril, fair skin, “pride in their port” and self-restraint
in every gesture, they move through the mass of common men, as if
conscious of a higher mission. By the sacred thread across the shoulder
they proclaim themselves twice-born, once from a mortal womb and once
again at an auspicious hour in childhood by initiation to the sacred
mysteries. Calm and indifferent, serene with a careful precision
and habit of restraint, they incarnate in their manner something of
absolute repose, as if untouched by the mundane ebb and flow. Withal
they are not in any customary sense a nobility. Perhaps, it may be
said, they have transcended even nobility. In any case the proudest
noble must at times, and some must constantly, admit the ascendancy,
spiritual though it be, of these born preceptors. The greatest ruler
will eat food cooked by the poorest Brahman beggar; but no Brahman,
desperate with the pangs of destitution, would accept even a glass of
water from a monarch’s jug, the mere touch being a profanation to the
nutriment of sanctity. In Southern India, where the Brahman, immigrant
from Aryan races, was most successful in exploiting the indigenous
population by the means of religious awe, the Nair nobility are abject
in their recognition of this hierarchic superiority. In every word of
speech the Nair throws himself, as a clod of mud, before the Brahman’s
feet to be trampled and contemned. His house becomes, in speaking to
a Brahman, his poor dunghill and the Brahman’s house his palace; his
teeth are dirty in his speech, and the Brahman’s pearls; his sleep is a
mere falling into snores, and the Brahman’s an honourable slumber.
But in ordinary speech, in Europe and no less in India, the concept
of nobility or aristocracy in its worldly relations implies other
qualities. A certain tinge of feudal tradition colours our thought;
and a nobleman is always conceived primarily as a fighter and a leader
of his own men in his own estate. Love of sport, a certain careless
gaiety, an eupeptic cheerfulness and a happy enjoyment, face to
face with a world in which nothing really matters, coupled with the
readiness to do the duties of his station and to die for honour, these
are qualities that make up the mental picture.
It is not to such a class that the Brahman belongs. To life and the
pleasures of life, he stands as a pillar of negation. Not here and
now one conceives him beckoning, but in a reality transcending all
appearance in duty and existence. Privation is for him the highest rule
and participation in the world is at most an inexorable concession to
accidental forces. The Brahman’s life must, in semblance at least, be
one of constant abstention, rigidly guarded. The show of enjoyment and
the joy of healthy natural life must be repressed or at least veiled
discreetly. Between him and mere sensual humanity he has dug a gulf,
impassable.
[Illustration: LADY FROM MYSORE]
Of Brahmans only a few are by ordination priests. The majority fill the
professional classes, as administrators, clerks, astrologers, scholars,
physicians, lawyers, and the like. Some are money-lenders and not a
few are cultivators of the soil. There are even rare Brahman houses
which, in spite of religious prohibition, have usurped the thrones
of princes. But in all there exists not only a sense of solidarity
as being sanctified, but also this ideal of abstention, leading in
practice not unseldom to a grave and measured hypocrisy. As a whole
they are the professional class of India, they and the rival caste,
the Kayasthas or “scribes,” and maintain with admirable earnestness
the tastes and pursuits of an intellectual, idealizing, and temperate
order. Mental discipline, the suppression of the impulsive act, a habit
of restriction so incessant as to become almost instinctive, these they
have to a degree almost overwhelming.
Among Rajput women one finds certainly the highest development of the
individual with the greatest charm and the fullest humanity, and it is
they, almost alone, who have achieved the heroic. But to India as a
whole the ordinary ideal of woman in her relation to social function is
represented by the more reticent figure of the Brahman. She is woman as
in his life the ordinary man would wish to find her, quiet, devoted,
managing and pious.
Nowhere is the Brahman woman so true to the type presented in this
ideal as in the Madras Presidency and in the Bombay Deccan. And never
is she so true to herself as when she goes, sedately, to the temple.
In her hand she carries the brass tray on which she has put her humble
offerings of ochre powder and flowers with a wick burning beside
them; and she goes looking neither to the right nor to the left. She
rings the bell which summons the God’s attention to his worshipper
and walks the prescribed ceremonial steps round the idol with a grave
unquestioning dignity. And her whole life is one unceasing round of
service, in which humility is elevated by an ever-present sense of
Divine ordinance. To the lowly in heart she feels--almost one might say
she knows, so strongly does she feel--belongs the kingdom of heaven.
In service to find fulfilment, even happiness, that is her God-given
mission. She grinds corn and cooks, carries water and washes the
house, nurses her children, waits upon her family, as also she draws
ornamental patterns with white and red chalks upon her door-step, all
with a humble pride and joy in the singleness of her devotion. In
poorer houses, in the houses of far the greater number of her class,
she is at work all day from long before the first-dawning till at last
at night she falls into the deep slumbers of exhaustion. There are few
who keep servants, except for an occasional old woman who comes to help
with the rougher tasks. And in addition to the household labour, she
is forced, too early, to premature childbirth, and protracted nursing.
For charm and coquetry, for all the arts by which woman gladdens life
and creates a liberal society, she has, if she had the inclination, no
spare time or energy. She ages early, spent by exhausting labour and
the recurring burden of unregulated childbirth, unwarmed by joy, unlit
by passion.
