THE MOVING FINGER
The aim of this book has been as far as possible to show the Indian
woman as she is, living and acting and expanding. But life, properly
speaking, cannot be represented. Representation must always be of
something that is already past and therefore lifeless and mechanical.
It breaks off and pins down, like a specimen in a museum, a mere
fragment out of the moving continuity of life. So a photograph for
instance, when it impresses a discontinuous moment on the plate, merely
fixes something which is artificial and unreal. Perhaps in literature
it would be impossible to give vitality to the picture of an Indian
woman, unless in the form of poetry or prose fiction. But the picture
would then be endowed with personal character and an individual shape.
Here it was desired rather to analyse national characteristics and to
display the varieties of Indian womanhood and their values. It was
necessary, therefore, to embody the typical rather than the personal
and to lose something of concrete reality in the effort to generalize
usual habits of mind and body. It is, however, true that neither man
nor woman can ever be so well known, as through the ideals which
they feel. In those ideals, in the spirit with which they meet the
incidents of life, consists all that is most real and permanent in
their actions. Other desires and emotions, peculiar to the individual,
which help to make his whole concrete life, are after all unharmonized
and, as it were, accidental. Essential are the thoughts which guide
his purposes and the social atmosphere in which he breathes. Regarded
in this way, the womanhood of India appears on the whole to be moving
in all its million lives towards a more or less similar ideal, more or
less clearly recognized as the social class rises or sinks in education
and self-consciousness. There are, of course, exceptions. The nobility
of Southern India form a social back-water, fed by other traditions
from a secluded source. There are wild tribes on whose crude minds the
common thought has hardly yet had time to become operative. And the
Mussulman population is, at least in name, ruled by an ethic far more
rationalistic and liberal. Yet there is not a class which in some form
or other, however indirectly, has not had to submit to the supremacy of
an ideal which in its purer lines is truly national. With the increased
ease of communication and the rigidity given to accepted Brahman
custom by the Courts of Law and common education, the movement towards
the same ideal throughout the various communities has become more
marked and rapid. Peculiarities of caste and race tend to be swamped
in the general current. In a few cases, new diversities have come
into existence, where, for instance, some of a small highly-educated
class have revolted against traditional restrictions or sought a new
salvation in the close imitation of European customs without a European
environment. It is in the comprehension of these ideals, manifested in
typical castes and classes, and of the social atmosphere that any real
image of Indian womanhood can alone be formed.
But it is not enough to see a woman in her girlhood and growth, in her
love and marriage, and in her relations to her family and society. To
grasp her as she really is she should be seen also as a mother. For if
love is a duty of womanhood, biologically the function of motherhood is
even more important. It is the most decisive of all her functions in a
primitive society. As the race advances, it does not lose its place,
but beside it ascend other functions, first and most essential that
of love or wifehood, and afterwards that of polishing and refining a
mixed society. In value to each life and each generation, the greatest
of these is certainly love; and the successful wife or mistress
ranks higher in art and literature and with the finer spirits and
civilizations than even the best of mothers. For the former implies
gifts which are not only rarer but also emanate from higher and nobler
qualities of mind, while it responds to needs which are felt above all
by loftier natures. Maternity, on the other hand, is the instinct of
reproduction in action, controlled by intelligent care and affection.
It is not peculiar to the human being but is as strong a force in
the animal. It is of course essential, like everything else that is
primeval in our life; for humanity is broad-based upon the animal. But
wifehood is a conception of the creative human intellect, a specialized
object of human feelings. The perfect beloved is an ideal form created
by a developed intellect and fastidious emotions.
Hence the worth of a nation’s womanhood can best be estimated by the
completeness with which they fulfil the inspirations of love and its
devotion. And judged by this standard, the higher types in India need
fear no comparison. Whenever race and belief have combined to resist
the mere negatives of ascetic teaching, there is a rich literature of
love, there is a mastery of rapture, and with it the constant service
of undying devotion.
Yet fully to estimate the value of her life, it would be necessary also
to watch the Indian woman in her performance of a mother’s functions.
