Where Half The World Is Waking Up Part 20

I think it was George William Curtis who said, "The test of a civilization is its estimate of woman"; and if we are to accept this standard, Hindu civilization must take a place very near the bottom.

In the great temple at Madura are statues of "The Jealous Husband" who always carried his wife with him on his shoulder wherever he went; and the att.i.tude of the man in the case is the att.i.tude of Hinduism as a system. It bases its whole code of social laws upon the idea that woman is not to be trusted. Their great teacher, Manu, in his "Dharma Sastra" sums up his opinion of woman in two phrases: "It is the nature of woman in this world to cause men to sin. A female is able to draw from the right path, not a fool {237} only, but even a sage." And the "Code of Hindu Laws," drawn up by order of the Indian Government for the guidance of judges, declares:

"A man both by day and by night must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means is the mistress of her own actions.

If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from a superior caste, she will behave amiss. A woman is not to be relied on."

"Confidence is not to be placed in a woman. If one trust a woman, without doubt he must wander about the streets as a beggar."

In accordance with these ideas the life of the Hindu woman has been divided into "the three subjections." In childhood she must be subject to her father; in marriage to her husband; in widowhood to her sons or--most miserable of all!--lacking a son, to her husband's kinsmen.

Her husband is supposed to stand to her almost in the relation of a G.o.d. "No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands,"

says Manu, "no religious rite, no fasting. In so far only as a wife honors her husband so far is she exalted in Heaven." And a recent Hindu writer says, "To obey the husband is to obey the Vedas (the Hindu scriptures). To worship the husband is to worship the G.o.ds."

Hinduism and the caste system, hard on the men, are doubly hard on the women. The women may no more rise above their caste than the male members of the family; and they are predestined to take up life's most serious duties before their fleeting childhood has spent itself. No wonder they look old before they are thirty!

If any one doubts the prevalence of child-marriage in India, a trip through the country will very quickly dispel his doubts. A law enacted by the British Government a few years ago decrees that while the marriage ceremonies may be performed at any age, the girl shall not go to her husband as his wife until she is twelve years old; but it is doubtful if even this mild measure is strictly enforced. In Delhi I attended an elaborate {238} and costly Hindu wedding-feast and was told that the bride was "eleven or twelve" and would go to her husband's home (he lives with his father, of course) the following week. My travelling servant told me that he was married when he was sixteen and his wife ten, though she remained two years longer with her parents before coming to him. The first American lady I met in India was telling of a wedding she had recently attended, the bride being a girl of eleven and the groom a year or two older. In Secunderabad a friend of mine found a week-old Brahmin girl baby who had been given in marriage, and in the house where he visited was a ten-year-old girl who had been married two years before to a man of thirty.

In prescribing a marriageable age for high-caste Hindu girls Manu named eight as a minimum age and twelve as the maximum. The father who delays finding a husband for his daughter until after she is twelve is regarded as having committed a crime--though it must always be remembered that girls and boys in India mature a year or two younger than boys and girls in the United States.

One reason for arranging early marriages is that the cost increases with the age of the girl, and the wedding ceremonies in all cases are expensive enough. Weddings in India furnish about as much excitement as circuses at home. My first introduction to a Hindu wedding was in Agra one Sunday afternoon--though Sunday in the Orient, of course, is the same as any other day--and the shops were in full blast (if such a strenuous term may be used concerning the serene and listless Hindu merchant) and the craftsmen and potters were as busy as they ever are.

From afar the sound of drums smote my ear, and as the deafening hullabaloo came nearer its volume and violence increased until it would have sufficed to bring down the walls of Jericho in half the time Joshua took for the job. Just behind the drummers came two gorgeously clad small boys astride an a.s.s begarlanded with flowers; and when the musicians stopped for a minute to tighten their drums so as {239} to make confusion worse confounded, I made inquiry as to the meaning of the procession. Then it developed that the eight-year-old small boy in front, dressed in red and yellow silk and gauze and who ought to have been at home studying the Second Reader, was on his way to be married, and the little chap riding behind him was the brother of the bride. It was very hard to realize that such tots were not merely "playing wedding" instead of being princ.i.p.al partic.i.p.ants in a serious ceremony!

