UR iHDI/ltf 
 — 5l§TER5 
 
 Rev. E. StorroW.
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 TWO SCHOOL-GIRLS (NEYOOR, SOUTH INDIA).
 
 OUR INDIAN SISTERS 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Rev. E. STORROVV 
 
 FORMERLY OF THE CALCUTTA MISSION OF THE LONDON MISSIONARY SOCIF.TY 
 
 WITH THIRTY ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 LONDON 
 THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY 
 
 56 Paternoster Row, and 65 St. Paul's Churchyard
 
 LONDON : 
 
 FHINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 
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 HINDU GIRLS IN AN ORPHANAGE (SOUTH INDIA). 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 _^ 
 
 The genesis of this book may briefly be explained. 
 From the time I became a missionary in Calcutta, 
 in 1848, a series of incidents led me to become deeply 
 interested in the condition of Hindu women. For 
 almost three years I resided with Dr. and Mrs. 
 Mullens. He was an ardent missionary, a zealous 
 worker, and possessed of a rare amount of missionary 
 information. Mrs. Mullens was like-minded ; almost 
 
 1 66;? ? OS
 
 6 PREFACE 
 
 all her time was given to her native boarding-school, 
 the visitation of native Christian women, and Hindus, 
 so far as then was practicable. 
 
 I was also so fortunate as to become acquainted, 
 at an early date, with Gyanendro Mohun Tagore, a 
 member of a leading family in Calcutta, whose young 
 wife had recently died, avowing her faith in Christ. 
 Her brief history was remarkable and touching, as 
 an illustration of the manner in which Divine truth 
 could find its way into zenanas, and I wrote a memoir 
 of Bala Shoondari Tagore, and of her cousin, who 
 by similar steps was led to the Saviour. Her history 
 was said to have ' profoundly interested many people,' 
 for it was the first known instance of a Hindu lady 
 of rank avowing her faith in Christ, and indicated 
 clearly the manner in which, most probably, Christian 
 truth would find its way into Hindu and Mahomedan 
 families of position. 
 
 Her conversion and death led her husband to avow 
 himself a Christian, and gave to my own mind a 
 permanent conviction of the need and importance 
 of Christian effort in behalf of women. I had become 
 interested in Hindu history, mythology, opinion, and 
 life, and this incident, with what I soon saw every- 
 where, drew my attention to the unique position of 
 women, and the hard conditions of their lot. My 
 principal duties as a missionary encouraged sympathy 
 and inquiry in this direction, for during the eighteen 
 years I remained in Calcutta I was more or less 
 engaged in the education of young men, chiefly
 
 PREFACE 7 
 
 belonging to families aspiring to zenana respectability. 
 To be almost daily in the midst of six hundred youths, 
 intellectually most receptive, eager for a good educa- 
 tion, and sure to have their opinions greatly altered 
 by it, was to me a position most satisfying and 
 suggestive ; for I learned through them, indirectly, 
 much relative to the position of native ladies, and 
 soon inferred that the most efficient agency for reach- 
 ing them was to educate on a Christian basis their 
 sons and brothers. 
 
 During the first twenty years of this latter half 
 of the century female emancipation has most rapidly 
 advanced, and I had the happiness of being acquainted 
 more or less with some of the most active leaders of 
 the movement. 
 
 I left India with infinite regret, and with an undying 
 interest in the people and their evangelization. I 
 have always been ready to speak and write on these 
 subjects, and not least on the status of women and 
 their elevation. I have not been content with the 
 knowledge I gained whilst in India, but ever since 
 have read all that was within my reach on these 
 questions, studied them, and noted whatever seemed 
 to be of value. 
 
 I formed the purpose to write this book some years 
 ago, when I saw that many English women were in- 
 terested in the subject, but knew so little about it, 
 or, indeed, could know, for the sources of information, 
 though useful as far as they went, were usually 
 elementary and superficial.
 
 8 PREFACE 
 
 But my task has been most arduous. I wished to 
 make the book a thorough record of the usages and 
 ideas governing the condition of women, to give 
 some explanation of their origin and extent, and to 
 be as accurate and impartial as possible. 
 
 I have been the more careful, knowing how much 
 there is in all Hindu affairs that is difficult to under- 
 stand, seemingly contradictory, often contrary to the 
 intelligence, humanity, and gentleness of the people 
 themselves, and that educated native gentlemen 
 usually take a more favourable view of the condition 
 of native women than we do. 
 
 That is the reason why this book so abounds with 
 quotations from native authorities, ancient and 
 modern, and is so largely a statement of facts ; for 
 I have felt it important to fortify whatever is ad- 
 vanced, by opinion less likely to be questioned than 
 an Englishman's and a missionary's, though I know 
 of none so accurate and less given to exaggeration. 
 
 Another difficulty I have had arises from the fact 
 that whilst opinion on women throughout all India is 
 degrading and contemptuous, the usages governing 
 their condition vary. Among some of the national- 
 ities they are less jealously guarded, have more 
 personal freedom and a wider family influence, than 
 in others. The differences, for instance, in the status 
 and treatment of women in Rajput, Mahratta, Punjabi, 
 Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, and other great nationalities 
 are considerable, and suggestive of wide race dis- 
 tinctions of character and temperament ; but though
 
 preface 9 
 
 interesting, they need not now be pointed out. I have 
 written this book profoundly conscious of the stupen- 
 dous and pathetic importance of its subject, and 
 pained by the apathy and indifference with which it 
 is regarded. That must be because Europeans know 
 not the facts of the case, or are too selfish to try to 
 realize them. 
 
 I am greatly indebted to the Church Missionary 
 Society, the London Missionary Society, and the 
 Zenana Bible and Medical Mission both for supplying 
 electros of engravings and also in some cases placing 
 photographs at my disposal for the illustrations which 
 add so greatly to the value of the book. 
 
 If this book should awaken in any a more intelligent 
 and ardent interest in the women of India, and, indeed, 
 in missions generally — for this has been my aim and 
 prayer — I shall feel most grateful to God. 
 
 E. STORROW.
 
 NORMAL TRAINING CLASS (NAGERCOIL, SOUTH INDIA). 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Women in the Code of Manu .. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 17 
 
 II. Women as seen in Ancient History and 
 
 Literature ... ... ... ... 29 
 
 III. Women in Modern Literature ... ... 37 
 
 IV. Daily Life ... ... ... ... ... 53 
 
 V. Child Life ... ... ... ... 77 
 
 VI. Child Marriage ... ... ... ... 84 
 
 VII. Infanticide ... ... ... ... 96
 
 1 2 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER i.\(,i 
 
 VIII. Suttee, or the Immolation ok Widows ... in 
 tX. Widowhood ... ... ... ... 125 
 
 X. The Evils arising out of the Status of 
 
 Women ... ... ... ... ... 143 
 
 XI. The Causes productive of the Condition of 
 
 Women ... ... ... ... ... 163 
 
 XII. The Remedy ... ... ... ... ... 175 
 
 XIII. Efforts already made 10 Benefit Women 189 
 
 XIV. The Various Forms of Female Agency ... 221 
 XV. Inducements and Encouragements ... 237 
 
 Index ... ... ... ••• ■•• 253
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Two School-girls (Neyoor, South India) Frontispiece 
 
 Hindu Girls in an Ori'Hanage (South India) ... 5 
 
 Normal Training Class (Nagercoil, South India) ... 11 
 
 Indian Women pounding Rice ... ... ... 16 
 
 Hindu Woman of High Caste... ... ... ... 28 
 
 Hindu Women carrying Water ... ... ... 36 
 
 In the Courtyard of a Zenana (Western India) ... 52 
 
 A Hindu Meal ... ... ... ... 53 
 
 At the Riverside (Allahaisad) ... ... ... 62 
 
 An Indian Well ... ... ... ... ... 76 
 
 Hindu Orphans ... ... .. ... ... 84 
 
 Hindu Water-carrier ... ... ... ... 92 
 
 Hindu Infanticide ... ... ... ... ... 102 
 
 A Bible Cart in North India ... ... ... 124 
 
 Hindu Girl ... ... ... ... ... ... 132 
 
 The same after Three Years' Christian Training 133 
 
 A Zenana Lady in Bengal ... ... ... ... 143 
 
 Hospital Group, Doctors and Nurses (Lucknow) ... 149
 
 1 4 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Teaching in a Zenana ... ... ... 153 
 
 A School in North India ... ... ... ... 162 
 
 A Hindu Training Class (South India) ... ... 172 
 
 A North Indian Village School ... ... ... 174 
 
 A Criticism Lesson in Travancore ... ... 1S8 
 
 Christian Girls' School (Calcutta) ... 189 
 
 Girls' School in North India ... ... ... 197 
 
 A Hindu Christian Family ... ... ... 204 
 
 Lace Workers (Nagercoil) ... ... ... ... 220 
 
 Some Little Patients ... ... ... ... 221 
 
 Lady Dufferin's Christian Girls' School (Lahore) ... 236 
 
 Scene in Bangalore Hospital ... 245
 
 v ' I ' 1 1 1 ' ! ■■ .- 
 
 i 
 
 INDIAN WOMKN POUNDING RICE.
 
 OUR INDIAN SISTERS 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU. 
 
 It is necessary to give some account of the origin, 
 age, and authority of this remarkable book, since it 
 embodies the sentiments commonly entertained of 
 women in ancient times, and is chiefly responsible for 
 the subordinate and unhappy position they have held 
 in all subsequent ages. 
 
 Manu himself, like so many who appear in ancient 
 Hindu literature, is little more than a name. He may 
 have been the compiler of the Code : he was probably 
 the author of some parts of it, and its permeating 
 genius ; but certainly no one wrote the whole. Portions 
 of it are evidently of various ages, and written by 
 various persons, but who they were, and who (whether 
 one person or a group) finally arranged the whole,
 
 1 8 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 
 
 and claimed for it divine authority, is one of the 
 insoluble mysteries of Oriental literature. 
 
 It is thought by those most capable of forming 
 an opinion that the Code is a collection of laws, 
 rules, and opinions gathered from various sources ; 
 that its original form was not that of a Code, in the 
 modern sense of the word ; that it was compiled by 
 Brahmins with the design of glorifying their order 
 and perpetuating their power ; that it expresses senti- 
 ments and opinions on a great variety of domestic, 
 social, sumptuary, and religious questions, with the 
 view of presenting an ideal of what Aryan society 
 should be, from the Brahminical point of view, and in 
 behalf of Brahminical domination ; and that to give it 
 authority and permanence a divine and inspired 
 quality was ascribed to it, as also the form of a 
 Code. 1 
 
 Many portions of the Code are more than 2000 years 
 old, and in its present form it has existed for 1400 
 years; nevertheless, the sentiments it expresses relative 
 to women are to-day prevalent, more or less, all over 
 India. It crystallized the suspicion and contempt with 
 which women were regarded in ancient times, and has 
 handed them down in this fixed and evil form to all 
 succeeding ages. Hence the significance and import- 
 ance attached to it. Through its high claims, its 
 unique form and purpose, the extraordinary astuteness, 
 
 1 'The moral and political code propounded by Manu is reputed to 
 have been revealed to that inspired sage by Brahma himself.'— Modem 
 India, by Sir Monier M. Williams, p. 228.
 