The strength of her desire for children, the warmth and selflessness
of her affection, the extent of her care and teaching, her readiness
or unwillingness herself to learn the needs of childhood, above all,
the place in her heart that she affords her children--all these are
factors which should be not merely weighed or analyzed but actually
felt by a creature intuition. But only another woman could have such
comprehension or attain such intuition. No man--even in regard to the
women of his own country, where he is illuminated by the examples of
his mother and his wife--could have the needed sympathy, the necessary
similarity of feeling, to comprehend the woman’s emotions to the child
she bears and over whose growth she watches. It would be impossible to
attempt the task in a foreign country of women by whose side one has
not grown from infancy.
Some points, however, which lend themselves to any observation,
may be noted, all the more since they have not infrequently led to
misunderstanding. It is the case undoubtedly that every Indian woman,
whatever her rank or race, has a clamorous wish to bear children, above
all a son, for her husband’s sake. “How many children have you?” is
the first question every woman asks another. In order to get children
they go on pilgrimages and tolerate austerities, they give alms to
beggars and are deluded by impostors. A childless woman becomes only
too readily the butt of scorn and even of her own self-reproach. Not
to have borne a son is to the Indian woman to have missed her vocation
and have failed in life. She has a certainty of belief--“She knows”
she would say--that it is her function, even hers, to have children;
and if she be fruitful, she counts herself blessed. From these data,
it has often been inferred that Indian women in all classes have an
overpowering desire for motherhood and are especially mastered by the
maternal instinct. But that this inference is wholly just, may well be
doubted.
In the upper classes at least it must be admitted that the woman wishes
for children because of reasoned and intelligible motives, and that
these motives are so strong as to overcome any instinctive passions.
And a will moved by a mere calculation of reason may be as powerful as
and even more effective than an act of will which, really responds to a
deep and eternal, unreasoned, self-creating emotion. The Indian woman
at any rate has every reason to desire to be a mother, above all the
mother of a son. Hindu science and philosophy have never hidden from
her that, regarded as a living being merely like any other animal, her
primary function is to continue the race. And religion has impressed
this teaching upon every mind by the legend that a man’s soul can be
released from the torments which follow death only by the prayers
and ritual of a living son. Moreover, she fears that barrenness may
impose the presence of a second wife, a rival in that love to which,
after all, she gives first place. Then, again, the end may prove to be
subjection to another woman’s son, heir to his mother’s hatreds. Or at
the best there is the pressure of religious faith--to think herself
accursed, if she has no child, while even her husband may in time
shrink from her as from a being judged by the doom of God. All these
are motives which can be weighed by the intellect but which move desire
and will-power. Yet their action does not in itself show that the
instinct of maternity is strong beyond the usual.
It is true of course that little girls in India in their games are
accustomed to play at being mothers and cook for imaginary children
and put their dolls to bed, and in a word play as girls do all over
the world. But so they play also at being wives and greeting their
husbands and bowing to a mother-in-law. When it is considered how
early they learn the secrets of life and how few their other games and
amusements can be, it is hardly astonishing that motherhood should
enter soon in their thoughts and pastimes. But the European child is
at least as ready to play with dolls and as fond of mothering her pets
with a mimicry to which her instincts call her. Where the European girl
differs is that marriage enters little into her thoughts and games,
love in any real sense hardly at all; whereas the Indian girl from
childhood has her mind filled with glad anticipations, and responds
to the name of marriage with a ready and not altogether unconscious
emotion. Even from the example of the child, then, the inference would
rather be that the instinct for love is quickly developed than that the
maternal instinct is stronger than in other peoples.
There are considerations of many kinds which go to show that the desire
for love is first in the Indian woman’s heart, at least in the higher
and better nurtured classes. In England for instance it is really now
the case--largely owing to the defects of a highly artificial education
and partly from the evils produced by bad economic conditions--that
there are quite a number of women who would desire to be mothers
but who actually look upon marriage and love as a distasteful and
unpleasant preliminary. Such a perversion of view, it can at once
be said, is unknown in India--not only unknown indeed, but even
inconceivable. Every woman may wish for a child, but she wishes first
and above all for the blessing of a loving husband, and she desires
the child mainly to satisfy and conciliate the man to whom she gives
herself joyfully.