[Illustration: A SOUTHERN INDIAN TYPE]
But the bare life of poverty and unending labour is illumined by a
spiritual exaltation. With the performance of their service the million
Saint Theresas of the Deccan are able to find within their hearts a
satisfying happiness. Like nuns, by an austere self-repression, they
avert their eyes from humanity and the human purposes of life; and when
they are forced to see, they persuade themselves to despise. They live
as it were in a spiritual cloister. But even in this world they are not
altogether without reward, though it comes late in life. The love and
devoted kindness of her sons, that is the one constant meed of service
upon which the woman counts. And there are few things more impressive
than an Indian son’s look when he turns to his mother or the tone in
which, even years after her death, he speaks of his childhood at her
side. And in old age when she in turn, with her husband, succeeds
to the management of the large joint family household, she finds a
peaceful joy in the ordering of their simple life and the caresses of
her clustering grandchildren. At the end, when death lays her to sleep
at last, she dies in the hope of an untroubled peace, as one who has
accomplished a lengthy service not without pain and effort.
Such perhaps most truly are the women of India, as through a large
continent the greatest number of its inhabitants would like to see
them. Not for this world, they might say, is the labour; not for love
and enjoyment and greater power and finer emotions and self-development
and the glories of nature do they thirst. Of the fervours of youth and
the vivid joys of mere active BEING, of the fine harmonies between soul
and sense in expanding, self-perfecting human functions, of a humanity
that should be self-sufficient, free in the face of the eternal
universe and glad in the fight for mastery with obstructive matter,
they have not even a conception. To an Indian Antigone no chorus would
sing of human power and magnitude. Only the preacher would instruct in
humility and abnegation.
Even the richest Brahman women of the South spend their leisure hours
in a manner that accords with the common ideal. Relieved of the more
exhausting house-work by the labour of the servants, they spend the
afternoon hours when they are at rest in the reading of the Purans,
those grosser Scriptures or, one might perhaps with truer comparison
say, those Hagiologies in which priests have deformed the too subtle
tenets of Hindu theosophy with the flesh of mythology. In the reciting
of these legends, and in lengthy prayers and ritual performance the
wealthy Brahman lady is content to find the entertainment of her
leisure.
The same ideal of service and privation is to be found no less in
Bengal, sweetened however and softened like the more languid air.
There is something hard, even cruel perhaps, in the arid Deccan
plain with its burning dry winds and its stony hill-sides, and its
stern, thrifty, self-centred people. Its asceticism is harsh and
rough, the sour ferment as it were of crude souls in fear of a fierce
Deity, looking by abnegation to secure the grace that alone can give
salvation. The spirit is that, almost, of a Hindu Calvinism, savagely
abnegatory. A softer piety, as of some Italian nunnery among roses and
olive trees over the blue sea, inspires the womanhood of Bengal. They
have a devotion no less intense, their service and self-sacrifice is
no smaller; but they are filled also with the pity that assuages and
the love that makes things sweet. To be kind and tender in a world
which, with all its evil and pain, is pervaded by a loving and merciful
Providence, such is the spirit in which they render service. The large
houses of Bengal, embowered in trees, have a claustral peace as well as
labour. The lives of the women in them are coloured by the tender light
of pity and affection. Often in the warm nights under the star-strewn
sky, young girls creep to each other and whisper little gaieties.
[Illustration: BENGALI LADY]
In general, among the middle classes of Bengal, women practise a
seclusion that is, however, not too rigid. It is a seclusion like
that of classic Athens, not savagely jealous as it still is in many
Rajput houses. But with the renaissance that in the last fifty years
has so greatly altered life in this great province, many have learnt
to discard orthodoxy and with it the traditional restrictions. At
Benares, especially, many a Bengali lady can be seen walking openly to
the temples and the sacred river. Always she bears a perfect courtesy
and a rounded balanced dignity. Of the newer school, too many perhaps
have aspirations gleaned from the lighter English novels which they
eagerly read--dreams for whose passage the ivory gates of Hinduism
were never meant to open. But deep in the hearts of all--far deeper
than such fashions--are the images of Sita and Sakuntala. Some play
tennis and ride, some there are who return from English schools and the
smarter section of London society with the gossip of Ranelagh or the
bridge club and a wider taste for amusement. But there are none who
discard the tenderness and soft devotion of their native womanhood.
Nowhere in India have there been so many marriages between English
and Indian; nowhere have they been more successful. The number of
women really educated, appreciative of art and literature, a few even
themselves poets and writers, is out of all comparison large; and the
artistic rebirth in Bengal must to some extent have been shaped by the
influence of women’s grace on the social world. Without departing from
the prescribed fields of service and abnegation, they take their part
in every important movement--sometimes perhaps unwisely! But at times
they have brought untold benefit by their acts. So a few years ago did
the brave girl who by the sacrifice of her own life slew a great social
evil--the purchase of men at the price of ruinous dowries. It must
at least be conceded that the women of Bengal, descendant from mixed
races but long since truly Indian, have clothed the sacerdotal ideal in
vestment of soft and womanly grace. But there are other parts of India
where even the Brahman woman has diverged from this ideal, or--should
one not rather say?--has transfused into it the feelings and robust
sensuality of a more vigorous nature. Where the late conquerors from
the North have settled, where rich plains bear wheat and millet, and
fields are hedged with the milk-bush and the cactus, where the great
trees make the country seem like an English park, and the air bites
cold in the winter mornings when a skin of ice crackles on road-side
pools, where in the hot months the sun hangs like a disc of brass
over the panting earth, there the pulse beats stronger and a larger
nature sways the will. Women there have their claims as well as duties;
and from life they demand, besides the right to serve, a broader power
also and a rich fulfilment. They wish for love and to be loved, and
even in their service they aspire to govern. For their womanhood they
claim at least some freedom. The texts are still the same; but they are
commented by a bolder temperament. The distinction holds good perhaps
for all the women of real Hindustan--for the lusty graceful women of
Allahabad, for instance, and the upper Ganges Valley.