 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 19 
 
 pertinacity, and self-assertion of the most remarkable 
 sacerdotal caste the world has ever seen, and certain 
 marked characteristics of the Aryan mind making it 
 a most receptive soil for such seed, it has impressed 
 itself on the thoughts and habits of the people as 
 no other book has, although they have ever been dis- 
 posed to attach divine or quasi-divine qualities to all 
 ancient religious books. 1 
 
 Whatever, indeed, may have been its origin, the fact 
 remains that for more than 1400 years it has held a 
 place second only to the Vedas, in the estimation of 
 learned and devout Hindus, as of sacred origin, and 
 because it deals far more than any other ancient 
 book with questions affecting the structure of society 
 in its minute details. It has had a powerful influence 
 on the sentiments and habits of the people, such as 
 the Vedas, even, have probably never had. It stands 
 as one of the four books of the world that have done 
 this to an extraordinary degree — the Pentateuch to 
 the -Jews, the New Testament to Christians, the 
 Koran to Mahomedans, and Manu to Hindus. 
 
 1 ' A code is never the work of a single age, some of the earliest and 
 rudest laws being preserved, and incorporated with the improvements 
 of the most enlightened times.' This code is not to be regarded as 
 ' drawn up for the regulation of a particular state under the sanction of 
 a government. It seems rather to be the work of a learned man, 
 designed to set forth his ideas of a perfect commonwealth under Hindu 
 institutions. It may be presumed to reflect the spirit and sentiments of 
 some ages prior to that of the compiler as well as of his own, and thus 
 viewed it is of the highest value. Its statements relating to women 
 are very copious, and whilst some of them are just and humane, others 
 of them are simply detestable.'— Elphinstone's History of India, 
 Book I.
 
 2o WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 
 
 It is also remarkable that, whilst many of the laws 
 and usages of the Code have become obsolete — if, 
 indeed, some of them were ever anything more than 
 counsels of perfection — and the penalties for violations 
 of the laws and usages can no longer be enforced, the 
 spirit of the Code and its prevailing sentiments survive 
 to this day, and powerfully influence the social and 
 domestic life of the people. 
 
 The passages here cited are by no means all that 
 relate to our subject. Some are too offensive for 
 citation, and I have hesitated to insert some which 
 here have a place. It is as repellent a task to quote 
 such sentiments as it will be to read them. But it 
 is advisable that they should be known, and even 
 carefully studied. 
 
 It is too much the habit of our age to think 
 favourably of all the religious systems of the East, 
 and of the usages which have sprung from them. 
 Notwithstanding the unutterable filth and intolerable 
 drivel pervading much Hindu literature, it is important 
 that English women should know what the sages 
 and legislators of India have taught relative to the 
 nature, position, and duties of women. It would give 
 them a new and glorious conception of the blessings 
 Christianity has conferred on their sex ; and if they 
 could adequately understand, not only that which 
 Hindu writings of the highest repute teach regarding 
 women, but their position, principally through the 
 powerful influence of those writings, it would rouse 
 their indignation, pity, and zeal in behalf of their
 
 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 21 
 
 Hindu sisters, as Uncle Tom's Cabin did against 
 slavery in the United States. Here is some of the 
 evidence in proof of this, and much more will be 
 given in subsequent pages. 
 
 The Code declares — 
 
 ' It is the nature of women to seduce men in this 
 world ; for that reason the wise are never unguarded 
 in the company of females.' 1 
 
 ' For women are able to lead astray in this world 
 not only a fool, but even a learned man, and to make 
 him a slave of anger and desire.' 
 
 'One should not sit in a lonely place with one's 
 mother, sister, or daughter, for the senses are power- 
 ful, and master even a learned man' (chap. ii. 213-215). 
 
 ' A shepherd, a keeper of buffaloes, the husband of 
 a remarried woman, and a carrier of dead bodies, — all 
 these must be carefully avoided.' 
 
 'A present to a Brahmin born of a remarried 
 woman resembles an oblation thrown into ashes ' — 
 distinct condemnations of widow remarriage (chap. 
 iii. 166, 181). 
 
 ' Hear now the duties of women. By a girl, by a 
 young woman, or even by an aged one, nothing must 
 be done independently, even in her own house.' 
 
 1 She must not seek to separate herself from her 
 father, her husband, or sons ; by leaving them she 
 would make both her own and her husband's families 
 contemptible.' 
 
 1 Ihc La-vs of Manu, translated by G. Buhler. Published by 
 Triibner & Co.
 
 22 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 
 
 ' Him to whom her father may give her, or her 
 brother with the father's permission, she shall obey 
 as long as he lives, and when he is dead she must 
 not insult his memory.' 
 
 'Though destitute of virtue, or seeking pleasure 
 elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities, yet a husband 
 must be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful 
 wife.' 
 
 ' No sacrifice, no vow, no fast must be performed 
 by women apart from their husbands ; if a wife obey 
 her husband, she will for that reason alone be exalted 
 in heaven.' 
 
 1 A faithful wife, who desires to dwell after death 
 with her husband, must never do anything that would 
 displease him who took her hand, whether he be alive 
 or dead.' 
 
 'At her pleasure let her emaciate her body by 
 living on pure flowers, roots, and fruits, but she must 
 never even mention the name of another man after 
 her husband has died.' 
 
 'A virtuous wife who after the death of her 
 husband constantly remains chaste, reaches heaven 
 though she have no son.' 
 
 ' But a woman who from a desire to have offspring 
 violates her duty toward her deceased husband, 
 brings on herself disgrace in this world and loses her 
 place with her husband in heaven.' 
 
 ' Offspring by another man is here not considered 
 lawful, nor is a second husband anywhere prescribed 
 for virtuous women ' (chap. v. 154-166).
 
 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 23 
 
 ' One man who is free from covetousness may be 
 accepted as virtuous, but not even many pure women, 
 because the understanding of females is apt to 
 waver.' 
 
 ' No crime, causing loss of caste, is committed 
 by swearing falsely to women ' (chap. viii. 70, "J, 
 1 12). 
 
 'Day and night, women must be kept in depend- 
 ence by the males of their families. 
 
 ' Her father protects her in childhood, her husband 
 in youth, and her sons in old age. A woman is never 
 fit for independence.' 
 
 ' Women must be particularly guarded against evil 
 inclinations, however trifling they may appear, for if 
 they are not guarded they will bring sorrow on two 
 families.' 
 
 ' When creating them Manu allotted to them a 
 love of their bed, of their seat, and of ornaments, 
 impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and bad 
 conduct.' 
 
 ' Knowing their disposition to evil which the Lord 
 of Creatures laid in them at the creation to be such, 
 every man should most strenuously exert himself to 
 guard them.' 
 
 ' For women no sacramental rite is performed with 
 sacred texts, thus the law is settled ; women who are 
 destitute of strength and of the knowledge of Vedic 
 texts are as impure as falsehood itself, that is a fixed 
 rule.' 
 
 ' And to this effect many sacred texts are sung
 
 24 WOMEN FN THE CODE OF MANU 
 
 also in the Vedas, in order to make fully known the 
 true disposition of women.' 
 
 ' On women, infants, men of disordered minds, the 
 poor and the sick, the king shall inflict punishment 
 with a whip, a cane, a rope, and the like.' 
 
 1 Women, being weak creatures, have no share in 
 the Mantras ' — the sacred invocations (chap. ix. 2, 
 5-18). _ 
 
 ' A wife who is barren may be superseded by another 
 in the eighth year ; she whose children are dead in the 
 tenth ; she who brings forth only daughters in the 
 eleventh ; but she who speaks to her husband unkindly 
 may be superseded without delay.' 
 
 ' She who shows disrespect to a husband, who is 
 addicted to some evil passion, is a drunkard or 
 diseased, shall be deserted for three months, and be 
 deprived of her ornaments and furniture ' (chap. ix. 
 77-81). 
 
 ' Stealing grain, base metals or cattle ; slaying 
 women, Sudras, Vaisyas, or Khetriyas ' — the inferior 
 castes — 'and Atheism, are all minor offences' (chap, 
 xi. 67). 
 
 ' A wife is the marital property of her husband.' 
 
 ' Let the husband neither eat with his wife, nor 
 look at her eating.' 
 
 There are a few texts which refer to women in kind- 
 lier accents, and their existence along with similar 
 diversity on other questions, lends force to the theory 
 that the Code is an ancient compilation from yet 
 more ancient and various sources. One evidence of
 
 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 25 
 
 this is its lack of coherent statement. The honour, 
 for instance, given in the following texts to mothers 
 contrasts with the disdain generally shown toward 
 women and even wives, though it exhibits the intense 
 desire for sons. 
 
 ' By honouring his mother he gains the terrestrial 
 world, by honouring his father the ethereal — inter- 
 mediate — and by assiduous attention to his preceptor, 
 even the celestial world of Brahma.' 
 
 ' All duties are completely performed by that man 
 by whom these three are completely honoured ; but 
 to him by whom they are dishonoured all other acts 
 are fruitless.' 
 
 ' So long as these three live, he must perform no 
 other duty for his own sake, but delighting in what 
 may conciliate their affections, and gratify their wishes, 
 he must from day to day assiduously wait on them ' 
 (chap. ii. 233-237). 
 
 'Where the female relatives live in grief, the family 
 soon wholly perishes, but that family where they are 
 not unhappy ever prospers.' 
 
 ' Hence men who seek their own welfare should 
 always honour women on holidays and festivals with 
 gifts of ornaments, clothes, and dainty food.' 
 
 'Women must be honoured and adorned by their 
 fathers, brothers, husbands and brothers-in-law who 
 desire their own welfare.' 
 
 ' Where women are honoured, there the gods are 
 pleased ; but where they arc not honoured, no sacred 
 rites yield reward.'
 
 26 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 
 
 1 Where female relatives are made miserable, the 
 family of him who makes them so very soon wholly 
 perishes ; but where they are not unhappy, the family 
 always increases.' 
 
 ' On whatever houses the women of a family, not 
 being duly honoured, pronounce an imprecation, those 
 houses, with all that belong to them, utterly perish 
 as if destroyed by a sacrifice for the death of an 
 enemy.' 
 
 ' Let these women therefore be continually supplied 
 with ornaments, apparel, and food at festivals and at 
 jubilees by men desirous of wealth.' 
 
 ' In whatever family the husband is contented with 
 his wife, and the wife with her husband, in that house 
 will good fortune be permanent' (chap. iii. 55-63). 
 
 Whilst the Code enjoins respect and honourable 
 treatment to women, its general tendency is to regard 
 them as essentially inferior and subordinate to men. 
 According to it the sexes are not equal ; the woman 
 was made for the man, and is not his companion, but 
 his adjunct, his subordinate, his satellite. Her most 
 religious duty is to serve and obey. 
 
 She, like the lower castes, is not fit to be entrusted 
 with the most sacred knowledge. 
 
 She is intellectually .and morally the inferior of 
 man, therefore she must always be subordinate to 
 him, or through lack of intelligence and virtue she 
 will 'behave amiss.' Her sole use and destiny is to be 
 a wife and mother, and apart from these she has no 
 place or use in life.
 
 WOMEN IN THE CODE OF MANU 27 
 
 These are inferences obviously deduced from the 
 Code. Ample evidence of this is seen in the 
 manners and customs affecting the status of women, 
 in history, and in the various citations that will be 
 found throughout subsequent chapters from various 
 sources.
 