Again it is striking that the whole long record of Indian literature
contains hardly one picture of a mother’s love, and is dumb even
about the longing at her heart for a child. Erotic poetry is full and
voluminous and the love of man and woman is sung in burning words in
thousands of lyrics, while it is also depicted with a more objective
grandeur in numerous epics. Hardly any European literature, at least
since Alexandria, can vie with this literature of love in volume and
intensity. But in the poetry of the West, mother’s love has had its
honoured place. In the letters of India it is almost absent.
It is sometimes suggested in India, and it may perhaps be true, that
in the castes which allow divorce, a mother’s affection for her child
is a passion stronger than her love for her husband. It would indeed
sometimes seem in those classes that she would more readily choose to
sacrifice the father than the child. But it does not follow that the
cause lies in the freedom of divorce, even though it be a factor which
co-operates in the result. For in practice the Hindu castes which allow
divorce are almost all of the lower class--in some cases not much above
the savage, ignorant, of a slow sensibility, unstimulated by the arts
and luxuries of civilization. Their passions have not yet much refined
above the elemental. For that fine and ennobling love which is the
fruit of advanced culture they have not yet developed the capacity. But
the maternal instinct remains among them in all its primitive strength.
And it has not to divide its sovereignty with the emotions of a later
culture. Relatively its force is greater, because undivided.
But, it must be said, in no class does maternal affection arouse, as
it should, that persistent and laborious effort to tend and educate,
which is its worthiest criterion. The Indian mother is lavish with
her caresses and endearments, as in other moods she may fly into fits
of uncontrolled anger. But, except for the lengthy period of nursing,
sometimes three and ordinarily two years, to which she is willing
to devote herself, she shows only too little of that continuous and
intelligent care which is expected from a mother. Largely no doubt this
is due to ignorance. She has not--one might with justice say she is not
allowed to have--the knowledge which is needed to be a good mother.
She is unaware of the most elementary requirements of sanitation and
health. Worse still, she has not been trained to know the importance
of compelling good habits and regular discipline in early childhood.
Again, though she is usually an affectionate, she is not often an
inspiring, mother. She is probably at her best as she sees her children
fed with the food she has cooked herself, giving to each the tit-bits
that she can, looking lovingly to their comforts, herself waiting till
all are done before she sits down to her own meal. This is the memory
that lingers most closely in the Indian’s mind as the man grows older
and leans on retrospect. To most European children the remembrance that
is dearest is that of his mother stooping over his cot to kiss him
good-night, radiant in beauty, clad in silks and laces, with the gleam
of white shoulders and precious stones to set off the soft curves of
her dear face, before she leaves for a dinner, a theatre, or a ball.
He is proud of her looks, so transformed, and of her charm, proud that
he belongs to a being so splendid and so wonderful. But to the Indian
the picture that recurs is of ungrudging kindly service. And perhaps
the prolonged nursing period, bad as in other respects it is--bad
especially for the over-taxed mother--serves to draw closer the bond
between her and the child, already conscious of its own existence.
Certain it is that the Indian son, as he grows up, forbears ever to
judge his mother. Of Indian women generally, or of the mothers of
other men, he may complain for their ignorance and their disregard of
matters which he has taught himself to consider necessary; he may even
with some unfairness blame them for a want of steadfast purpose and
regularity, which is by no means peculiar to their sex. But for his own
mother he preserves a constant respect and loving solicitude.
[Illustration: IN THE HAPPY VALLEY OF KASHMIR]
Yet, all said and done, it is not in motherhood, but rather in her
love, that the Indian woman has reached her highest achievement.
The devotion and self-sacrifice which are hers form a triumph of
the spirit; and she clothes these virtues with sensuous charm and
transcendent ecstasy. She gives freely of herself with both hands, by
service and surrender, by wistfulness and delight.
It is in the quality of social charm that the Indian woman is most
often lacking. For the man she loves she can command every grace.