[Illustration: A NÁGAR BEAUTY]
But nowhere can this fine and active type be better studied than in
the Nágar caste of Káthiawád and Gujarát. The Nágar community came
to India with the last Scythian hordes; and almost at once, at the
great fire baptism of Ajmer, attained the rank of Brahmans. To this
day, so high do they hold themselves above all others, they hardly
trouble to use the title Brahman, but call themselves merely Nágar,
with a proud simplicity, as who would say, “I am the Prince.” For
centuries they have held the appointments of the State and been famous
as administrators. They are to be found in every rank and in every
department of the public services, clever, courteous, receptive, and
self-confident. Their pride has become a byword among other castes; and
their success has made them the mark of envy and dislike. But there
can be no question of the ability with which they have held their
position, nor of the keen, progressive intellect that guides their
interests and activities. They have an eager humanity, and a keen
understanding of worldly good and evil, and are above the hypocritical
renunciations and pessimistic sanctity of a priestly class. Literature
they hold in honour; and the creative instinct, which leads many of
them to administration as the career in which man expresses his active
will through the minds and morals of mankind, forces others of their
community to self-expression in thought and language. If renunciation
there be, it is here, not for a mere negation, in itself fruitless;
but to the end of a greater realization in the material given by
humanity. In this dynamic will, the women have a proportional share.
Ambitious and intellectual, they partake in the interests of their
families and encourage or advise their husbands and their children.
For the achievement of purpose they are ready for every sacrifice; but
the consciousness of larger interests ennobles the sacrifice as it
humanizes the purpose. They too serve, as every Hindu woman seeks to
serve, and the Nágar wife, like her sisters, will cook and wash and
stand aside before her man and wait upon his meals. But her devotion
is shaped by a less trammelled intellect, and she claims in return an
immediate recompense of love and attention.
Very beautiful are the Nágar women, and their beauty is the theme of
countless songs and ballads. Fair with a rich golden vivid fairness,
like the colour of ripe wheat, with dark eyes in whose depth glows
a spark of passion and round which humour and laughter play, with
full petulant lips, figures finely rounded and firmly plump like
the quail, with, graceful movement and slender limb, the whole lit
up by intelligence and comprehension and a touch of conscious charm,
the Nágar woman presents a picture that remains unforgotten. Even
laborious study seems to have no power to rob her of her looks, and
the girl-graduate is fresh and graceful, as if she had never bent over
Euclid or deductive logic. One meets them so at times in Ahmedabad or
Baroda, in the houses of the highest officials, clever, well-read,
well-bred, with perfect manners and astounding beauty, like some memory
of the Italian Renaissance, taking no small part in the establishment
of an urbane and liberal society, and like the _donne_ of Boccacio they
return to their homes to serve and cherish their husbands. And of love
they can repeat the whole gamut. Indeed, the keynotes of this society,
with all its undertones of Hindu abnegation--as in Florence, too,
one imagines an undercurrent, not too discordant, from Savonarola’s
denunciations--are not unlike Italy in the great age. Women have
similar duties with a touch of the same implied seclusion; they have
the same intrigues and stolen pleasures, the same essentially natural
poise in life; they are now even beginning a similar application
to learning and poetry. And of love too they have no lesser lore
and experience than those ladies who, finely natural and fittingly
acquiescent in their sex, gladdened and made illustrious the Courts of
Mantua and Ferrara.
Even more beautiful than the women in the Nágar caste are their
charming and delightful children. With the round oval of their faces,
the fair bloom of their skins, the growing intelligence that dances
in their eyes, they at once captivate all who look. In general up to
the age of eight or ten they remain naked (though an unfortunate new
fashion, imitated from customs made necessary by the cold grey skies
of England, tends to hamper their free beauty in ugly and unwholesome
clothes), and the light movement of frail gold-browned limbs in the
Indian air is sheer refreshment to the eye. Devotion, then, the Nágar
woman certainly stands for, devotion and the due and harmonious
fulfilment of the duties of her station. A woman she is always, fully
and truly womanly. But she is far above the mere privative of empty
abnegation. Beauty she knows and values, and she is not ignorant or
afraid of the power that kindly beauty can exercise in the affairs of
men. Learning she can recognize and honour; literature she assists;
even of art, she is not, like her sisters, much afraid. In Gujarát from
of old the dainty custom has remained by which on certain festivals,
the feast of lamps for instance, ladies of the highest classes meet in
the open streets of the residential quarters and chant choral songs
while they move round in a circle, beating time with their hands and
bending gracefully up and down. They sing of spring and flowers and the
sports of girl-friends in palace-gardens. But in the large industrial
cities which in the last generation have risen upon the older towns
with their restricted social circles, the publicity of the streets has
become inconvenient. The Nágar ladies in Ahmedabad, for instance, have
taken a leading part in transferring the old songs to larger concert
halls in clubs and similar places, and at the same time raising the
standard and artistic value of the performance. Those who have ever
heard such a concert must be grateful for a movement full at the same
time of beauty and colour and sweet sound along with modesty and
perfect taste. For a higher social life, with heightened enjoyments and
a rational freedom, for self-development and wider interests, yet well
within the limits that nature prescribes for woman, distinct from the
far other limits set to man by his divergent functions, for a life that
has in it something of Greece as well as the main ideals of Hinduism,
the Nágar woman, for all the illiberal asceticism of the Brahman
tradition, may emphatically stand.