 HINDU WOMAN OF HIGH CASTE.
 
 ( 2 9 ) 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 WOMEN AS SEEN IN ANCIENT HISTORY AND 
 LITERATURE. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact, illustrative of the wide differ- 
 ence between Eastern and Western races, that no 
 Hindu writer has ever given in chronological scientific 
 order, free from legend and myth, a history of any 
 race, or, as Tacitus, Macaulay, and Green, a portraiture 
 of the ordinary life of a people, with their manners, 
 customs, and conditions of life. 
 
 Hindu writings are more numerous and varied than 
 those of any other ancient race, but in many of them, 
 as the Puranas and Great Epics, history, biography, 
 and philosophic speculation are so intermingled with 
 mythology, legend, supernaturalism and extravagance, 
 that the facts and truths to be gleaned from them, 
 after careful sifting and analysis, are comparatively 
 few. 
 
 The most ancient and revered of the Hindu scrip- 
 tures take us back to times probably contemporaneous 
 with those of the Judges and earlier Kings of Israel, 
 and present to us a picture of society not greatly
 
 3 o WOMEN IN HISTORY 
 
 different from that of Syria and Palestine. It was 
 simple, fairly well organized, and religious. Bar- 
 barians there were, but the ruling, dominant race, 
 the Aryans, the ancestors of the Hindus, were neither 
 ignorant nor barbarous, as judged by the standard of 
 ancient times. Society was organized and graded. 
 The people could move and act in the mass and in 
 concert. They obeyed constituted authorities, recog- 
 nizing the force and reasonableness of certain laws, 
 usages, and principles. They were as a race united 
 and strong. They acknowledged divine power and 
 authority. They believed and worshipped, if not 
 as correctly as the Patriarchs, yet far more so than 
 the vast bulk of their descendants in the present 
 day. 
 
 In philosophy, astronomy, poetry, and all the arts 
 of civilization they were far in advance of the aboriginal 
 inhabitants of India, whom they, therefore, easily dis- 
 placed or reduced to subjection. 
 
 The status of women corresponded with all this ; 
 and in considering what it was, and, indeed, what it is 
 now, the fact should be kept in mind, that no Asiatic 
 race in any period of history has ever given to women 
 that place which Western races, and especially Pro- 
 testant nations, give them. 
 
 In the Vedic period of Indian history, which takes 
 us back to times antecedent to Manu's Code, women 
 were in as favourable a position as they were any- 
 where in ancient times. Honour, respect, confidence, 
 and liberty were freely accorded to them. Marriages
 
 WOMEN IN HISTORY 31 
 
 were free from almost all the usages which have 
 degraded them in recent times. Monogamy was the 
 general rule of married life, but polygamy was not 
 unknown, 1 neither was polyandry. But in these early 
 ages we find no instances of child marriage, enforced 
 widowhood, and contempt and distrust of women, so 
 common in subsequent times. 
 
 Following the earliest ages of Hindu society, there 
 come times less simple and tranquil, and more legen- 
 dary. The position of women during those times 
 was materially altered. The two great Indian epics, 
 the Ramayan and Mahabharat, portions of which 
 have even now an extraordinary influence over the 
 imaginations and thoughts of the people, present to 
 us few detailed and minute descriptions of domestic 
 life, or of the relative position of the two sexes 
 among the great masses of the people ; but make it 
 clear that the women of the upper ranks of society 
 had much more freedom than the same class now. 
 Their wishes and desires were more consulted, and 
 their appearance in public was allowed, and probably 
 welcomed. At all events, when there were great 
 gatherings on festival occasions, or for the display of 
 prowess, skill, and courage analogous to the tourna- 
 ments of the ages of chivalry, whilst there were 
 galleries for men who were spectators and combatants, 
 there were others for their wives and daughters, who 
 came to add by their presence and the splendour of 
 their array to its attractiveness, to stimulate the 
 
 1 Teaching of the Vedas, by the Rev. Maurice Phillips.
 
 32 WOMEN IN HISTORY 
 
 combatants not only by their presence, but their 
 gestures and utterances. The general condition of 
 all classes of women must have been far higher than 
 it has ever been since, when one class at least, and 
 that the highest, was thus honoured and free. 
 
 One usage then was permissible, which would be 
 impossible where modern Hindu sentiment relative 
 to women is prevalent — the Swayamvara, or self- 
 choice, when a maiden of high rank selected for 
 herself a husband either purely by choice, or through 
 some test of courage or skill. Such cases, no doubt, 
 were rare, but they sufficiently justify the inference 
 we have drawn. In confirmation of this we recall 
 the exquisite episode of Nala and Damayanti, as an 
 instance of such usage, which amply sustains this 
 opinion, as the words following will show : — 
 
 ' Bhima, the Rajah of Vidarbha, sent to all neigh- 
 bouring countries to proclaim in behalf of his daughter 
 a Swayamvara. Many came, allured by the report 
 of her exceeding loveliness. Among them was Nala, 
 King of Nashadha. He entered the palace, saw 
 Damayanti, and conversed with her. On the great 
 day of selection all the rajahs crowded to the palace, 
 and when Damayanti entered every soul was 
 entranced at her dazzling beauty. Soon the name of 
 each rajah was proclaimed aloud, and Damayanti 
 glanced around at the glittering throng. At length, 
 spying the object of her affections, in all maidenly 
 modesty she went up to him, and taking hold of the 
 hem of his robe and casting a wreath of flowers on
 
 WOMEN IN HISTORY 33 
 
 his neck, thus chose him as her lord. A sound of 
 wild sorrow bursts from all the rajahs. But Nala 
 turned to the slender-waisted maiden and said, 
 ' Since, O maiden with the eye serene, you have 
 chosen me for your husband, know that I will be 
 your faithful consort, ever delighting in your words ; 
 and as long as my soul shall inherit this body I 
 solemnly vow to be yours and yours alone.' 
 
 The story of Ram and Sita, which forms the basis 
 of the Ramayan, is almost unequalled as a record of 
 affection and fidelity between husband and wife, in 
 spite of extraordinary trials. The two are the ideals 
 of manhood and womanhood, and of mutual love and 
 loyalty in the heroic periods of Hindu history : Ram, 
 the ideal of noble self-denial, honour, courage, and 
 endurance ; Sita, of submission to her husband's will 
 and fortunes, of chastity and fidelity. The concep- 
 tion, however, of the subordination of the wife to 
 the husband runs through the marvellous romance. 
 Nevertheless, it is honourable to Hindu intelligence 
 and virtue that for so many centuries the Ramayan 
 has so profoundly won the respect and admiration of 
 all who have any claim to education or refinement. 
 
 In one of the hymns of the Rig Veda there is an 
 allusion to the 'husband of many maidens.' In 
 another a Rishi praises the generosity of a rajah 
 for having given him in marriage his ten daughters. 
 In another the Aswins, twin brothers, are thus con- 
 gratulated : ' Aswins, your admirable horses bore 
 the car which you had harnessed first to the jail for 
 
 C
 
 34 WOMEN IN HISTORY 
 
 the sake of honour ; and the damsel who was the 
 prize came to you and acknowledged your husband- 
 ship, saying, <: You are my lords." ' 
 
 According to established usage the eldest brother 
 was entitled as a matter of right to select and marry 
 a damsel, who then became the joint wife of himself 
 and his younger brethren. So clear and indisputable 
 was this right held to be, that it might override and 
 supersede the prior right acquired by the victor at a 
 Swayamvara. Of this we have a signal exemplifica- 
 tion in the case of Draupadi, who became beyond all 
 question or dispute the lawful prize of Arguna, one 
 of the younger of the five Pandava brothers. But by 
 the decision of the Divine Sage, Vyasa, and with the 
 full and harmonious consent of all the parties chiefly 
 interested, the superior right of Yudhisthira, the eldest 
 brother, was with due formality conceded. Thereupon 
 Draupadi was first married to him, and afterwards 
 successively to the others according to their relative 
 ages. 
 
 Nor is it to be supposed that this marriage of 
 Draupadi to the five sons of Raja Pandu is an isolated 
 event, which might have been surreptitiously inter- 
 polated in the stirring narrative of the Great War. It 
 is envvoven as an integral and constituent element 
 into its very texture ; it is one of the main hinges on 
 which the plot of the terrible tragedy of the war is 
 made to turn, and ever and anon it comes to the 
 forefront of the unfolding roll of its marvellous scenes 
 and soul-stirringr incidents.
 
 WOMEN IN HISTORY 35 
 
 Contrasting the present with the past, it is clear 
 that formerly women were then more respected and 
 trusted. If not regarded as equal to men, they stood 
 nearer to them in general estimation for virtue and 
 intelligence. Education, accomplishments, and in- 
 fluence were open to them. Their power was felt in 
 the family, the tribe, public affairs, and literature. 
 Dr. Wilson of Bombay declared that ' in no nation 
 of antiquity were women held in so much esteem as 
 among the Hindus,' and the most ancient religious, 
 philosophical, and literary writings give colour to this 
 opinion ; and certainly in those ancient records there 
 is no evidence of the systematic and all-prevailing 
 degradation to which the whole sex has been doomed 
 for some centuries.
 
 HINDU WUME.N CARRYING WATER.
 
 ( 37 ) 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 WOMEN IN MODERN LITERATURE. 
 
 THAT the more kindly sentiments and opinions 
 expressed in the latter quotations from the Code of 
 Manu have, in all ages, prevailed in many families, 
 is undoubted. Good sense, natural affection, humanity 
 and gentleness are qualities in which Hindus are 
 certainly not lacking ; and that, under the influence 
 of Christian teaching and example, they are gaining 
 the mastery over superstition and prejudice is gladly 
 recognized. But now we have to indicate the 
 authoritative and prevalent drift of native opinion 
 and sentiment. And this is the more important, since 
 written and public opinion has in all ages governed 
 the conduct and shaped the policy of the people, to 
 a degree most marked and significant. Two sources 
 of authority will assist us here : the Gentoo Code, 
 and common proverbs and sayings. 
 
 This Code is a most interesting and significant 
 expression of native law and sentiment, and reveals 
 what, towards the close of last century, these were,
 
 38 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 
 
 according to the highest living authorities ; and as 
 it is largely based on Manu's Code, it justifies the 
 inference that all through the intervening centuries 
 the low and contemptuous conceptions of women's 
 abilities, character, and status disclosed in the earlier 
 Code had been dominant. 
 
 The origin of this Code is interesting, and is given 
 in the preface, written by N. Brassey Halhed, who 
 translated it from Persian into English at the instance 
 of Warren Hastings, in 1775. This was its origin. 
 As soon as the East India Company became rulers 
 in India they were under the necessity of administer- 
 ing law and justice, and were soon made conscious 
 of the wide difference between English and Hindu 
 and Mahomedan law ; of the necessity of paying 
 much attention to the latter, and of their own ignorance 
 of its principles and details. To assist them ' a 
 number of the most experienced lawyers were selected 
 by the Government in Calcutta from every part of 
 Bengal, for the purpose of compiling the Code, which 
 they picked out sentence by sentence from various 
 originals in the Sanscrit language, neither adding to 
 nor diminishing any part of the sacred texts. The 
 articles thus collected were next translated into 
 Persian — at that time the language of the law courts 
 — under the inspection of one of their own body, and 
 from that translations were rendered into English, 
 with an equal attention to the closeness and fidelity 
 of the version. From hence, therefore, may be formed 
 a precise idea of the customs and manners of these
 
 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 39 
 
 people, who, to their great injury, have long been 
 misrepresented in the Western world.' 
 