The wedding-feast which I attended in Delhi was arranged for a couple who came from the higher ranks of Hindu society, and though no one could have asked for a more gracious welcome than my American friend and I received, I very much doubt if any one of the high-caste folk about us would have condescended to eat at the same table with us even to end a three-days' hunger. The groom, Harri Ram by name, was a nice-looking boy of fourteen, clad in a velvet suit and apparently pleased with the show of which he was It. There had already been a three or four days' wedding ceremony at the bride's house, we were told, and this was the fifth and last day of the ceremonies and feasts arranged by the groom's father. One thousand people had been invited and, judging from the richness of the food with which we were served, I should think that my friend's estimate of the total cost, 5000 rupees, or $1633, was none too high.

Not only are the wedding ceremonies expensive, but a poor father, or a father with several daughters to find husbands for, must often strain his credit to the utmost in providing dowries. It is said that among the humbler cla.s.ses a father will sometimes mortgage his wages for life to secure money for this purpose. Then, too, the marriage-broker or middleman who has gone to the groom's father with the story that the bride is "as beautiful as the full moon, as graceful as a young elephant, and with a voice as sweet as a cuckoo's"--he must also be paid for his indispensable services.

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Not to be envied is the little damsel of twelve who leaves her childhood home and goes out as the bride of a boy or man--whose face she may never have seen but once or twice--to take up the hard life of a Hindu wife in the home of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Yet from her infancy she has been bred in an atmosphere full of suggestion of the inferiority of womankind, and to her it is probably not so galling as we fancy that she is never accounted worthy of eating at the same table with her husband, but must be content with what he leaves. Even Christianity can move but slowly in bringing the people to a higher appreciation of the dignity of womanhood. "Some of my girls are engaged to be married," Mrs. Lee, of the Lee Memorial Home in Calcutta, said to me, "and when their fiances come to call, after the Christian fashion, the girls must remain standing as inferiors while the boys are seated."

Once married, the Hindu wife has two things to dread: either that her husband may die or that he may supplant her by a second wife. If she lives seven years as a wife without giving birth to a son, the husband is authorized by law and religion to take a second spouse; and in nearly all such cases the lot of the first wife is a hard one. Rev. W.

J. Wilkins says that a servant in his employ married a second wife and insisted that the first should not only support herself but contribute the bulk of her wages for the support of wife No. 2. The older wife is tantalized by the thought that she herself was selected by the parents of her husband, while the new wife is probably his own choice; and another cause of jealousy is found in the new wife's youth. For no matter how old the man himself may be--forty, fifty or sixty--his bride is always a girl of twelve or thereabouts--and for the very simple reason that practically no girls remain single longer, and widows are never allowed to remarry. A story was told me in Bombay of a Hindu in his fifties who was seeking a new wife and sent an agent to his native village and caste with power to negotiate.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TAJ MAHAL FROM THE ENTRANCE GATE.]

The most beautiful building on earth with a story no less beautiful than the building itself.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: GUNGA DIN ON DRESS PARADE.]

Ordinarily the Indian water carrier, or _bhisti_, is attired more nearly after the manner described in Kipling's poem:

"The uniform 'e wore Was nothing much before An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind.

For a twisty piece o' rag and a goatskin leather bag Was all the field equipment 'e could find."

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"My friends have persuaded me that I ought not to marry a very young girl," he said to the agent, "get an older one therefore--oh, it doesn't matter if she is twenty-four."

The agent left and two days thereafter the Hindu received this message: "Can't find one of twenty-four. How about two of twelve each?"

The sorrows of a superseded wife, however, are as nothing to the troubles of a Hindu widow. The teaching of Brahminism is that she is responsible through some evil committed either in this existence or a previous one, for the death of her husband, and the cruelest indignities of the Hindu social system are reserved for the bereaved and unfortunate woman. If a man or boy die, no matter if his wife is yet a prattling girl in her mother's home, she can never remarry, but is doomed to live forever as a despised slave in the home of his father and mother. Her jewels are torn from her; her head is shaved; and she is forced to wear clothing in keeping with the humiliation the G.o.ds are supposed to have justly inflicted upon her. In a school I visited in Calcutta I was told that there were two little widows, one five years old and one six.

Formerly and up to the time that the British Government stopped the practice less than a century ago, it was regarded as the widow's duty to burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre. "It is proper for a woman after her husband's death," said the old Code of Hindu Laws, "to burn herself in the fire with his corpse. Every woman who thus burns herself shall remain in Paradise with her husband 35,000,000 years by destiny. If she cannot burn, she must in that case preserve an inviolable chast.i.ty." This rite of self-immolation was known as suttee, and it is said that in Bengal alone a century ago the suttees numbered one hundred a month. It was an old custom to set up a stone with carved figures of a man and a woman to mark the spot where a widow had performed suttee, and travellers to-day still find these gruesome and barbaric memorials here and there along the Indian roadsides. {244} Moreover, the present general treatment of widows in India is so heartbreakingly cruel that many have been known to declare that they would prefer the suttee.

