Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official Part 7

'Then he will have rather an old wife in paradise?'

'No, sir; after they pa.s.s through the flames upon earth, both become young in paradise.'

'Sometimes women used to burn themselves with any relic of a husband, who had died far from home, did they not?'

'Yes, sir, I remember a fisherman, about twenty years ago, who went on some business to Benares from Jubbulpore, and who was to have been back in two months. Six months pa.s.sed away without any news of him; and at last the wife dreamed that he had died on the road, and began forthwith, in the middle of the night, to call out "Sat, sat, sat!"

Nothing could dissuade her from burning; and in the morning a pile was raised for her, on the north bank of the large tank of Hanuman,[15] where you have planted an avenue of trees. There I saw her burned with her husband's turban in her arms, and in ten days after her husband came back.'

'Now the burning has been prohibited, a man cannot get rid of a bad wife so easily?'

'But she was a good wife, sir, and bad ones do not often become suttees.'

'Who made the pile for her?'

'Some of her family, but I forget who. They thought it must have been a call from Heaven, when, in reality, it was only a dream.'

'You are a Rajput?'

'Yes.'

'Do Rajputs in this part of India now destroy their female infants?'

'Never; that practice has ceased everywhere in these parts; and is growing into disuse in Bundelkhand, where the Rajas, at the request of the British Government, have prohibited it among their subjects.

This was a measure of real good. You see girls now at play in villages, where the face of one was never seen before, nor the voice of one heard.'

'But still those who have them grumble, and say that the Government which caused them to be preserved should undertake to provide for their marriage. Is it not so?'

'At first they grumbled a little, sir; but as the infants grew on their affections, they thought no more about it.'[16]

Gurcharan Baboo, the Princ.i.p.al of the little Jubbulpore College,[17]

called upon me one forenoon, soon after this conversation. He was educated in the Calcutta College; speaks and writes English exceedingly well; is tolerably well read in English literature, and is decidedly a _thinking man_. After talking over the matter which caused his visit, I told him of the Lodhi woman's burning herself with the Brahman banker at Sihora, and asked him what he thought of it. He said that 'In all probability this woman had really been the wife of the Brahman in some former birth--of which transposition a singular case had occurred in his own family.

'His great-grandfather had three wives, who all burnt themselves with his body. While they were burning, a large serpent came up, and, ascending the pile, was burnt with them. Soon after another came up, and did the same. They were seen by the whole mult.i.tude, who were satisfied that they had been the wives of his great-grandfather in a former birth, and would become so again after this sacrifice. When the "sraddh", or funeral obsequies, were performed after the prescribed intervals,[18] the offerings and prayers were regularly made for _six souls_ instead of four; and, to this day, every member of his family, and every Hindoo who had heard the story, believed that these two serpents had a just right to be considered among his ancestors, and to be prayed for accordingly in all "sraddh".'

A few days after this conversation with the Princ.i.p.al of the Jubbulpore College, I had a visit from Bholi Sukul, the present head of the Sihora banker's family, and youngest brother of the Brahman with whose ashes the Lodhi woman burned herself. I requested him to tell me all that he recollected about this singular suttee, and he did so as follows:

'When my eldest brother, the father of the late Duli Sukul, who was so long a native collector under you in this district, died about twenty years ago at Sihora, a Lodhi woman, who resided two miles distant in the village of Khitoli, which has been held by our family for several generations, declared that she would burn herself with him on the funeral pile; that she had been his wife in three different births, had already burnt herself with him three times, and had to burn with him four times more. She was then sixty years of age, and had a husband living [of] about the same age. We were all astounded when she came forward with this story, and told her that it must be a mistake, as we were Brahmans, while she was a Lodhi. She said that there was no mistake in the matter; that she, in the last birth, resided with my brother in the sacred city of Benares, and one day gave a holy man who came to ask charity salt, by mistake, instead of sugar, with his food. That, in consequence, he told her she should, in the next birth, be separated from her husband, and be of inferior caste; but that, if she did her duty well in that state, she should be reunited to him in the following birth. We told her that all this must be a dream, and the widow of my brother insisted that, if she were not allowed to burn herself, the other should not be allowed to take her place. We prevented the widow from ascending the pile, and she died at a good old age only two years ago at Sihora. My brother's body was burned at Sihora, and the poor Lodhi woman came and stole one handful of the ashes, which she placed in her bosom, and took back with her to Khitoli. There she prevailed upon her husband and her brother to a.s.sist her in her return to her former husband and caste as a Brahman. No soul else would a.s.sist them, as we got the then native chief to prohibit it; and these three persons brought on their own heads the pile, on which she seated herself, with the ashes in her bosom. The husband and his brother set fire to the pile, and she was burned.'[19]

'And what is now your opinion, after a lapse of twenty years?'

'Why, that she had really been the wife of my brother; for at the pile she prophesied that my nephew Duli should be, what his grandfather had been, high in the service of the Government, and, as you know, he soon after became so.'