In the mercantile classes the same ideals persist, deflected however by
the incidents of their livelihood and to an even greater extent by a
profound difference in spiritual aspect. Of the Hindu trading classes
by far the most important and the most ubiquitous are the merchants
of Márwár, of Gujarát, and of Cutch. All follow one of two sects, the
Vaishnava or the Jain--the latter in essence a different religion,
originally indeed a protest against Hinduism but now little more than
a sect, another ripple, so to say, on the waters of national faith.
Both at any rate are protests against Brahman orthodoxy and the gnostic
philosophies of essential Hinduism. Numerically and in its effects, by
far the more important is Vaishnavism. In the form in which it has
been adopted by the trading classes, it is the belief that by love
alone can God be realized. It centres upon Krishna, that tender and
sportive figure, in whom the God Vishnu again came to earthly life,
and in whom are enshrined the memories of a once-living hero. On Him
mythology and popular song have lavished their softest endearments
and their most entrancing images. In His name have been composed the
voluptuous love-poems of many generations; and the dalliances of
Krishna with the milk-maids and His beloved Rádha are the constant
theme to which Indian passion turns for lyrical expression. They are
the familiar accompaniment in childhood as in age of the merchant’s
women-folk. In Vaishnavism such as this the devotee throws himself, as
a suppliant, on God’s grace and love alone. He acknowledges indeed his
innate incapacity to apprehend the Godhead, but he aspires at least
to feel something of His Glory in those ecstasies of self-abandonment
which can be likened on this earth only to the passionate love of
man and woman. In their prayers too they associate with the God that
consort Lakshmi or Rukhmini, who gives wealth and prosperity--the
benign divinity who with her lord preserves and maintains all living
things and in loving-kindness intercedes for all who seek by love
and submission to realize the Divine in the universe, be their sins
manifold as the sands upon the shore.
In every land, of course, the pursuit of wealth as such must be
opposed to higher spiritual activities and loftier aspirations. For
the merchant the end must be the acquisition of riches for its own
sake. All other purposes are either means or incidents. He must treat
men and women as means and not as ends in themselves. He can have
for humanity none of that respect which is felt by him who, as equal
among equals, seeks as his end human perfection, or even by him who,
again one of many equals, works, as he thinks, by pain and self-denial
for the greater glory of God. Where acquisition is the supreme good,
all else must be subordinate. And the methods of acquisition are
really two-fold, either by careful saving and the starving of desire
to accumulate useless metal tokens which are the equivalents of
untasted pleasures, or by wilder speculation quickly to capture the
wealth which, exchanged, can buy luxury and material gratification.
Side by side, in the same class of men, the two methods can be seen.
Extravagant abstention and extravagant lavishness, a fulfilment that
is material or an abstention that is no less material, these in
all countries are the marks of the merchant class. But they can be
mitigated in their effect, as they were in the Italian Renaissance by
the almost superstitious devotion of all ranks to the newly-exhumed
classic ideal. In India this mitigation is given by the creed of
Krishna and of love. Materialized though it has to be when refracted
through the mind of man the acquisitive, it is still an influence,
nicely attuned to the receiver, for something finer and ennobling. What
there is of good, charity and spiritual significance in the merchant’s
life (and it is after all much) is mainly drawn from a faith which,
even when interpreted in a too material sense, could hardly be replaced
for its worshippers by any other _credo_. In modern Europe the
aristocratic ideal has for the richer merchant something of the same
significance and mitigating value. But for those outside the circle in
which this ideal can be operative there is no other thought to raise
and enlarge the spirit.
It is not difficult to see how all these influences must react upon
the woman’s life. The effects are further complicated by the fact
that child-marriages are still the rule, and that only too often, in
a trading class, the young bride is sold by her parents for large
sums to an aged bridegroom. Among the larger number of the class,
probably, acquisition is sought by rigid economy. The young wife finds
herself stinted, therefore, of every comfort and even of the dresses
and ornaments that by nature every woman desires. The husband holds
the purse and makes almost all purchases himself. A few rupees only
can reach the wife, and for these she has to account. Even if her
husband is young, long hours in the shop, constant poring over account
books, and little exercise only too soon make him obese and feeble.
The only real interests are house-work, in which she has no final
voice, and frequent, often ill-natured, gossip. On the other hand, she
has this of advantage that her menfolk, weighing the world as they
do by its material fruits, ascribe to women the first place in their
pleasures. She is, therefore, in spite of all, able sometimes to
attain a real power that is discordant with her ostensible position.
The passion is for the sex in general, not for the individual woman;
for a mere satisfaction of sense, not for a spiritual individualized
love of the fitting mate. But a shrewd woman can play upon the passion
and make it serve her own purposes. And when the trader’s wife does
manage to attain such influence, she uses it unsparingly for her own
satisfaction. Many a comedy of manners is played, unseen, on the dark
stage of the merchant’s house. There are not a few husbands who,
whether from love of gain or from sheer terror of their wives, shut
their eyes complaisantly to divagations damaging to their honour. The
practice common to many money-lenders of keeping burly Mussulman, often
Afghan, servants in their households, is anything except an incentive
to female virtue.
[Illustration: JAIN NUN]
Among the merchants who follow the Jain religion, however, these
conditions apply with less force. Their life is simpler and the
imagination is unheated by the constant thought of loving ecstasy.
The Jain _sadhvis_, a class of nuns recruited both from the unmarried
and the widowed, bear a character that is far above reproach. With
shaven heads and in yellow garments, a little square of cloth usually
tied upon their lips to save them from inhaling the smallest insect,
they wander through the country, begging and singing hymns, nowhere to
remain above four days, leading a life of austerity for the glory of
the spirit. They are irreproachable like Sisters of Mercy, and like
Sisters of Mercy they can move safely among the roughest crowds,
protected by the respect of all. Something of their simple and humble
piety has penetrated to all ranks among the Jains; and the ladies of
the Jain millionaires of Ahmedabad, owners of large cotton factories
and masters of men and money, live their simple lives in the midst of
riches with purity and quiet modesty.