She can be coaxing, caressing, kind, gentle, tender, submissive,
all in one. Even to the stranger, alone in her family as guest or
dependent, she shows herself solicitous and kindly, with a pleasing
quiet charm that comes from the heart. But she has not the habit of
social entertainment or that special training, so much a matter of a
quickened intelligence, which is required to set general acquaintances
at ease or to lead a conversation which should be at once comprehensive
and light. She has no general coquetry and is often without that ease
of manner and unconstrained grace of movement in a crowded room,
which can hardly be acquired otherwise than by the habitual usage
of good society. This lapse from complete achievement marks itself
most strongly in the intonations of her voice. For it must, alack, be
admitted that the Indian woman’s voice is her weak point. Here are
few of those soft, round, low but clear mezzos and contraltos which
like bronze bells sound so deliciously in a European drawing-room. The
voice in India seems seldom to have that steady control and rounded
_timbre_ which is gained from the repression of strained and uneven
notes and the modulation of all tones to one easy key. The Indian girl
is not even taught to sing and knows nothing of voice production. What
little she does sing, untaught or worse than untaught, is more often
a scream than a real melody. Good voices are almost the monopoly of
the professional dancing girl. Hence even in ordinary conversation,
a lady’s speech tends to harsh and abrupt sounds, shrill and not
beautiful. Her intonation is only too often an antidote to the charms
of her fastidious neatness and her kindly eyes and smile.
Society, it must be said, and social converse had in India ceased
to exist some fifteen hundred years ago. It does not happen that a
company of men and women meet on easy terms for entertainment with
the pleasures of light and familiar conversation, not learned, never,
please heaven, didactic or instructive, but clever, witty, illumined
by intuitions and swift generalizations, light of touch, and near to
laughter. Nor is anything known of that innocent coquetry of well-bred
womanhood, which seeks no particular stimulations but appeals for a
general admiration, impersonally given to that fine spirited, finely
attractive being who is the last word in luxury and taste and womanly
moderation.
In India as one knows it--whatever it may have been in the remoter age
pictured in the caves of Ajanta--the aspirations of women have taken
a different course through a more placid water. Where they steer is
no ebb and flow of conflicting purpose and sometimes, as they pass
listlessly to the shore, it looks almost as if the roadstead had come
to a stagnation. And yet--yet the course is set correctly and the sun
is rightly taken. It may be that the horizon is viewed too low and
that the profundities of the human spirit are not yet plumbed; but the
Indian woman crosses the waters of life on a line true to her nature
and her functions.
There is in all the Indian languages which derive from Sanscrit a word
whose habitual usage is significant of a whole attitude to life, by
whose meaning alone it is possible to understand the position sought
by and accorded to womanhood. It is the word “_dharma_” which has
been constantly mistranslated into English as “religion.” But when
an Indian speaks of “_dharma_” he means really the duties, divinely
imposed if you like or valid in nature, of his station. Between this
“_dharma_” and that, between the “_dharma_” of his own class or sex and
that of others, he draws a sharp distinction. In England, too, this
sense is not unknown and the great landlord, for instance, speaks with
right of the duties of his position, contrasting them with a broad
distinction to those of the merchant, for example, or the workman.
_Noblesse oblige_ is a proverb that has been applied in all countries.
But throughout Western thought there runs the idea that duty and morals
must at bottom be one and the same for all. It is only, one might say,
as a concession that the special duties of each station are recognized;
and at most they are referred rather to the accidentals of life, to
those supererogatory virtues which may be expected, like magnanimity
or liberality from the rich and powerful, or that exceptional patience
and humility which many persons seem to expect from the needy and
unfortunate. The basic more permanent rules of moral conduct are
regarded as something absolute, unalterable, unconditioned. Even the
differences of sex are forgotten in the abstract contemplation of fixed
moral laws. In practice, of course, facts have often compelled peoples
to admit that differences do exist in the application of rules of
conduct. Thus, to take a recent instance, in the crisis of war public
opinion has allowed that even the supreme duties of citizenship press
with divergent force upon married and unmarried men. Similarly it
was until recently recognized by all and is even now by the greatest
number that there are matters in which the conduct of men and women
cannot be the same and that the same rights and duties cannot be
applied indiscriminately to both sexes. But the recognition was seldom
more than tacit. It was never co-ordinated, at least in England, to a
reasoned view of life. It was not built upon a deliberate analysis of
natural differences in function and in sensory and nervous force. It
tended rather to be a mere concession to passing conditions of life.