 The immutability of the East is seen in the fact 
 that, after more than 1200 years, the sentiments 
 prevalent throughout Hindu society relating to women, 
 and the customs defining their position, correspond 
 with those expressed in Manu. The one Code is 
 the echo of the other. Just as a river running through 
 a mountainous and rocky district abides in the same 
 channel age after age, deepening its bed, it may be, 
 but never leaving it, so the sentiments enunciated by 
 the great codifier have all through the long interval 
 operated on society almost as a law of nature does 
 on physical elements. Abundant evidence of the 
 close correspondence between ancient and recent times 
 will be observed in the following extracts from the 
 Gentoo Code : — 
 
 ' A man both day and night must keep his wife 
 so much in subjection that she by no means becomes 
 mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her 
 own free will, notwithstanding she be sprung from 
 a superior caste, she will yet behave amiss.' 
 
 ' Women have six qualities : an inordinate desire 
 for jewels and fine furniture, handsome clothes and 
 nice victuals ; inordinate desire ; violent anger ; deep 
 resentment ; another person's good appears evil in 
 their eyes ; they commit bad actions.' 
 
 ' A woman shall never go out of the house without 
 the consent of her husband.' 
 
 ' A woman shall never go to a stranger's house,
 
 AO WOMEN IN LITERATURE 
 
 and shall never stand at the door, and must never 
 look out of a window. She must not eat till she has 
 served her husband and his guests with food.' 
 
 ' It is proper for a woman, after her husband's death, 
 to burn herself in the fire with his corpse ; every 
 woman who thus burns herself shall remain in 
 Paradise with her husband threescore and fifty laks 
 of years' (3,500,000). 
 
 Thus were the degrading, pernicious sentiments of 
 the ancient Code accepted and endorsed by great 
 legal authorities toward the close of last century. 
 And there is ample evidence that both express the 
 opinions prevalent at least for several centuries. The 
 customs and usages which will be considered in some 
 subsequent chapters offer ample evidence of this ; 
 and so do the following extracts from two most 
 diverse sources — the leaders of opinion on all questions 
 of philosophy, morals, and religion, and the common 
 proverbs and sayings of the people. The following 
 quotations could be extended indefinitely, but they 
 are sufficient as evidence, and the writer may well be 
 spared the pain of adding to them, and the reader 
 the indignation they excite. 
 
 ' Let the husband be choleric and dissipated, 
 irregular, a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee ; suppose 
 him reckless of domestic affairs, agitated like a 
 demon ; let him live in the world destitute of honour ; 
 let him be deaf or blind ; his crimes and infirmities 
 may weigh him down, but never shall his wife regard 
 him but as her god ' (Padma Pur ana).
 
 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 41 
 
 ' When in the presence of her husband, a woman 
 must not look on one side or the other ; she must 
 keep her eyes on her master, to be ready to receive 
 his commands. Her husband may sometimes be in a 
 passion ; he may threaten her, he may use imperious 
 language, he may unjustly beat her, but under no 
 circumstances shall she make any return but meek 
 and soothing words ' (Padma Pur ana). 
 
 ' A father secures the safety of a woman in infancy, 
 a husband in youth, children in old age, but a woman 
 who follows her own inclination cannot be secured 
 from sin or folly ' (Hitopodesh). 
 
 'The beauty of a cocil bird is its song ; the beauty 
 of a woman is obedience to her husband ' {Hitopodesh). 
 
 ' Should her husband call, even though she were 
 eating ambrosia, she should joyfully quit it and 
 hasten to him ' (Casi Candani). 
 
 ' Let the wife who wishes to perform a sacred 
 ablution, wash the feet of her lord and drink the 
 water ; for a husband is to a wife greater than 
 Shantiara (an eminent sage) or Vishnu.' 
 
 ' Her husband is her god and guru, teacher and 
 guide, and religion and its services ; wherefore, 
 abandoning everything else, she ought chiefly to 
 worship her husband' {The Skanda Puraua, cited by 
 Horace Hayman Wilson). 
 
 'To well-born women their husband is a god.' 
 
 ' Though her husband be of surpassing beauty, 
 youthful, powerful in song, of an aspect to ravish the 
 eyes of maidens, and uniting truth with courtesy in
 
 42 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 
 
 his pleasing address, the heart of woman will still be 
 fixed on others ' (Nithi Valaccani). 
 
 1 They are void of the feelings of honour ; regard- 
 less of pride of birth ; their minds are ever vacant ; 
 they have a thousand varying wills ' {Sinthamani). 
 
 ' It is impossible to restrain within any bounds 
 those who are adorned with jewels — women — if they 
 are devoid of good qualities. Shall I say why ? Is it 
 possible by any means, or by binding it ever so tightly, 
 to keep a dog's tail straight ? No ! ' {Parly amarlyi). 
 
 ' In creatures with nails, in rivers, in horned 
 animals, in those with weapons in their hands, con- 
 fidence must not be placed ; nor in women, nor in 
 kings' favourites. One may trust deadly poison ; a 
 river ; a hurricane ; the beautiful, large, fierce elephant ; 
 the tiger come for prey ; the Angel of Death ; a thief ; 
 a savage ; a murderer ; but if one trust a woman, 
 without doubt he must wander about in the streets 
 as a beggar.' 
 
 It may be supposed by some who are ignorant of 
 Hindu literature, or who desire to think favourably 
 of Hinduism, that we have cited only its unfavourable 
 features. They are such, at least, as are most prevalent. 
 This is the testimony of a most competent witness. 
 The Pundita Ramabai Sarasati, in her High Caste 
 Hindu Women, says : ' I can honestly say, and truth- 
 fully, that I have never read any sacred book in 
 Sanscrit literature without meeting with a low and 
 degrading conception of the character and influence 
 of women.'
 
 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 43 
 
 The sentiment at the root of all domestic life is 
 that women have neither sufficient intelligence nor 
 moral strength nor sense of honour to protect them- 
 selves, and need, therefore, as much to be guarded 
 from themselves as from others. And this demoralizes 
 and injures alike the men who cherish such senti- 
 ments and the women who have to endure the wrong. 
 1 Woman,' wrote Dr. William Arthur, ' is, according 
 to Hindu masculine sentiment, a compound of all 
 the vices. The following passage, cited by Mill, 
 accurately expresses (notwithstanding the remarks 
 of Professor H. H. Wilson) the estimate of woman 
 generally given by the people in familiar conversation : 
 " Infidelity, violence, deceit, envy, extreme avaricious- 
 ness, a total want of good qualities, with impurity, 
 are the innate faults of womankind." " To teach a 
 woman," they have said to me, " would be to give a 
 serpent milk ; she would turn her knowledge into 
 venom." And again, " Keep women at what distance 
 we may, it is hard to govern them ; but did we make 
 them our equals, teaching them to read and write, 
 farewell to the hope of ruling our houses." 
 
 ' Even the nobles in the court of Ahasuherus were 
 not more jealous than the meanest Hindu of the 
 right of men to bear rule in their own house. They 
 profess great alarm for the moral consequences of 
 female education, asking, " If it be almost impossible, 
 in the present state of things, to preserve a family 
 from intrigues, how would it be if the women could 
 send and receive notes ? " The connection that has
 
 44 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 
 
 long existed between an educated and a disreputable 
 woman enlists the prejudices even of the women 
 themselves against their own education. A respect- 
 able man said to me, " The most fatal error one 
 can commit is to treat his wife affectionately ; from 
 the day he exhibits tenderness towards her, his 
 independence and his peace are gone. She will dread 
 him no longer. All the vices of her nature will break 
 forth ; his home is no more his own, and he must 
 bear with her tongue and temper all his days. If," 
 added he, " you bear affection to a parent, a brother, 
 a child, or even a servant, you may display it ; but 
 if you love your wife, you must never allow her to 
 suspect it is so, or farewell to peace." ' ! 
 
 The following incident is no doubt exceptional, 
 but the sentiments expressed are by no means so. 
 A man was brought before Sir Charles Napier, 
 charged with killing his wife in a fit of rage. With his 
 usual promptitude, the guilt of the man being proved, 
 as well as the innocence of the wife, Sir Charles 
 sentenced the man to be hung forthwith. On learn- 
 ing this, a native of rank belonging to a warlike race, 
 exclaimed, ' What ! you will hang a man for only 
 killing his wife?' 'Yes,' replied Sir Charles; 'she 
 had done no wrong.' ' Wrong ! No ; but he was 
 angry : why should he not kill her ? ' 
 
 Mr. Dutt, a member of an influential and gifted 
 family in Bengal, says, 'The position of women in 
 India has hitherto been one of degradation and 
 
 1 Mission to the Alysore.
 
 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 45 
 
 servitude. Though the legislators of Hindustan 
 have not, in common with the sterner lawgiver of the 
 Mahomedans, excluded females from Paradise, nor 
 denied that they have souls, they have treated 
 them in every respect with marked indignity and 
 contempt, sparing no occasion to give vent to their 
 scorn. While the minutest provisions are made in ' 
 the Shastras for the mental cultivation of the boys, not 
 even one stray text is to be found advocating the 
 instruction of female children. On the contrary, 
 women are in many places expressly refused access 
 to the sacred scriptures of the country, and prohibited 
 the acquirement of literary instruction, under a curse. 
 The female who can read and write is branded as the 
 heir of misfortunes. The Vedas are not even to be 
 heard by women. And from the other sources of 
 information they are also debarred ; as, according to 
 the authorities most commonly known and revered, 
 the study of letters is considered a disqualification for 
 domestic usefulness, and the sure, inevitable harbinger 
 of danger and distress. Women have accordingly 
 received no education in this country, neither in 
 childhood nor in youth, much less in maturer years. 
 
 ' Nor is this all ; not satisfied with debarring woman 
 from mental cultivation, the lawgivers of India have 
 also imputed unto her many of the worst propensities 
 of human nature, and to her conduct attributed all 
 the miseries of human life. All the invective that 
 wit could devise, all the sarcasm that her sex could 
 countenance, have been used, bitterly and brutally,
 
 46 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 
 
 against her to injure her reputation. "Woman," say 
 the Gentoo laws, " is never satisfied with the gratifica- 
 tion of her appetites, no more than fire is satisfied 
 with burning fuel, or the main ocean with receiving 
 the rivers." Manu also tells us that women are 
 always ready to corrupt men, whether wise or foolish. 
 In the same strain says the Nit Shaster — " To lie, to 
 be impudent, to deceive, to speak bitter words, to be 
 unclean and cruel, are all vices inherent in woman's 
 nature, and most of all to find fault with a man, if her 
 wishes are not satisfied." 
 
 ' And the Vedas declare woman to be an incarna- 
 tion of sin. In the works of some of the sages and 
 poets, though they all generally teem with the most 
 wicked misrepresentations of her character, there are 
 indeed some portraits in which she has also been 
 delineated as amiable, modest, and high-principled ; 
 but we are not speaking now of the occasional 
 opinions of isolated admirers, but of the notions 
 entertained on the subject by the community at 
 large. The nations of antiquity, one and all, appear 
 to have held woman in disesteem ; and the more 
 corrupt the character of the people, the greater the 
 share of their contempt for the sex. Nowhere has 
 the national character ever been more low than in 
 India, and nowhere was a worse opinion of female 
 integrity generally entertained.' l 
 
 The same low conceptions of women find expres- 
 sion in the common proverbs and sayings. 
 