Amongst the richest of the merchant class are the Bhatias, who
gain rather by daring speculation than by niggardly effort. On the
race-course, as in the exchange and cotton market, they are conspicuous
figures, with a certain pleasing _bonhomie_ and easy good-fellowship.
The Bhatia women play a part in the social life of modern India that
is hardly less conspicuous. Orthodox in the extreme, they are strict
followers not of the ascetic but of the more human sect. They are
able, therefore, to be strict in observance and orthodox in belief
without abdicating the rights and enjoyments of humanity. They attend
diligently to religious services and in the early hours of the
morning the ways that lead to the Krishna temple are thronged with
their carriages. To the High-priests, in whom they see the divinity
incarnate, they give an adoration that is almost boundless. But, with
all this, they claim from life the fulfilment of their humanity and
their womanhood. Moreover, they demand something of excitement and
palpitant emotion. A few there are who, like their menfolk, gamble, and
there is none who will deny herself the excitement of jewelry and fine
clothes, diaphanous fabrics half disclosing the limbs they cover. The
worst offshoot of their orthodoxy is the practice of infant marriage;
and there are few sections of the community in which young girls are
so often married to old men, the parents profiting by the bride-price.
As the remarriage of widows is forbidden, it follows necessarily that
in the Bhatia caste there is a number, quite excessive, of young
widows, in the first bloom of fresh maturity, often left with great
fortunes. Fortunately for society, these widows, so numerous are they
and the conditions of their marriage so manifestly unfair, have been
able collectively to repudiate the hardships that enmesh the orthodox
Brahman who has lost her husband. Among the Bhatias, there are few
shaven heads! Neat and well dressed, with pleasing face and figure,
perhaps too consciously demure, they strike an attractive note in the
complex harmonies of modern India. The system by which they are married
is hardly elevating and is opposed not only to the ideals but also to
the commandments of the sacred texts; but a commercial class cannot
get away from its own limitations. It is at least a great deal gained
that it should be alleviated by a sensible appreciation of life and joy
and by a degree of freedom which, though not of the highest and inmost
kind, is more humanizing and liberal than the negatives of material
self-denial. Self-control, control, that is, of and by the inner self
in harmony with ultimate nature, is no doubt the concomitant of the
highest liberty; but any liberty, even any licence, is better than the
denial of the actual living self.
[Illustration: BHATIA LADY]
In the rich province of Gujarát, the home of so large a proportion
of the merchants of India, there is a festival which embodies in its
observance much of the inner feeling of the Indian woman. During the
rains, for one waxing moon, the days are sacred to that Goddess, who
represents the all-pervading energy of nature, the spouse of Shiva,
the Great God, the ultimate Destroyer. During these days the maidens
of middle-class Gujarát worship the Goddess with an eye fixed upon the
attainment of the perfect husband. The little girls go in groups and
bathe and pray, and they make the vow that is the Vow of Life. They may
be as young as six or seven or eight, but year after year they renew
the vow till they are married. Throughout the day they have to sit in
a darkened room, reflecting upon the Goddess and upon the supreme boon
of a good husband, but at times resting their minds by nursery tales
or songs or innocent games with cards and dice. Then every morning
they bathe again in the pond or river, where rival groups of girls
make jokes upon each other and laugh and play. The many songs are the
most touching part of the whole festival. And these songs represent a
marriage of free choice, in which the girl chooses a husband from her
suitors. How different from the present practice! Year after year,
till they are married, they sing these songs. And who shall say how
far this dream of choice may remain to mould their actions, even after
the forced marriage that awaits them? The need of marriage at least,
its supreme value to a woman’s life, that is always before their eyes
from early childhood; and marriage is bound up with religion, with
the personal gifts of the divine and happy wife of the Greatest God.
But in the very songs, sanctioned by the goddess, the cry is always
for the chosen mate, the giver of love and happiness. Little wonder
if at times the grown girl, now become conscious, learns to know the
difference between the husband selected under social conventions by
her parents for his worldly circumstance and the man who, unsuitable
perhaps in wealth or temperament, is yet nature-chosen to be the mate
of her desires and the beloved of her heart. For the parents’ choice is
not always wise, and among sinful mankind there are not a few who will
sacrifice a daughter’s welfare to their own profit.
[Illustration: KHOJA LADY IN BOMBAY]
Of the Mussulman middle classes, the most conspicuous are the Bohras
and the Khojas. Both belong to different branches of the Shiah
sect, that sect which is to Islam what the Catholic Church is to
Christianity. Both also are the descendants of Hindu communities which
were converted in fairly recent times to the faith of salvation. Among
the Khojas, especially, many Hindu customs have survived, and their
law of succession in particular is not the law of the Qor’an but the
survival of Hindu tribal custom. At this moment, perhaps, theirs is
the most interesting of these communities, both because by their
practical talents they have obtained a place of political leading among
Indian Mussulmans and because they are--with the exception of a small
reforming branch--the religious followers of H.H. the Agha Khan, a
prince so nobly known by his loyal efforts in the War.
The Khojas, “honourable gentlemen” as the name means, come in the main
from Gujarát and Bombay. But they are scattered now through all the
bigger trade centres of India--Calcutta, Nagpur, Sind and the Punjáb.