And yet we may be sure that the picture is not wholly dark; that a kind providence mingles some sunshine with the shadows which blacken the skies of Indian womanhood. Men are often better than their customs and sometimes better than their religions. The high-caste Hindu and Mohammedan women who are supposed to keep their faces veiled and (in the case of the Hindus at least) must not even look out of the windows of their zenanas, manage to get a little more freedom than the strict letter of the law allows; and the Hindu father and husband, doing good by stealth, sometimes pours out in secret an affection for his womenfolk which it would not be seemly for the world to know about.

Standing with a friend of mine on a high flat housetop in Calcutta one day, I saw a Hindu father on the next-door housetop proudly and lovingly walking and talking with his daughter who was just budding into maidenhood. "His affection is quite unmistakable," my friend said to me, "and yet if in public, he would never give any sign of it."

Nor can the lot of the Indian woman ever be regarded as hopeless while the country holds the peerless Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument ever erected in memory of a woman's love. True, Shah Jehan, the monarch who built it, was not a Hindu: he was a Mohammedan. And yet Mohammedanism, although its customs are less brutal, places woman in almost the same low position as Hinduism. In considering the status of woman in India, therefore, scorned alike by both the great religions of the country, it is gratifying to be able to make an end by referring to this loveliest of all memorial structures. Of all that I saw in India, excepting only the magnificent view of the Himalayas from Tiger Hill, I should least like to forget the view of the Taj Mahal in the full glory of the Indian full moon.

The inscription in Persian characters over the archway, "Only the Pure in Heart May Enter the Garden of G.o.d," {245} is enough to a.s.sure one that Arjmand Banu, "The Exalted One of the Palace," whose dust it was built to shelter, was a queen as beautiful in character as she was in form and feature. We know but little about her. There are pictures which are supposed to carry some suggestion of her charm; there are records to show that it was in 1615 that she became the bride of the prince who later began to rule as "His Imperial Highness, the second Alexander (Lord of the two Horns) King Shah Jehan," and we may see in Agra the rooms in the palace where she dwelt for a time in the Arabian Nights-like splendor characteristic of Oriental courts,

"Mumtaz-i-Mahal," they called her--"Pride of the Palace." And seven times Arjmand Banu walked the ancient way of motherhood--that way along which woman finds the testing of her soul, the mystic reach and infinite meaning of her existence, as man must find his in some bitter conflict that forever frees him from the bonds of selfishness. Seven times she walked the mother's ancient way down to the gates of Death and brought back a new life with her, but the eighth time she did not return. And grief-stricken Shah Jehan, carrying in his heart a sorrow which not all his pomp nor power could heal, declared that she should have the most beautiful tomb that the mind of man could plan. So the Taj was built--"in memory of a deathless love," and in a garden which is always sweet with the odor of flowers, at the end of an avenue of fountains and stately cypress trees, and guarded by four graceful, heaven-pointing minarets, "like four tall court-ladies tending their princess," there stands this dream in marble, "the most exquisite building on earth."

With the memory of its beautiful dome and sculptured detail in our thoughts, let us take leave of our subject; trusting that the Taj itself, like a morning star glittering from a single rift in a darkened sky, may form the prophecy of a fairer dawn for the womanhood of the country in which it is so incongruously placed.

Madras, India.

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XXV

MORE LEAVES FROM AN INDIA NOTE-BOOK

There are many show places and "points of interest" in India that have a hundred times more attention in the guide books, but there is a simple tomb in Lucknow--it cost no more than many a plain farmer's tombstone in our country burying-places--which impressed me more than anything else I saw excepting only the Himalayas, the Taj Mahal and the view of Benares from the river.

It is the tomb of the heroic Sir Henry Lawrence, who died so glorious a death in the great mutiny of 1857. No commander in all India has planned more wisely for the defence of the men and women under his care; and yet the siege had only begun when he was mortally wounded.

He called his successor and his a.s.sociates to him, and at last, having omitted no detail of counsel or information that might enable them to carry out his far-seeing plans, he roused himself to dictate his own immortal epitaph:

Here Lies

HENRY LAWRENCE

Who Tried to Do His Duty

May the Lord Have Mercy on his Soul.

And so to-day these lines, "in their simplicity sublime," mark his last resting place; and one feels somehow that not even the great Akbar in Secundra or Napoleon in Paris has a worthier monument.

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