 1 Essays, by Shoshi Chunder Dutt, p. 267. Calcutta.
 
 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 47 
 
 ' Do not listen to the words of your wife.' 
 
 ' The man who acts not according to his own 
 opinion, but according to that of his wife, cannot 
 discharge the necessary duties connected with this 
 world or the world to come.' These are the 
 sentiments of Ouvay, a Tamil lady, the most 
 popular and renowned authoress India has ever 
 produced. Thus writing, she expressed, we may 
 assume, not her own convictions, but the prevalent 
 ideas, for it has ever been a characteristic of the 
 Hindu race to keep within the limits of surrounding 
 thought and action. 
 
 ' Ignorance is an ornament to women.' 
 
 1 A drum, a rustic, a servant, a woman — all these 
 go on right when struck.' 
 
 ' A woman's will no one knows ; after killing her 
 husband, she will herself become suttee.' 
 
 ' He who listens to the words of a woman will be 
 accounted worthless.' 
 
 ' Even were a woman well read and learned, taking 
 her counsel would lead to the eating of refuse.' 
 
 1 Sickness is caused by water, sin by woman.' 
 
 'A tree on the bank of a river, wealth in another 
 man's possession, a matter known to a woman, — all 
 these must be fruitless.' 
 
 ' Women are as unsteady as the birds that float in 
 the air.' 
 
 1 Never put your trust in woman — woman's counsel 
 leads to destruction.' 
 
 ' Woman is a great whirlpool of suspicion, a
 
 48 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 
 
 dwelling-place of vices, full cf deceits, a hindrance 
 in the way of heaven, the gate of hell' 
 
 One of the peculiarities of the cocoanut palm is 
 that it seldom stands upright. A Malayan saying has 
 it that, ' He who has looked upon a dead monkey, 
 he who has found the nest of the paddy-bird, he 
 who hath beheld a straight cocoanut, or has fathomed 
 the deceitful heart of woman, will live for ever.' 
 
 The following quotation is given as a specimen of 
 the teaching set forth in a book which was distributed 
 broadcast as a prize-book in the Government girls' 
 schools in the Bombay Presidency : — 
 
 ' If the husband of a virtuous woman be ugly, of 
 good or bad disposition, diseased, fiendish, irascible, 
 a drunkard, old, stupid, dumb, blind, deaf, hot- 
 tempered, poor, extremely covetous, a slanderer, 
 cowardly, perfidious, and immoral, nevertheless she 
 ought to worship him as a god, with mind, speech, 
 and person. The wife who gives an angry answer to 
 her husband will become a village pariah dog ; she 
 will also become a female jackal, and live in an 
 uninhabited desert. The woman who eats sweet- 
 meats without sharing them with her husband will 
 become a hen-owl living in a hollow tree. The 
 woman who walks alone without her husband will 
 become a filth-eating village sow. The woman who 
 speaks disrespectfully to her husband will be dumb 
 in the next incarnation. The woman who hates her 
 husband's relatives will become from birth to birth a 
 musk rat living in filth.'
 
 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 49 
 
 A Sanscrit Catechism reads thus — 
 ' What is cruel ? 
 The heart of a viper. 
 What is more cruel than that ? 
 The heart of a woman. 
 What is the cruellest of all ? 
 The heart of a soulless widow.' 
 Another Catechism or Manual reads thus — 
 ' What is the chief gate to hell ? 
 A woman. 
 
 What bewitches like wine ? 
 A woman. 
 
 Who is the wisest of the wise ? 
 He who has not been deceived by woman, who 
 
 may be compared to malignant fiends. 
 Who are fetters to men ? 
 Women. 
 
 What is that which cannot be trusted ? 
 Women. 
 
 What poison is that which appears like nectar ? 
 A woman.' 
 ' Blind sons support their parents, but a prince's 
 daughter extorts money from them.' 
 
 That is, a son, however helpless, will care for his 
 parents, but a daughter, however rich, will try to get 
 all she can from hers. 
 
 1 Unless a daughter dies, she cannot be praised for 
 her virtues.' 
 
 Women are so fickle and frail that you are never 
 sure what their lives will turn out to be. 
 
 D
 
 50 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 
 
 1 Those who attend to the words of a woman are 
 possessed with devils.' 
 
 ' Females produce young ones. They are given to 
 exaggeration, and produce wonderful stories out of 
 very meagre facts.' 
 
 1 We cannot understand the character of women. 
 Even the gods cannot' 
 
 In South India the following story is told in praise 
 of the abject submission to her husband on the part 
 of a wife. Valluvar, a sage, was asked by a disciple 
 which was best, a married or unmarried state. He 
 told his disciple to wait for an answer, and one day 
 when he was present called his wife Vasugi, who was 
 in the act of drawing water from a deep well, who 
 instantly left the vessel suspended halfway and ran 
 to him. On another occasion when she was giving 
 him cold rice, he said, ' This is burning me,' when 
 instantly she ran for a fan and fanned him. Then, 
 when weaving at noonday, he dropped his shuttle, 
 and calling to his wife for a light, she immediately 
 brought one. Then said the sage to the disciple, ' If 
 such an obedient one can be found, it is good to 
 marry, but not otherwise.' 
 
 The Arabs say — and their literature and sentiments 
 have spread over Western Asia and Northern Africa 
 — that the wicked one thus addressed woman at the 
 creation : ' Thou art half of my host, and thou art 
 the depositary of my secret, and thou art my arrow 
 with which I shoot, and miss not.' 
 
 Mahomed is reported to have said, ' I stood at
 
 WOMEN IN LITERATURE 51 
 
 the gate of hell, and lo, most of the inmates were 
 women ! ' 
 
 The Caliph Abu Bekr said, ' The women are all 
 evil, but the greatest evil of all is that they are 
 necessary.' 
 
 Another caliph, Omar, said, ' Consult them, and do 
 the contrary to what they advise.' 
 
 Jewish literature and ceremonialism exhibit the 
 same features. According to Maimonides there are 
 ten sorts of persons disqualified to give evidence in 
 a court of justice. These are women, slaves, children, 
 idiots, the deaf, blind, wicked, despised, relatives, and 
 those interested in a case. The devout Jew in his 
 prayers says, ' Blessed art Thou, O Lord God, King 
 of the Universe, who hast not made me a woman.' 
 The Jewess meekly prays, ' Blessed art Thou, O 
 Lord God, King of the Universe, who hast made 
 me according to Thy will.' She is not allowed to 
 take part in worship on the floor of the synagogue, 
 but with her sex apart, behind the lattice-work, 
 seeing, but not seen, a silent worshipper, for it is not 
 permitted her to join vocally in the service. 
 
 But nobler sentiments are not wanting. For 
 instance — 
 
 ' God did not make woman from man's head, that 
 she should rule over him, nor from his feet, that she 
 should be his slave, but from his side, that she should 
 be near his heart ' {Talmud).
 
 A HINDU MEAL. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 DAILY LIFE. 
 
 Hindu dwellings indicate by their form the in- 
 security of former ages, the suspicion and distrust yet 
 prevalent, and the great social differences existing 
 between men and women. Every Hindu aims to
 
 54 DAILY LIFE 
 
 secure privacy and seclusion in his dwelling. He 
 likes his house to be separate from others ; to surround 
 it with a wall or hedge ; to be embosomed in trees 
 and shrubs, and to be free from the observation of 
 neighbours. 
 
 Almost every house is the property of the family 
 inhabiting it. They are usually small, with one room, 
 or at the most two. The sides consist of mats, or 
 wickerwork between posts, or of earth formed into 
 low walls, or sun-dried bricks. The roof is very low- 
 pitched, and composed of straw, reeds, palm leaves, or 
 tiles, so small and light that crows often displace 
 them. The interior is bare and gloomy, for there is 
 no window, though there may be a small wooden 
 lattice ; and in front, to the south, if practicable, a 
 small raised platform, protected by the overhanging 
 roof from the sun and rain. A mat may be on a part 
 of the mud floor. There are no chairs, drawers, or 
 table, but a box, a few coarse earthen vessels for 
 oil, water, and cooking, and a charpoy, which serves 
 as a bedstead and lounge. The fireplace consists 
 of three or four bricks or stones, but there is no 
 chimney, the smoke finding its way out of the roof 
 as best it can. 
 
 Probably nine-tenths of the families in India live 
 in such houses. But there is far less discomfort in 
 them than those unfamiliar with India would suppose. 
 The intense heat causes fires to be unnecessary except 
 for cooking, shoes and stockings to be an encum- 
 brance, body and bed clothing to be of the lightest,
 
 DAILY LIFE 55 
 
 and sleeping out in the open air on most nights a 
 pleasure rather than an inconvenience. 
 
 But houses of a better class most truly express the 
 Hindu ideal. They, too, stand apart, and usually have 
 a bare, forbidding appearance. The side walls are of 
 coarse brick or bare masonry, with no outlook. The 
 roof is usually flat. On entering the small well- 
 protected door, you pass into a court open to the sky. 
 On either side, perhaps also over the entrance, runs 
 a narrow verandah communicating with small, ill- 
 ventilated, badly lighted rooms. Opposite the door 
 on the fourth side is a raised platform, appropriated 
 to religious uses. Here the images of the gods are 
 placed, and the paraphernalia of worship, and at the 
 great religious festivals, sacrifices and worship are 
 celebrated in the presence of spectators in the court- 
 yard and the surrounding verandahs. At the back 
 of this, communicating with it by a small door, is the 
 women's part of the house, the zenana, constructed 
 somewhat as the front portion, but smaller and with 
 an eye to greater seclusion. At the back of this, 
 again, is often a well-enclosed garden, in which is a 
 tank, so that the ladies and children may bathe and 
 take exercise unseen and undisturbed. 
 
 The inhabitants of such houses are usually far more 
 numerous than in any ordinary European family, are 
 more subject to precedent and authority, and live 
 more apart from their neighbours. 
 
 It is regarded as a matter of course that sons and 
 daughters are married at a very early age. Equally
 
 5 6 DAILY LIFE 
 
 is it regarded as a matter of course that sons with 
 their wives and children shall live in the family house, 
 not as separate entities, but an integral part of the 
 family or commonwealth. It is a binding obligation 
 on every head of a family to provide for all the 
 distressed, helpless, and unemployed of his kith and 
 kin. The claim is often a wide one, and if the head 
 of the family or even some of its subordinate 
 members, are in fair circumstances, it is surprising 
 what a number of poor relatives may lay claim 'to 
 bed and board.' The claims are generally allowed 
 with the utmost politeness, though made by the idle 
 and worthless, and in many cases sadly weigh on the 
 family resources. But custom sanctions the usage, and 
 nothing must therefore be said. Then, too, since 
 widows in such families do not marry, they and their 
 children help to increase the number of inhabitants 
 in a father or father-in-law's household. 
 