They have not, however, confined their enterprise to the Indian Empire,
but have made settlements in the East wherever the British flag gives
its subjects protection. They have crossed the mountain passes to Hanza
and Dardistan; they have sailed to Zanzibar and the Persian Gulf;
they have penetrated into Arabia; they maintain business connections
with Singapore, China and Japan, and even with England, America and
Australia. Many of the great commercial interests of India are in their
hands, and in business they bear an excellent reputation for integrity
and punctuality. Their representatives have an important place in the
Legislative Councils of Bombay and of the Government of India. In
social life, they are something of epicures, and their clubs are not
only hospitable but are well-managed and furnished. The best of food
and the best of wine will always be found at any entertainment given by
these generous and liberal merchants. They enjoy literature and still
more music and dancing; and they are among the most tasteful supporters
of those arts. Many among them have now forsaken commerce for the
liberal professions.
The Khoja woman is hidden in seclusion behind the _purdah_. The few
that are to be seen are as a rule somewhat below the middle height and
are of a graceful, but not altogether healthy, slightness. They are
well educated and are good housekeepers, known for their neatness and
management. As Mussulmans they are of course married under a system of
free contract, but unfortunately for them Hindu tradition has been too
strong, and they suffer in practice from many of the disabilities of
their Hindu sisters. Remarriage after widowhood is in practice almost
unknown; and divorce is so discountenanced that its relief is seldom
sought. On the other hand, the ascetic idea is at least absent, and a
wife expects and a husband is prepared to give constant attention and
all possible comfort. They have a force of character which merits this
attention; and their features, with arched head and broad forehead,
strong chin, and large lustrous eyes, are the index of their character.
Of other trading classes of Mussulmans, the Memans, also converts from
Hindu castes in Sind, Káthiawád and Cutch, deserve notice, if only for
their charity and piety. All Memans, women as well as men, hope to
perform the pilgrimage to Mecca and habitually visit the Chisti Shrine
at Ajmer. And for their large secret charities the women, no less than
the men, have a well-deserved reputation.
Among the large body of middle-class Mussulmans of the usual Sunni
sects, those who claim to be descended from foreign invaders and
who are at least not directly traceable to any special wholesale
conversion, the position of women is on the whole satisfactory and
agreeable. Every family has its poor relations and dependants so
that, even when she is childless, the mistress of the house is seldom
lonely. The morning she spends at her toilet and in seeing to the
day’s marketings and looking to the kitchen. At meals all the family,
men and women alike, meet and eat together. Sometimes, even, a
much-favoured friend of the husband’s, a trusted and intimate friend,
may be introduced to the inner, unveiled circle. After the midday meal,
a rest; then sewing and talking; then games of backgammon and chess
make the afternoon pass. The evening dinner then needs looking to,
and after dinner it is common to hear or read tales and romances or
religious books. Children may also take up much of the woman’s time;
and among Mussulmans as a rule the wife may count upon a loving, almost
a passionate, husband, except in the unhappy cases where differences of
temperament produce a real antipathy. In that case she can always try
to force a divorce from his hands, though the practice varies with the
social circle. That the pressure of Indian influences has forced upon
them child-marriage, followed only too often by premature consummation;
that the intentions of the Prophet in regard to divorce and widowhood
have often been neglected; and that the rule of veiling has been
interpreted with a superstitious irrationalism, quite opposed to the
teachings of the law, are disabilities under which the Mussulman
woman of the middle classes still has in part to suffer. But she is at
least oppressed by no tradition of renunciation or asceticism, and she
has, in favour of her fulfilment and just cherishing, text after text
in the sacred Book. The recent tendency to a purer Islamic practice,
hand in hand with the growth of rationalism, offer her hope of early
liberation from extraneous bonds and of development as a free human
agent. The women of Islam have as guide rules of law, sanctioned by
revelation, which if practised are more rational and more insistent on
justice and human freedom than any other precepts ever codified into
statutes. It is to be hoped that the recent advance and rationalistic
movement in Islamic countries will secure the happiness that should
follow intelligent practice of a humane code. The devastation caused by
Mongol invasions and ravages and the subtle perversions induced by an
alien atmosphere have to be repaired and eradicated; but there is no
intrinsic reason why the social system of Islam should not again reach
and surpass the high level it commanded in the days of Al Ma’mun.
[Illustration: MEMAN LADY WALKING]
In a review of the middle classes of India, it would be impossible
to omit the rich and influential sect of Parsis. Descendants of the
ancient inhabitants of Persia, expelled after the Mussulman conquest,
followers of Zoroaster and worshippers of fire, they reached the
west coast of India after many perils, to be finally protected by a
Hindu Rána or prince. Small in numbers, for many centuries they lived
in the main by agriculture, though there were a few among them who
achieved a name in arms. With the coming of the British they changed
their pursuits and their social habits. Commerce had heretofore been
strictly protected by the exclusive guilds of the Hindu merchants. Its
doors were now thrown open. Moreover, the British official required
body-servants, if possible of good class. The Hindu was precluded
from accepting such an occupation by caste rules of purity and caste
prohibitions. The Zoroastrian religion left the Parsi free from such
scruples. Many members of the community, by commerce direct and by
the assistance that gratitude was ready to bestow, were soon able to
insinuate themselves into positions which they maintained by their
adaptability and their commercial integrity. In shipbuilding they
excelled, and both in this and in the kindred trade of ship-broking
they accumulated many fortunes. The liquor trade was their monopoly;
and, aided by the privilege of exclusive distilling and a monopoly of
sale, it was remunerative to an undreamt degree. By the end of the
eighteenth century, an old traveller notes, practically the whole of
Malabar Hill, the most fashionable and only really enjoyable portion of
Bombay had already passed into the ownership of rich Parsis. Throughout
the nineteenth century their wealth and their importance grew.