Thought, when it was explicit, dwelt chiefly upon abstract ideas of
equality and equal duties. Some writers even tried to explain away
the differences of character between men and women by referring them
to mere accidents of environment, to women getting a less thorough
education, for instance, or less of a chance in life, as it was
called. It was not openly and clearly recognized that the natures and
functions of men and women were different in essentials, and that the
rules of conduct must in consequence be relative to different needs and
purposes.
[Illustration: A DENIZEN OF THE WESTERN GHAUTS]
In India, the way in which “_dharma_” is understood has made such a
mistake impossible. From its implications it is believed by all, or has
until the last few years been believed, that duty must necessarily be
relative to function and must correspond with fitness to inner nature.
A distinction so obvious and primary as that of sex can in consequence
be ignored by none except a few recent abstract thinkers. The rights
and duties of women are defined in relation to the activities which are
imposed on them by the principles of their nature; and the ideal which
is painted is in harmony with the natural laws of flesh and spirit.
Modesty, self-sacrifice, tenderness, neatness, all that is delicate
and fastidious, those are qualities which have a natural propriety.
To play her modest part in the family household quietly, to sweeten
life within the radius of her influence, to serve her children, to
please the man to whom she is dedicated, to receive pleasure in her
love, and find happiness in the pleasures that she gives, that is a
woman’s “_dharma_”--her fitting performance of function. It is not, of
course, that Hinduism does not know that men and women are alike in
respect of certain faculties and both alike distinguished from other
living creatures. But it has laid more stress upon the differences
in function. It has been able to see that the being of each separate
man and woman is one and indivisible, and that sex is not a mere
distinction added or subtracted but rather the shape in which the
whole living, acting human creature is cast and moulded. This, which
is the teaching of India’s philosophies, is also the practical wisdom
of her peoples. And this it is which has kept Indian women so superbly
natural, so calmly insistent on their sex. In Northern Europe, it
may perhaps be said, the evolution of womanhood has more rapidly
progressed, in response to a quickly developing environment; but in as
far as it has rejected nature and inner law, it may the rather tend
to be in fact a _devolution_, a turn or twist _from_ the road and not
a progress. In India evolution has been slow, cramped by unnecessary
superstitions and arbitrary abstentions, but in its main lines at least
it is consistent and natural. Its form is not unsuitable; though it
still has to be filled with a larger and richer content.
But the content of life in India is in truth already being enriched.
Her women are no mere abstractions, fixed and immovable, to be
delineated by thin conventional lines. Rather must they be thought of
as a mass of concrete, distinguishable, living human beings, moving as
a whole towards a larger freedom. Only a century ago when the greatest
of German thinkers, Hegel, wrote his “Philosophy of History” he could
with no little truth say that “Indian culture had not attained to
a recognition of freedom and inner morality,” and could assert that
in the Indian soul there was “bound up an irrational imagination
which attaches the moral value and character of men to an infinity
of outward actions as empty in point of intellect as of feeling, and
sets aside all respect for the welfare of men and even makes a duty
of the cruellest and severest contravention of it.” Women of course
in all countries are far more conservative than men and are more
readily content to sink the needs of personality in a general level
of unruffled action. Yet even among the women of India a new spirit
of liberation from external limitations is becoming visible and an
aspiration to an excellence that shall be from within. In spite of
caste distinctions, in spite of the forced rigidity of the marriage
system, in spite of all the mental unrest and error of the educated
and the practical inertia of the unread, in spite of all this and much
more, it would now be far from true to say of them as a whole that they
are unconscious of inward freedom and inward law or are blind to the
needs of human welfare in the conditions of human life.
But this inner freedom and external amplitude need not be sought and
will not be gained in the imitation of foreign manners and customs.
Such imitation can never be anything but unnatural and inharmonious;
and the castes which have tried it have not succeeded in avoiding
evil consequences. A better way is to revert to the ancient ideals
which still inspire all that is good in later practice. Dark ages
of ignorance have pruned and pinched the older, freer spirit, by
superstitious and absurd asceticisms and misinterpreted authorities.