 From these various causes it happens that families 
 are often very large, consisting of twenty-five, fifty, 
 one hundred, and even more relatives, including not 
 only parents and children, but brothers and sisters- 
 in-law, uncles and aunts, and cousins of all degrees. 
 Whatever money is gained is put into the common 
 purse, held by the father, or, if he has passed away, 
 by the elder brother. The position of family head 
 is a real, not a nominal one. He is an autocrat whose 
 will is law. So is it on the female side of the house, 
 the two sexes living apart. 
 
 It would be regarded as improper, and subject a
 
 DAILY LIFE 57 
 
 man to ridicule and contempt, if he were to eat with 
 his wife or any other woman, or converse with them 
 on terms of equality. Nor is there any ordinary 
 occasion when the male and female members of the 
 family come together. There is no dining, drawing, 
 sitting-room, or parlour free to men and women alike. 
 Even on occasions when husbands and wives meet 
 before others, it is considered good form for the 
 husband to refrain from all expressions of affection 
 or partiality for his wife. She too must not sit in his 
 presence, unless requested to do so. It is he, not she, 
 who must introduce conversation ; it is her part 
 to listen and obey. She must not directly address 
 him by name ; to do so would be to degrade him in 
 the presence of onlookers by too great familiarity. 
 If they have a child, the mother speaks of her husband 
 through the child's name as the father of Gopal or of 
 Sita. If they have no child, she uses a respectful 
 personal pronoun equivalent to ' he,' perhaps adding 
 the expression 'mine' or 'ours.' So the husband 
 never pronounces the wife's name. He speaks of 
 her as the mother of so and so, or uses a yet more 
 vague form of expression, literally meaning 'the 
 people of my family,' though generally the allusion 
 is only to the wife. Some ludicrous instances of the 
 former usage occurred when the census was taken, 
 since, in the absence of the husband, wives could not 
 be induced to utter their names, and were too illiterate 
 to write them. The entire demeanour of the wife 
 must be expressive of deference and submission.
 
 58 DAILY LIFE 
 
 The front part of the house, the courtyard, and 
 verandahs are accessible on easy terms to servants 
 and neighbours, but the female side of the house is 
 strictly private, and given over to isolation and 
 monotony. No man must visit there, even though he 
 be an uncle, a brother-in-law, or a cousin. The visits 
 even of female relatives and neighbours are infrequent 
 and formal ; no one older than a mere child must 
 penetrate into the men's side of the house, and only 
 for the sleeping-hours may the men retire to that 
 small portion of the zenana which belongs to the wife. 
 If ladies take a journey or visit their own relatives, 
 every precaution is taken that they may not be seen, 
 though some allowance is made that they may see 
 through the lattices of a carriage or palanquin. If a 
 European visits the house, he will be received with 
 marked courtesy, but an introduction into the zenana 
 or to any adult lady of the family is not to be 
 thought of, though he may surmise that feminine eyes 
 observe him by peeping over the balustrades of 
 the roof, or through jalousies or curtains or other 
 coigns of vantage. As few visits are paid, so few are 
 received, excepting in cases where houses are so near 
 to each other that the inmates may pass and repass 
 over some narrow lane without fear of observation. 
 
 The apartments in a zenana are usually bare, 
 dreary, and comfortless to an extreme degree. The 
 walls are neither papered nor painted ; tables, chairs, 
 sofas, drawers, cabinets are seldom seen. The windows 
 and jalousies are small, and constructed so as to give
 
 DAILY LIFE 59 
 
 light only ; they look into the courtyard or garden, 
 or toward the open country, never into the street, or 
 if they do, they are placed so high that the sky, not 
 the earth, can be seen. 
 
 The difficulty of making word-pictures of a zenana 
 vivid is great. Here is a description from a 
 missionary friend who had felt the difficulty. ' I 
 had often wondered why one had such a dim 
 impression of what a zenana was like, and wished 
 for a minute description. I now wonder no longer. 
 A zenana is simply indescribable, from the fact that 
 no two are alike, and not one seems to have been 
 built on any supposable plan or shape. A collection 
 of dirty courtyards, dark corners, breakneck stair- 
 cases, filthy outhouses and entries, overlaid with 
 rubbish or occupied by half-clad native servants 
 stretched about on charpoys or on the ground ; 
 indifferently narrow verandahs, and unfurnished or 
 semi-furnished rooms, and very small ; such is a 
 zenana and its surroundings. Very often the 
 approach to the house is so intricate, or rough, or 
 narrow, that it becomes an impossibility for the 
 ghari to approach, and the missionary must go on 
 foot — a perilous proceeding under the scorching rays 
 of a tropical sun. Once inside the zenana, you are 
 struck, as a rule, by the entire absence of all that 
 constitutes to our idea the complement of a room — 
 furniture, tables, and chairs are not to be thought of, 
 except when brought in from the Balm's apartments, for 
 the teacher's use for the time being-.'
 
 60 DAILY LIFE 
 
 This was written of the Calcutta zenanas. A 
 missionary from Benares writes : ' The homes here 
 are more gloomy, dirty, and devoid of every comfort 
 even than in Calcutta. Even at this cold season the 
 majority of the women wear no other clothing than 
 their thin sarees, and sit on the cold mud or flag 
 floors with their uncovered legs and feet, so that one 
 wonders they are not constantly suffering from 
 rheumatism.' Another writes : ' The women always 
 have the worst part of the house assigned them, and 
 seem to have few comforts given them. Even in 
 the large residences of the rich Babus one can always 
 tell when getting near the rooms allotted to the 
 women by the dirty and miserable appearance of the 
 walls, staircases, and courts. Many of the high-caste 
 natives are very poor, and then they have to live 
 in very small, wretched houses ; but some of them 
 are rich enough, and their dwellings are large and 
 airy, and furnished, with luxuries, but the ladies 
 do not share in the comforts, though they may 
 be better dressed, and have more servants to wait 
 on them.' 
 
 But what of the dwellers in these cheerless, prison- 
 like abodes ? In natural endowments, Hindu women 
 will compare favourably with their sisters anywhere. 
 Their features are most regular, and often refined 
 and delicate. They lack expression, as might be 
 expected from their want of intellectual training, 
 but gentleness of disposition and physical beauty com- 
 monly belong to them. In form they are elegant and
 
 DAILY LIFE 6t 
 
 graceful, fit models for any sculptor or painter. They 
 walk with slow and measured step. Their dress is 
 simple and suited to their manner of life, usually it 
 consists of one long piece of light cotton cloth, 
 wrapped in graceful folds round the body, leaving 
 one limb partially free ; then from under her arm, 
 gathering it up in front, she draws it across her 
 left shoulder and tucks it in above her waist behind. 
 Usually the upper part rests on her shoulders, but it 
 can easily be lifted on her head and drawn across 
 her face, or the whole upper part be lowered to her 
 waist. This is usually done when she is alone or at 
 work. Thus the one piece of cloth usually serves as 
 skirt, jacket, and bonnet. Sometimes a light bodice 
 with short sleeves is worn. 
 
 Next to children, ornaments are the chief joy of 
 women ; they not only give pleasure to their minds, 
 untrained to value higher possessions, but are always 
 regarded as the measure of the family position and 
 the affection of the husband. Those of the poor are 
 made of brass, shells, and glass. Those of the rich, of 
 silver, gold, and precious stones. Their number is 
 great ; thirty-six distinct kinds may be worn by a 
 Tamil lady, and often several of the same kind, and the 
 number worn by ladies in Northern India is almost 
 as great. 
 
 How do they pass their time ? The wives of the 
 poor and low castes have far more to interest them than 
 those of higher rank. They go more abroad ; they 
 see and hear more. The management of domestic
 
 62 
 
 DAILY LIFE 
 
 affairs rests with them, and having more freedom, 
 they become more self-reliant and intelligent. They 
 
 AT THE RIVERSIDE (ALLAHABAD). 
 
 often work hard, have coarse food, few comforts, and 
 are harshly treated. They have daily to bring water
 
 DAILY LIFE 63 
 
 from the well, purchase in the market the necessary 
 articles, cook the food, attend to the house and 
 children, and perhaps work in the farm or garden. 
 
 Zenana ladies are much more carefully tended, but 
 their lives are intensely dull, monotonous, and trivial — 
 so at least they seem to us. They never leave the 
 house singly or in company for a walk or shopping 
 or visiting. To do so would be not only ruinous to 
 the reputation of any zenana lady, but also regarded 
 as disgraceful to her family. 
 
 Visits are rarely paid or received, and then are 
 arranged with much ceremony. There are multitudes 
 of ladies who have never enjoyed a free long walk, 
 or been in any house but their father's and father's- 
 in-law, or travelled a mile from either, or have the 
 least idea of the town or village in which they were 
 born. 'You,' said a young lady in a zenana to an 
 Englishwoman, pointing to a bird on the wing — 'you 
 are like that bird soaring to heaven ; we are like birds 
 caught, their wings cut, and shut up in cages too 
 narrow for them.' 
 
 Cooking is the principal event of the day, and is 
 usually done with great skill and completeness ; but, 
 since there is but one cooking for the whole family, 
 and as several members of the family can assist as 
 well as servants, this occupies no great proportion of 
 the time. They clean the cooking utensils ; bathe and 
 dress their children ; dress and braid their hair ; look 
 at their jewels and the jewels of one another ; cat, 
 lounge, sleep ; hear the gossip brought in on the
 
 64 DAILY LIFE 
 
 previous night by each husband to his wife and by 
 the servants — and that is all ! 
 
 What a dull, cheerless, restricted existence theirs is ! 
 Some part of each day many English women are left 
 to themselves, but they ever have the consciousness 
 of freedom : they can go out, they receive visits, 
 read, and toward evening the house is made bright 
 and cheerful by the return of the husband and 
 sons ; and the glory and delight of Christian family 
 life is seen in men and women using the same room, 
 sitting around the same table, eating the same food, 
 and conversing freely as equals. Nothing of the kind 
 is seen in India. 
 
 This segregation of the sexes in the same family is 
 disastrous alike to men and women, and it is difficult 
 to say which sex is most injuriously affected. What 
 a world of significance is conveyed in the remark that 
 in India there are ' houses, but no homes ' ! ' We have 
 no homes,' said the Dewan Bahadur R. Raghonath 
 Rao. ' There exists,' writes Sir M. Monier Williams, 
 ' no word that I know of in any Indian language 
 exactly equivalent to that grand old Saxon mono- 
 syllable " home " — that little word which is the key 
 to our national greatness and prosperity. Certainly 
 the word " zenana," meaning in Persian " the place of 
 women," cannot pretend to stand for " home," any 
 more than the Persian " mandana," " the place for 
 men," can mean " home." ' 
 
 In the zenana itself there are abundant sources of 
 discomfort and trouble. Women's sole companions
 
 DAILY LIFE 65 
 
 are near relatives, chiefly nieces, aunts, and sisters-in- 
 law, some married, others unmarried, but all confined 
 within the same restricted intellectual, social, and 
 material horizon. However patient, gentle, submissive 
 women may be, it is inevitable that many occasions 
 for envy, jealousy, and discord must exist in families 
 so constituted. There is, indeed, an authority whose 
 will is supreme — the grandmother or mother-in-law or 
 sister-in-law, whose Oriental conception of autocratic 
 power is not likely to be softened by previous subor- 
 dination, and still less by sweet reasonableness, the 
 discipline of education, or the beneficent influence of a 
 pure religion. Usually delighting in the exercise of 
 power over others, and being ignorant and supersti- 
 tious, and the most conservative where all are so, she 
 is the enemy of all change and reform. Her govern- 
 ment is a pure despotism, all the more harsh and 
 overbearing because it is exercised for the most part 
 over the daughters of other women. Report speaks 
 of this as one of the darkest and saddest features of life 
 in the zenanas, and so do such current sayings as 
 the following : — 
 
 ' If the mother-in-law break the pan, it is earthen ; 
 if the daughter-in-law, it is golden.' 
 