One of the most striking qualities of the Parsi community is its
aptitude for imitation. With the advent of British rule, this facility
stood them in good stead. It was not long before English education
became general and almost universal among them, while by their prompt
acquisition of the minor conventions of manners, they easily opened
the doors of European society. In consequence it was not long before
they attained a position of social importance, based upon solid
grounds of wealth and education. The Parsi woman was not left behind
in the advance of her caste. Many women studied diligently and even
passed the examinations of the University. In general they demanded
a liberty such as they read of in English novels, and fancied they
could see among their English friends. They refused to marry except at
their own choice. For the dull details of household management they
expressed contempt and considered their duties done when they looked
to the furnishing and decoration of their houses. In dress, the Parsi
woman has contrived no less to modify her own costume, originally a
slightly altered form of the Hindu woman’s, in imitation of European
fashion. She still retains the mantle or _sari_, but it is hemmed with
a border imported from London or Paris. An outer lace shirt is draped
like a blouse under the mantle. The trousers, which she has to wear
under her skirt by customary prescription, are so curtailed as to be
invisible, and the feet are thrust into silk stockings and Louis Quinze
shoes. Her jewelry is of European pattern, usually second-rate, and
she despises the beautiful antique designs of the Indian goldsmith as
“old-fashioned.”
The Parsi woman has in the past been greeted by an amount of praise
from European writers which, though intelligible, is yet almost
extravagant. It was natural to be pleased at so conscious an
imitation, especially in a generation when most Europeans had no doubt
of the superiority of their own civilization and were prone to judge
the merits of other races, like missionaries, by their aptitude for
assimilating its products. They could, after all, always clinch the
argument by pointing irrefutably to the triumphs of the Albert Memorial
and the Crystal Palace. In a country where few women of the better
classes appear in public and beauty is seldom displayed, the spectacle
of many gaily-dressed ladies, with graceful drapery, promenading along
an Indian street with the freedom of a popular sea-side resort at home,
gave almost as much pleasure and pride to the gratified Englishman as
it did to the girls’ own parents. It has required closer inspection and
broader judgment of East and West to notice the cracks that stretch,
no doubt inevitably, across the charming picture. New liberties,
imitation not always too wisely conceived, above all sudden commercial
prosperity--these have had their advantages. But they also have their
countervailing losses.
At the bottom of such disadvantages as appear is no doubt the broad
fact that the community as a whole consists of business men. There are
of course individuals who have adopted the learned professions and are
solicitors, doctors, barristers, and judges. But even they live in a
society and probably in a family circle which is wholly commercial; and
even their successes are estimated by the money they bring in. In many
ways Parsi society is like the Jewish society that is to be found in
the larger cities of Europe. But the Jews as a community are devoted
to the arts and have a ripe sense of emotional and spiritual values.
They respect learning and artistic expression. Even those--the greater
number--among them who are engaged in business frankly enough recognize
their inferiority to thinkers and artists. Again the Jews have always
had a tradition of aristocracy among themselves, and in recent years
have sought every opportunity of mingling with the nobilities of the
countries to which they belong. The best among them have, therefore,
raised themselves by art and letters and by an aristocratic code
far above the narrow vices of a commercial middle class, and it is
only the lower strata who continue to display the typical defects of
“business life.” But the Parsis have unfortunately so far missed these
mitigations. They have not, and, within the memory of history, they
have never had, the tradition of an aristocracy. They are separated
from the indigenous nobility, not only by religion, but by interest
and custom, and the difference has been deepened by their partiality
for an Anglicized mode of life. Though a few among them have done good
work, they have no real liking for learning and art. Hence there is
hardly a community in the world, except perhaps in the United States
of America, which bases its standards so largely upon wealth. Men are
esteemed mainly by what they have managed to acquire; precedence is
allowed according to size of income; the business man takes rank over
the professional; and a memorandum of their richest men is inscribed
on each Parsi’s heart, as on tablets of brass.
These are defects which are not unnatural when a small and isolated
community finds itself confined to commerce and is from its history
devoid of higher interests. They are defects which do not alter the
fact that not a few among the Parsis, especially those who have for
generations reposed upon inherited wealth and have taken to the learned
professions, are charming men and women and true and worthy friends.
Among those who have such a position--who do not aspire to dazzle
fashion in the wealthiest circles and do not require to increase their
incomes by further trading--the women are attractive by their education
and their rational freedom. They preserve a place of dignity and
reserve, while quietly taking from life the benefits it offers to a
liberal mind. They may even rise above the touchy vanity which is all
too common.
It must, however, be admitted that Parsi womanhood has suffered
harm from the excessive imitation of English habits--or what are
taken to be such. From the nature of the case, because of their own
inclinations and environment, the English life they have sought to
imitate has inevitably been that of the middle classes. And the effect
has been heightened by the enormous consumption of English novels
among Parsi women. Owing partly to national character and partly to
the demoralizing secret censorship which broods over the publishing
world, nearly all English novels have to be “pretty-pretty” falsehoods,
distorted away from the facts of life and the truths of nature. The
consequence has been to produce a dangerous mental confusion in which
spirituality and idealism are suppressed and replaced by a fruitless
sentimentality. Reality on the other hand is known and presented only
in the shape of hard cash. The harm done by such popular writings is
not so apparent in England, where they are part of the normal tissue
wastage of the nation. In a foreign and not immune constitution, they
produce rapid inflammation. One finds therefore among Parsi women, as
one does among the women of the United States, a mentality in which
impracticable and silly sentimentalism is mixed up inextricably with
a thirst for the solid advantages of wealth. They sigh for courtships
of the kind depicted in their favourite “literature,” with scores of
“dears” and “darlings” scribbled over scented letters, with moon-calf
glances and clammy squeezings of hands; they and the heroes of
their fancy get photographed together like any German _braut_ and
_brautigam_; they enter marriage with a blind eye turned to the hard
realities of human nature, to discipline for instance and duty, but
with the expectation of finding a husband on his knees to pamper every
wish and petulance. Yet at the same time, the Parsi, like the American,
girl will not let herself slide into these sentimentalities till she
is assured of her admirer’s income and position. Both restraints--that
which keeps her from love till she knows how money stands, and that
which keeps her during her courtship within the bounds of technical
chastity--come easy enough as she is, with a few honourable exceptions,
free from passion. She would never give herself to the wild love of
Romeo and Juliet or the abandoned ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde.