Only the ruling castes have enlarged themselves from the bondage by
their more virile audacities. In general even the primitive and natural
classes, as they raise their status and become reflective, succumb
to the same narrowing limitations and impose upon their womankind
disabilities which are external and mechanical but which they see
current in the higher Brahmanized classes. Yet in the older, nobler
days, the Indian women had a life larger by far and more rich in
fulfilment. To regain this, which after all is still a living ideal,
and to ennoble and enlarge it further through that Greek thought--that
inspiring humanity and breath of happiness--which is the life-giving
element of European science and civilization, that were indeed an
end worthy of a fine tradition. To cut away from the bonds of fears
and artificialities and non-human hopes and terrors and seek only to
_be_, wholly and fully, in the harmony of nature and function and
sane development, preserving the eternal virtues of womanhood, and
finely conscious of a proud tradition--by some such purpose surely
might it be possible to secure safe continuity and social health
while attaining a progressive and extended activity that should not
be alien or discordant. But the timidities of crude asceticism must
first be overcome. A generation must arise which can comprehend
that self-control is not abstention, far from it, but is found only
when, a free soul, governing itself by its own laws, seeks its own
satisfaction and the development of all its functions in its free
activities. To deny human nature, for any price however fanciful, is
more harmful by far than the “Fay ce que Voudras” of any Abbaye de
Thelème.
[Illustration: A WORKING WOMAN AT AJMERE]
Of the narrow and incongruous privations with which the old ideals
were overlaid in the later decadence many still remain. Most cruel
and least defensible of all is the prejudice, common in all classes
except the highest and not unknown even there, against the enjoyment
of literature and art. Music is discountenanced, pictures are never
seen, even reading and writing is thought unwomanly. When not only the
charming likeness drawn of women in old books is remembered, but in
actual life also one sees the fine harmony achieved by those ladies,
Rajputs perhaps or Nágar Brahmans, who can recite and enjoy poetry
and even sing or play instruments--with what far greater happiness to
themselves and the men they love!--it should be plain how great is the
national loss wrought by this empty deprivation. Of all the European
countries, it is in France that women have most nearly attained that
final excellence which both accords with the true tradition of Western
life and is not out of harmony with their nature. There a sane and wise
worldliness has led to an incessant regard to neatness and careful
management, an avoidance of all that is wasteful or excessive. And
French life of course pivots upon a mixed society, easily mingling in
graceful and polished intercourse--an urbane fellowship in a human
_civitas_, a citizenship in whose enjoyment, it might almost seem,
lies the last test of civilization. Hence the French woman, for her
part, has trained herself or been trained to be the instrument of
a symphony of urbanity and well-bred fellowship, giving of her own
characteristic qualities to be an inspiration and a standard to the
creative art. Yet, with it all, she is emphatic of her sex. From the
highest to the lowest class, one may see her, neat, well dressed,
choice in adornment, lavish of love. But she is also tirelessly ready
to serve, in her house-keeping as in affairs, devoted to the family of
which she is the living bond, an affectionate but careful mother who is
honoured and loved by her sons with a pure and tender fervour. For in
France, in spite of the general European tendency to moral absolutes
at least in theory, the balanced sanity and practical wisdom of the
people has never failed to recognize the different spheres and powers,
qualities and weaknesses, of men and women. And further, Greek thought
and an unbroken Roman tradition have kept alive in France the ideal of
a temperate and steady fruition of a world that is made for mankind.
In India conditions are different and there is no tradition of mixed
society with an easy untrammelled exchange of ideas. Yet even within
the limits of the family, it might be thought, the added enjoyment
and the larger and finer interests that would be gained by some such
acquaintance with books and music and paintings, and the nobler
emotions thus won, should seem desirable to all who can think at all.