'And what did your father think?'

'He was so satisfied that she had been the wife of his eldest son in a former birth, that he defrayed all the expenses of her funeral ceremonies, and had them all observed with as much magnificence as those of any member of the family. Her tomb is still to be seen at Khitoli, and that of my brother at Sihora.'

I went to look at these tombs with Bholi Sukul himself some short time after this conversation, and found that all the people of the town of Sihora and village of Khitoli really believed that the old Lodhi woman had been his brother's wife in a former birth, and had now burned herself as his widow for the fourth time. Her tomb is at Khitoli, and his at Sihora.

Notes:

1. _Sati_, a virtuous woman, especially one who burns herself with her husband. The word, in common usage, is transferred to the sacrifice of the woman.

2. The women of Bundelkhand wear the same costume, a full loin-cloth, as those of the Jubbulpore district. North of the Jumna an ordinary petticoat is generally worn.

3. Suttee was prohibited during the administration of Lord William Bentinck by the Bengal Regulation xvii, dated 4th December, 1829, extended in 1830 to Madras and Bombay. The advocates of the practice unsuccessfully appealed to the Privy Council. Several European officers defended the custom. A well-written account of the suttee legislation is given in Mr. D. Boulger's work on Lord William Bentinck in the 'Rulers of India' series.

4. Whenever it is practicable, Hindoos are placed on the banks of sacred rivers to die, especially in Bengal.

5. For explanation of this phrase, see the following story of the Lodhi woman, following note [14], in this chapter. The name is abnormal. _Upadhya_ is a Brahman t.i.tle meaning 'spiritual preceptor'.

Brahmans serving in the army sometimes take the t.i.tle Singh, which is more properly a.s.sumed by Rajputs or Sikhs.

6. An instance of such a prophecy, of a favourable kind, will be found at the end of this chapter; and another, disastrously fulfilled, in Chapter 21, _post_.

7. Riwa (Rewah) is a considerable princ.i.p.ality lying south of Allahabad and Mirzapore and north of Sagar. The chiefs are Baghel Rajputs. The proper t.i.tle of the Udaipur, or Mewar, chief is Rana, not Raja. See 'Annals of Mewar', chapters 1-18, pp. 173-401, in the Popular Edition of Tod's _Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan_ (Routledge, 1914), an excellent and cheap reprint. The original quarto edition is almost un.o.btainable.

8. The masculine form of the word sati (suttee).

9. Well known to tourists as the seat of the Maharaja of Benares.

10. 'of' in text.

11. In the author's time no regular census had been taken. His rough estimate was excessive. The census figures, including the cantonments, are: 1872, 175,188; 1901, 209,331; 1911, 203,804.

12. This Benares story, accidentally omitted from the author's text, was printed as a note at the end of the second volume. It has now been inserted in the place which seems most suitable. Interesting and well-told narratives of several suttees will be found in Bernier, _Travels in the Mogul Empire_, pp. 306-14, ed. Constable. See also Dubois, _Hindu Manners_, &c., 3rd ed. (1906), chapter 19.

13. Widows are not always so well treated. Their life in Lower Bengal, especially, is not a pleasant one,

14. Sihora, on the road from Jubbulpore to Mirzapur, twenty-seven miles from the former, is a town with a population of more than 5,000. A smaller town with the same name exists in the Bhandara district of the Central Provinces.

15. The monkey-G.o.d. His shrines are very numerous in the Central Provinces and Bundelkhand.

16. Within the last hundred years more than one officer has believed that infanticide had been suppressed by his efforts, and yet the practice is by no means extinct. In the Agra Province the severely inquisitorial measures adopted in 1870, and rigorously enforced, have no doubt done much to break the custom, but, in the neighbouring province of Oudh, the practice continued to be common for many years later. A clear case in the Rai Bareli District came before me in 1889, though no one was punished, for lack of judicial proof against any individual. The author discusses infanticide as practised in Oudh in many pa.s.sages of his _Journey through the Kingdom of Oudh_ (Bentley, 1858), It is possible that female infanticide may be still prevalent in many Native States. Mr. Willoughby in the years preceding A.D. 1849 made great progress in stamping it out among the Jharejas of the Kathiawar States in the Bombay Presidency. There is reason to hope that the crime will gradually disappear from all parts of India, but it is difficult to say how far it still prevails, though the general opinion is that it is now comparatively rare (_Census Report, India_, 1911, p. 217).

17. A college of more pretensions now exists at Jabalpur (Jubbulpore), and is affiliated in Arts and Law to the University of Allahabad established in 1887. The small college alluded to in the text was abolished in 1850.

18. For description of the tedious and complicated 'sraddh'

ceremonies see chapter 11 of Monier Williams's _Religious Thought and Life in India_.

19. This version of the story differs in some minute particulars from the version given _ante_, [14].

CHAPTER 5