 ' Gold answering to the assayer's test and a woman 
 agreeable to her mother-in-law are scarce.' 
 
 'Tears come into the eyes of the daughter-in-law 
 six months after the death of the mother-in-law.' 
 
 And troubles are sure to be imminent from 
 confining within a narrow space a number of women 
 
 E
 
 66 DAILY LIFE 
 
 of different ages and of various forms of relationship, 
 who have little or nothing to do, and nothing 
 whatever to divert their minds from the most common- 
 place and trivial details. There may be two or more 
 wives of the same husband. Yet more probable is it 
 that there are aunts, sisters, sisters-in-law, daughters, 
 daughters-in-law, nieces, some married, some widows, 
 people of all ages and children of many degrees of 
 relationship. Friction in such families is inevitable. 
 Not only are there no means of escape from the 
 worry, annoyance, and tyranny that are but too 
 possible ; there is also no intellectual diversion of 
 mind or thought. What a refuge from trouble have 
 we in thoughts of the love, patience, and pity of God, 
 and in books ! They who love books have in them 
 an inexhaustible source of consolation and delight. 
 But a Hindu woman has neither. No one of the 
 numerous gods of whom she has any knowledge is 
 supposed to be loving, kind, and sympathetic. 
 
 And she has no books, nor could she read them 
 if she had. Of the 128,467,925 women in British 
 India in 1891, only 543,495 are returned as able to 
 read and write, with 197,662 learning. In the native 
 states female education is yet more backward, and if 
 it be remembered that at least one-third of the 
 readers are native Christians, it will be seen how few 
 have this advantage. Education, no doubt, is spread- 
 ing, but more slowly than is supposed, and it is a new 
 thing ; for hundreds of years not one woman in two 
 thousand has been able to read or write — a well-
 
 DAILY LIFE 67 
 
 informed writer says 'one in 20,000' — and if they 
 could have read previous to this half of the century, 
 there was little for them to read that was not 
 corrupting. This is proved by the second argument 
 urged against female education — that women, notwith- 
 standing all safeguards, are naturally predisposed to 
 evil ; how much more so would they be if they read 
 books ! The first being, that if women could read 
 and write, they would be filled with the conceit that 
 they were the equals of men. 
 
 Under such conditions of life ; assumed to be 
 the inferiors of men, intellectually and morally ; to 
 be unfit for freedom ; the subordinates of their 
 husbands ; subject to the caprice and will of other 
 women, related to them by marriage, not blood ; 
 superstitious, ignorant, and without any elevating 
 pursuits or associations, it is inevitable that they 
 should be liable to untold sorrows and humiliations, 
 and that even when they are not, their condition 
 must be lacking in some of the most rational, 
 benignant, and desirable elements of domestic life. 
 
 There arc, however, some features of Hindu life 
 and character which tend to alleviate and soothe the 
 lot of women. They are much dwelt on by native 
 apologists, and should in all fairness be stated. 
 
 Hindus are better than Hinduism, therefore their 
 intelligence and humanity mitigate the tyranny and 
 hardship of some of their customs. The women, for 
 instance, feel their position to be less irksome than we 
 suppose. Society from the top to the bottom has its
 
 68 DAILY LIFE 
 
 foundation in despotism. As it rules unquestioned 
 in the state, so does it in the family. Men rule and 
 women submit as a matter of course ; unless the 
 subjection can be evaded by favouritism or cajolery, 
 and when the latter have never been taught that they 
 have rights they can assert and claim, or seen or 
 heard of anything but the most abject submission, 
 and where the maxim is unquestioned, ' Whatever is, 
 is best,' it is not so surprising that women acquiesce 
 in their lot. They accept custom almost as patiently 
 as they do a law of nature. Even when the knowledge 
 comes to them that the condition of Western women 
 is different from their own, it affects them far less 
 than might be supposed, except as a thing to wonder 
 at rather than to be sought for. ' They are a strange 
 people ; they have one set of customs, we have another, 
 and of course it is proper for each to follow its own,' 
 expresses their thought, and there the matter ends ! 
 Then, by a perverse method of reasoning and some 
 caprice of fashion, that which to an Englishwoman 
 would be intolerable, is regarded by her Hindu sisters 
 as evidence of her husband's regard and of the 
 respectability of her family. A woman who never 
 walks abroad, and whose face is never seen but by 
 women in the zenana, is as proud of being 'a purdah ' 
 lady living behind a curtain as an Englishwoman 
 whose husband keeps a carriage ; she regards it as a 
 sign of rank, an evidence of her husband's care for her. 
 Then the duties and amusements of such women, 
 though trivial and unintellectual, are sufficient for
 
 DAILY LIFE 69 
 
 them, since their minds are never opened to greater 
 and more interesting affairs. 
 
 Nor is companionship always lacking. In such 
 large and miscellaneous households, some can usually 
 be found who in age, disposition, and sympathy 
 become friends and helpers. And though the 
 government of the family is despotic, giving a power 
 too great and that may press heavily, even cruelly, on 
 subordinates, it is not often so abused. Submission 
 to authority is far more general than with us, and 
 that disarms severity, and the gentleness and 
 amiability of the Hindu character indisposes those 
 who have power to abuse it, and those who have not 
 power to provoke its. exercise. 
 
 Nor are husbands usually cruel or unkind. Brutality 
 is not a Hindu characteristic. The husband may be 
 indifferent, contemptuous, even unfaithful to his wife, 
 but he is seldom cruel. Often he is indulgent in a 
 patronizing way. He does not treat her as an equal, 
 but his kindness, sense of honour, and affection induce 
 him to please and humour her in ways he thinks 
 suitable to her weak nature. She has the best food 
 he can afford ; he loads her with ornaments, if not of 
 gold and silver, of inferior material ; and not seldom 
 she is the actual, though not the acknowledged ruler. 
 
 As large a proportion of Hindu women are gifted 
 with great good sense, force of character, energy, 
 grace of manner, charm, and beauty as will be found 
 anywhere else, and these qualities exert their potency 
 in India, as elsewhere. A Hindu gentleman, next to
 
 70 DAILY LIFE 
 
 taking care that his caste is kept undefiled, regards 
 it as his highest duty, his point of honour, to protect 
 his female relatives. He thinks of them contemp- 
 tuously and patronizingly, as weak, helpless, and liable 
 to go astray, and his care degenerates into distrust 
 and suspicion ; but in his own way, and according to 
 his sense of propriety, he defends them from evil, pays 
 them due respect, and ministers to their happiness 
 in food, clothing, ornaments, and amusements, as 
 far as his resources will allow ; and defends them from 
 insult, dishonour, and danger as sternly as any knight 
 of chivalry or modern gentleman. Indian history 
 illustrates this in many romantic incidents. 
 
 Nevertheless, even when these modifying consider- 
 ations are allowed their utmost weight, the normal 
 condition of women leaves much to be desired. The 
 masculine sentiment has ever been, ' Women are to 
 be protected and cared for, not for their own sake, 
 but because they are the potential or real mothers of 
 men. They are necessary to us, and should for our 
 repute be pleased and indulged as far as prudence 
 will allow, according to their weak natures ; but since 
 they are intellectually and morally weak, frivolous, 
 vain, inclined to evil and to lead others astray, and 
 unsteady as the lotus on the running stream, it is 
 never safe to treat them as equals or to entrust them 
 with power. Therefore they should not be left free, 
 for their own sakes as well as ours. A woman is 
 never fit for independence.' 
 
 The inevitable results of such sentiments, practically
 
 DAILY LIFE 71 
 
 acted on generation after generation, has been to make 
 men tyrants, women far less esteemed than they 
 should be, and their houses little better than prisons. 
 At the best, how colourless, dreary, degraded, and 
 unintellectual must be the lives of women who know 
 no more of nature than can be seen from their zenana 
 jilmills ; who never walk abroad at their own free 
 will ; whose own husbands, fathers, brothers, treat 
 them, not as equals, not as companions, but as pretty 
 animals or pleasant toys ; whose opinions are never 
 consulted, and whose wishes are usually suspected ; 
 who have no inward sources of interest, information, 
 and delight from reading and writing ; and who never 
 are trusted without reserve. How ' cabined, cribbed, 
 confined,' are these millions, whose lives might be so 
 bright and fruitful of good and pleasantness ! 
 
 But how seldom, alas ! is the highest ideal of any 
 state of society reached, and certainly it is seldom 
 reached in India. Reports, very reliable, speak of 
 extreme ignorance, jealousy, strife, petty tyranny, 
 unhappiness, much unhealthiness and disease, and 
 suicide as far from uncommon. And darker things 
 are said to be — illegitimacy, infanticide, murder. 
 The structure of society, the seclusion of Hindu 
 dwellings, and the jealous privacy of family life lend 
 themselves to the commission of such crimes, without 
 much fear of detection, and the glints of informa- 
 tion which come to most who have opportunities of 
 learning what passes in private life justify these 
 statements. Testimony like the following is but too
 
 72 DAILY LIFE 
 
 abundant : ' The life of Hindu women is but a career 
 of ignorance, servitude, and superstition.' ' We are 
 prisoners,' says a Hindu lady, 'from our birth, and 
 life-long sufferers ; and our fathers, brothers, husbands, 
 sons, keep us in this prison. No Hindu brother 
 pauses to think that it is to his own hurt to keep us 
 down in this misery ; but it is. We women are shut 
 up in a pit of ignorance. Hearing of our condition, 
 the eyes of strangers fill with tears. But you leave 
 us there. Have you no pity in your hearts ? ' 
 
 Speaking of life in the zenana, another says, ' It 
 is like that of a frog in a well : everywhere there is 
 beauty, but we cannot see it ; it is hid from us.' 
 
 ' Indian women,' says Mr. Dorabiji E. Gimi, 
 'are denied the common enjoyments of life, are 
 throughout life behind purdahs, and, to add insult to 
 injury, the excuse for all such unmanly conduct is 
 proclaimed to be, their inborn wickedness.' 
 
 The following just and impartial statement is from 
 a zenana missionary, in reply to the inquiry, ' Are 
 Hindu women happy ? ' The latter part of it, however, 
 takes account of some present-day conditions of life of 
 which previous ages knew nothing. 
 
 ' We all feel that they are remarkably apathetic 
 under their sufferings. Apathy and a certain childish- 
 ness are two leading features of their character, which 
 may be accounted for partly by their long-continued 
 state of subjection, and partly by their religion. They 
 are taught to look at everything as ordered by fate, and 
 they have been taught to regard themselves as inferior
 
 DAILY LIFE 73 
 
 to men in every way. Their minds are untrained and 
 easily diverted by trifles, and they have been brought 
 up to observe a multitude of small ceremonial par- 
 ticulars, and to regard these as essential. So it is no 
 wonder that they are dull and trifling, and that the 
 heavier sorrows of life seem sometimes hardly to 
 touch them — at least not acutely. It would be untrue 
 to say that they have not in a certain, dull, half-in- 
 articulate way, a feeling of their grievances. Some 
 express it, and others only show it in their careworn 
 and patient faces. But there cannot be much doubt 
 that the childish element in their character, the facility 
 with which they can be diverted from the considera- 
 tion of their troubles by any little passing amusement, 
 goes a long way to lighten their burden. In the 
 better educated and more thoughtful, this facile dis- 
 position tends to disappear, and its place is sometimes 
 taken by a bitter sense of wrong and an inclination 
 to brood over grievances. And so in this case, as in 
 many cases of progress, there must be the inevitable 
 period of increased power to suffer without much in- 
 crease in the relief of the suffering. 
 