Hermann and Dorothea, or a drawing-room ballad, would appeal more
readily to her sympathies. That in England there is also another
type of womanhood, truer and greater, she does not know--how could
she? That there are girls of a fine candour and simplicity who are
taught in childhood to obey and to have quiet, effacing manners, who
respect a father whom they see controlling a large estate, honoured
in Parliament, perhaps governing a great dependency, who are bred in
a society of equals in which true and natural superiorities alone,
whether of age or seniority, of success in the hunting-field or in
the council, are admitted and publicly recognized, that such girls
bring to their husbands with their love, respect, and the heritage of
discipline, that as wives, while expecting to find fulfilment and the
realization of their hopes, they are ready to subserve the higher and
enduring interests of a family, of such facts and such nobilities of
life--worthy indeed of imitation if such there must be--there can be
little knowledge. Vital facts are not always plain upon the surface,
and in England no class is so quiet and unobtrusive as the one which
really counts.
[Illustration: PARSI FASHION]
The prevalence of a money standard in their lives has introduced among
the Parsis the great evil of excessive dowries. Generally speaking,
it may almost be said, no Parsi young man will marry a bride unless
her parents come down with a large settlement, and scandalous stories
are sometimes told of the means employed to extort larger sums from
the father. The girl whose family is poor--be she as beautiful as
Shirin and virtuous as an angel--stands in every danger of being
left a spinster. Day by day the probabilities against marriage grow
heavier, and the number of unmarried Parsi women of mature age goes
on increasing. Alone of all the peoples of India among them the
reproachful name of “old maid” can be used. The numbers of unmarried
women are already so great that this has become a serious danger to the
community, as for that matter it is among the upper middle classes of
Great Britain. “Old maid-ism” must have its consequences: hysteria and
other illness is on the increase; and the suffragette may soon become
as actual a terror and a retribution to the Parsis as she has been in
England. If this should ever happen, then climate and the surrounding
environment are likely to make the pathology of the situation even more
critical in India.
The marriage law which governs the Parsis is very much the same as
that which exists in England. Marriages are strictly monogamous, and
divorce can be given only by the decree of a public Court of Law on
grounds nearly the same as those admitted in the English Courts. In
practice early marriage has ceased to exist, and indeed marriages, as
in England, are as a rule contracted at far too late an age. The same
causes which lead so often to women remaining unmarried, have also
raised the average of age.
Parsi life presents, therefore, the picture of a society in which
woman have many seeming and some actual advantages, but in which,
on the other hand, they are more and more rapidly plunging into
unforeseen but very real evils. They have great liberty, a liberty
greater, or at least less restrained, than is enjoyed by the women of
the better classes in England or in France. They can have education
and the pleasures of a liberal mind. In accepting a husband they are
ostensibly allowed full freedom of choice, though in practice they
are of course limited by the usual considerations, by the importance
attached to wealth, and, especially, by the great difficulty of
securing any husband at all. They have the advantage of being trained
to mix without shyness in all societies. But, even apart from a certain
self-assertiveness which at times distresses their best admirers,
they have to suffer from the growing probability of a life-long
spinsterhood. Only too many will have to face the final misfortune of a
wasted and infructuous life.
The community is distinguished by its loyalty and its generosity;
and Parsi women, as well as men, play their part in that lavish
distribution of charity for which their race has become famous. It
could be hoped that, without foregoing what they have gained in
education and position, they should also preserve fresh the emotional
values of sweet and disciplined womanhood and be able to secure those
timely and assured conjugal relations which must be its fulfilment and
best reward.
Working and Aboriginal Classes
“Sweetly the drum is beaten and
Sweetly the girl comes to draw water:
Sweet is the ochre on her forehead:
Sweet is her bodice of silk:
Sweet is her charming footstep.
Ohé! the cakes baked by the girl:
Sweet is the girl with her infant child.
Lo, her dress is wet and clinging from the water
And she is adorned with tassels of jewels:
On her hands are bracelets
And her feet are enriched with anklets.”
_Rowing Song of the Fisher Kolis._
“A palmer came over the mountains and sat down under a barren tamarind
tree
Then he got him three stones and placed a pot upon them.
He went to the midst of the town to ask alms and played his pipe as he
went.
The sound of his pipe reached the ear of Rádha.
She ran towards her father and towards her mother:
‘You are my father and my mother: I am going off with this palmer for my
man.’
‘Do not go, my dearest daughter, I will give you all you want.
Cows and buffaloes will I give and for your service four hand-maidens.’
‘What should I do with your cows and buffaloes?
What should I do with your four maid-servants?
For such a man have I prayed to God for full twelve years.’”
_Marriage Song of the Fisher Kolis._
[Illustration: DYER GIRL IN AHMEDABAD]