Controversy has raged fiercely in India round this question of woman’s
education. The number of women who can even read and write, if all
classes in the whole country are regarded, is a negligible quantity,
so small it is; and there are vast tracts in which even Brahman girls
remain wholly illiterate. There are many to this day who bitterly
oppose even the teaching of letters to girl-children. That this can be
the case is of course due to the ignorance of their parents. They have
not yet been able to grasp, nor do they know their own ancient history
to sufficient purpose, that reading and writing is the birth-right
of every human being and a necessary condition of all intelligence
and rational development. They are not aware that the ancient ideal
contemplated no such renouncement. And quite without cause they
fear that instruction for a few years in the elements of education
would interfere with the routine of family life and the customs of
marriage. They have perhaps never had it clearly put to them how simply
this instruction could be fitted in with the usual programme of an
ordinary household and how it need imply no departure from existing
practice in other matters. But indefensible though this opposition
to elementary instruction must be, the objections against further
education are unfortunately by no means without excuse. For it must
with bitterness be confessed that the modern world, at any rate in
Europe, has not yet devised any suitable system of higher education
for girls, has indeed rather busied itself with what is unsuitable
and injurious. “Advanced thinkers” and “social leaders” have a way of
shutting their eyes to scientific results; and facts are hard things
which a flabby age prefers to ignore. So girls have been encouraged
to emulate boys and young men in every sort of examination within the
same curriculum, without heed of their earlier precocity, different
method of nervous activity and smaller reserve force, to the detriment
of health and natural talents and to their unfitting for their own
purposes and functions. It is this which Indian parents, with an eye
open to facts when they are so broad and natural as the facts of sex,
have apprehended, however dimly, and as it were unconsciously. They
have guessed what higher education must in all probability mean in
India, as long as European education remained unchanged. And they
would not let their girls run the risk of an education which might
distort, rather than develop, their sex. Late events served further to
deepen this strong and instinctive distrust; and it is indisputable
that the excesses of an unhappy section of English women with abnormal
aspirations have set back the cause of women’s education in India by
many decades.
[Illustration: BORN BESIDE THE SACRED RIVERS]
The misfortune is that in India opposition does not confine itself to
a particular and, one hopes, a temporary phase of secondary education;
nor does it recognize that in all countries, and especially in India
with its universal and early marriage, the question of higher
education can affect only a very small number of the total. The feeling
of dislike is instinctive and intuitional rather than a reasoned
criticism, and it has crept on like a cloud of smoke over the whole
field of elementary education. Necessarily it has also obscured all
view of a possible, better indigenous method of higher education, which
should at once be consonant with the traditions of ancient India and
the needs of women in Indian society. Such a system appears now to have
been set under way in the wonder-working country of Japan, and with
little change might probably be made suitable to Indian conditions. It
deserves at least to be studied without prejudice and with a settled
understanding of the requirements of the land and of the small classes
of women who would directly benefit.
In spite of all obstacles, due partly to the decay of older customs,
partly also to imported confusions, it may be hoped that before long
it will be admitted that every girl must be taught to read and write.
And one may even hope that a higher education will ensue which, without
slurring over a woman’s earlier precocity and special talents, without
ignoring her specific duties as wife and mother, without forgetting the
peculiar needs and excellences of her mind and body, will in addition
make her more liberal, better instructed, a worthier companion and a
nobler inspiration. In India happily a girl is already allowed to know
the facts of life and her emotions are at least natural. But such an
education as one foresees would teach her to know more clearly and
with scientific truth how to be at once a pleasing and happy wife and a
good mother. She, and through her the children whom she trains, would
learn the evils of premature or too constantly recurring childbirth and
how to avoid them easily. She would know also how to protect her family
from uncleanly surroundings and unwholesome habits. She would not
unlearn but rather be taught even better the necessary arts of cooking
and of sewing, the latter nowadays in many cases almost unknown. But in
addition she would also learn to appreciate the beauties of language
and of craftsmanship, to hear and understand great poetry, and to feel
her whole being thrill to a more glorious harmony in response to the
call of the fine arts. She would still--like the Nair ladies of whom
old Duarte Barbosa wrote--“hold it a great honour to please men.” Yet
she would please not merely by her passion and purity and service, but,
keeping these, would also create a higher attraction of the spirit.
Thus would the lotus women of India be in truth such that of each it
might be said: “She walks delicately like a swan and her voice is low
and musical as the note of the cuckoo, calling softly in the summer
day.… She is gracious and clever, pious and respectful, a lover of God,
a listener to the virtuous and the wise.”
“It may be all my love went wrong--
A scribe’s work writ awry and blurred,
Scrawled after the blind evensong--
Spoilt music with no perfect word.”
_The Leper._ SWINBURNE.