 ' Beside these natural characteristics there is an 
 external influence — the power of custom, perhaps 
 the strongest influence in a Hindu life. What is 
 customary is sacred, and rebellion against it hardly to 
 be thought of; and where rebellion is quite out of the 
 question, resignation of a kind follows, and produces 
 a measure of peace. But there are exceptions among 
 the classes, especially those which are least restricted.
 
 74 DAILY LIFE 
 
 ' After saying so much about the dark side of things, 
 it is only fair to say, too, that there are many really 
 happy women among the Hindus and Mahomedans 
 — happy, that is, in their outward circumstances and 
 relationships. I am pretty certain that two-thirds of 
 my present pupils have little or nothing to cause them 
 suffering in the special ways common to the women 
 of this country. They are kindly used, have the 
 opportunity of learning, are not without outside 
 interests, and seem on the whole to enjoy their lives. 
 The things they lack, and which we most pity them 
 for lacking, are things of the want of which they are 
 not sensible.' 1 
 
 1 The Mission World [ox 1S95, p. 421.
 
 ( 77 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CHILD LIFE. 
 
 NOWHERE is the sentence pronounced on Eve's 
 daughters more manifestly carried out than in India. 
 To the solicitudes of maternity, common to her sex, 
 is added a load of anxiety as to the possible sex of 
 her child ; for on that depends, for herself, an assured 
 position if her child is a boy, dishonour if a girl. 
 She is, at that time of mystery and tenderness, when 
 she should have all possible sympathy, placed rather 
 on trial, and kept in a state of extreme suspense ; for 
 her future position and that of her child depends 
 on that over which she can have no possible influence, 
 but for which she may be blamed or praised, made 
 happy or miserable. 
 
 She knows well that if she gives birth to a son, 
 her family will be proud of her, her rivals and 
 enemies — if she has any — humbled, and the fidelity, 
 if not love, of her husband assured. And she knows, 
 equally well, that the birth of a daughter will bring 
 disappointment to her family, regret, and it may
 
 78 CHILD LIFE 
 
 be alienation, to her husband, and shame to herself. 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that the blessing 
 invoked on women over the greater part of India 
 should be, 'Mayest thou have eight sons, and may 
 thy husband survive thee ! ' 
 
 Reference has been made to the supposed necessity 
 of having a son, for the well-being of the family in 
 a future life, and the stigma attached to being the 
 mother of daughters ; but it is important to observe 
 how and why such a mother is degraded. 
 
 In Hindu opinion, the conditions of this life arise 
 out of the merit or demerit contracted in a previous 
 state of existence, and, as women are held to be 
 inferior to men, to be born a woman is not only to 
 be born to an inferior position, but to give birth to 
 a girl is a sign of a lapsed, sinful taint in the soul, 
 which carries misfortune along with it. To give 
 birth to a girl is held to be proof of evil inherited 
 and transmitted. Men believe this, and women, 
 utterly ignorant and superstitious, who have never 
 had an opportunity to learn otherwise, cannot but 
 be strangely affected by such a belief. How must 
 a wife thus placed yearn to give birth to a son, and 
 how must her heart sink within her, when, weak and 
 ill after the pangs of maternity, she is told, ' It is only 
 a girl ' ! She may bewail her own misfortune in the 
 distinct fall of her status in the small circle in which 
 she lives, and if she can think, must pity the poor 
 little one, who is born to an inevitable inheritance 
 of humiliation.
 
 CHILD LIFE 79 
 
 Having these ideas of sex, its causes and conse- 
 quences, it is not so surprising that the birth of a 
 daughter 'was followed by the quiet sign of the father's 
 depressed and slightly clenched thumb over the fingers 
 of the right hand. No word was needed, the old 
 nurse knew too well its signification, and as quietly 
 pressed her thumb on a well-known spot on the 
 child's head, and all was accomplished. Nor is it 
 surprising that many a mother, knowing the sad 
 probabilities of feminine life, sorrowfully acquiesced in 
 the deed as the less of two evils. And who can tell 
 how many such deeds of darkness still occur, even 
 daily, behind the purdah.' x If the poor little un- 
 welcome one is not destroyed by violence, she is sure 
 to be less cared for than a male child, possibly may 
 be neglected, and if disease or accident take her 
 away, her death will be accepted as a gain rather 
 than a loss. 
 
 Not only do the conditions of life suggest this, but 
 evidence confirms it. A lady medical missionary 
 writes : ' Often I say to myself with a choking feeling, 
 Alas ! what has sin wrought ? Here is a poor 
 miserable child of three years, starved and ill. I order 
 cod-liver oil to be rubbed in her body, and the mother 
 says, " I don't think I'll take the trouble, for if she 
 dies I shall have one less to care for." ' Another lady 
 writes : ' In one of my houses I found a poor little 
 girl not more than three months old, lying wholly 
 neglected and uncared for, on the floor, crying very 
 
 1 Hindu Women, by II. Lloyd, p. 38.
 
 So CHILD LIFE 
 
 bitterly, and apparently in much pain, but no one 
 came to render her any help. At last the grand- 
 mother appeared, but instead of taking her up, and 
 comforting the little child, she showered anathemas 
 upon the poor little thing, which greatly distressed 
 me. So I asked the old woman to try and pacify the 
 child ; but imagine my horror when she exclaimed, 
 " Who cares for a girl ? If God could take away 
 the boy, let him take the girl also. I am not going 
 to touch her. I would rather she died." ' 
 
 No doubt, far more generally, affection comes 
 toward the little one, as well as pity, in the mother's 
 heart, and in due time in the father's, for Hindu 
 parents have this in no scant measure, overborne 
 though it is by the all-powerful influence of popular 
 opinion and superstition. But the affection is not 
 directed by knowledge or intelligence. The father's 
 love is mixed with contempt ; he recognizes her 
 beauty, her pretty ways, her craving for pleasant 
 food, for toys and amusements, and in these he 
 indulges her — if he is good-natured and prosperous — 
 to the utmost extent ; but her mind — well, he probably 
 doubts if she has one, as he thinks he has, though he 
 firmly believes in her innate weakness, frivolity, and 
 inclination towards evil. 
 
 A girl is left almost entirely in the hands of her 
 mother, and she, alas ! has no one qualification for such 
 a task save that of affection. She is without know- 
 ledge, and with a mind entirely untrained and undis- 
 ciplined, except by repression, suspicion, and coercion.
 
 CHILD LIFE -Si 
 
 The chances arc one to a thousand that she can 
 neither read nor write. She has no knowledge to guide 
 herself or to impart to her child ; for she has never 
 mixed in society, nor had the opportunity to observe, 
 nor talked to any one more intelligent than herself. 
 But she is a devout worshipper of Siva, Krishna, 
 Durga, and other terrible and licentious divinities. 
 She holds some trees, animals, and stones to be sacred. 
 She believes in omens, signs, lucky and unlucky 
 persons, places, and occurrences, and in ghosts, evil 
 spirits, and demons, and to her Eastern imagination 
 they are real, terrible, and active. Perhaps she, a 
 mother, is not far advanced in the teens. And other 
 women in the family, if different in age, are equally 
 ignorant, superstitious, and untrained. What must 
 the daughter of such a mother become ? The child 
 has more liberty than she ever will have in the future; 
 she has at least the freedom of the house, and can 
 play, with but little restraint, with her brothers and 
 cousins. But she must keep within narrow bounds, 
 she seldom sees a new face or hears a new voice, or 
 is taken a mile from the place of her birth. Her toys 
 and amusements are few and poor. She does not go 
 to school ; she receives no intellectual training. All 
 she is taught is how to stand and sit, to repeat a few 
 prayers, that she may be protected from evil spirits, 
 obtain a good husband who may live and will not 
 take a second wife, and that her caste may not be 
 defiled ! All the conversation she hears relates to 
 cooking, do'mgpiija, using terms of abuse, the legends 
 
 F
 
 82 CHILD LIFE 
 
 of a monstrous and licentious mythology, omens, 
 demons, and marriage. She has the two things a 
 child desires, but should not have, she is probably 
 indulged, and has no lessons to learn. But how dull 
 and uninteresting at the best such a life must be ; 
 without the laughter, sunshine, and flowers we always 
 love to associate with girlhood ! And how ominous 
 of the future ! And yet it is the happiest portion of 
 her life. She is freer than ever she will be in the 
 future. She dwells among her own people, where in- 
 dulgence and affection prevail, and she is most likely 
 free from the worries and humiliations which invade 
 adult life. 
 
 But her time of happiness, restricted though it be 
 by the conditions of her sex and lack of education, is 
 very limited. There is not for her that exuberantly 
 sweet and glad time of maidenhood which makes the 
 lives of English girls, between the ages of twelve and 
 twenty-two, the happiest period of existence, and the 
 most free from care, of that enjoyed by human beings 
 of any age or country. Before that time comes, the 
 foolish, empty-minded women around her are specu- 
 lating about her marriage, and perhaps negotiating 
 for it ; and since festivals, legends, cooking, and matri- 
 mony are the four principal topics of their conversa- 
 tion, she is seldom left without more than sufficient 
 information of what is designed for her. Solicitude 
 as to her future, so largely dependent on a family of 
 strangers and so little on herself, comes to her at a 
 very early age, and abides with her whilst, after
 
 CHILD LIFE 83 
 
 marriage, she remains in her father's house, before 
 being taken to that of her father-in-law. 
 
 This is not surmise : it is what we might expect 
 from the conditions of our humanity and the state of 
 society ; and it is proved by the pathetic notices of 
 which we so often read, of the sorrow and dread with 
 which child-wives leave their own homes for those of 
 their husbands, and then of their sorrowful yearning 
 to be sent back again. And such untaught, untrained 
 children have for many generations been the wives 
 and mothers of the people !
 
 HINDU ORPHANS. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE. 
 
 THE very early age at which marriage usually takes 
 place needs to be proved, otherwise it would seem 
 incredible. The great majority of girls are married 
 before they are 12 years of age, an immense number 
 before they are 10, and many even at an earlier age. 
 The age varies with the caste and with the family, 
 but it is exceedingly rare for any girl to be unmarried 
 when 14 years of age, or any boy who is 16. Among 
 the Brahmins marriage is earliest, and infants are
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE 85 
 
 often betrothed at the age of 2 or more years. Mr. 
 Malabari gives the number of males in British India 
 found married in 1 881, up to 9, as 668,000, and the 
 number of females 1,932,000. Between the ages of 
 10 and 14 the married males stood at 1,808,000, and 
 married females 4,395,000. Between 15 and 19 the 
 number of married males was 2,740,000, and of married 
 females 5,323,000. 
 
 The census for 1891 gives the following returns of 
 early marriages : — 
 
 Under 4 years of age, males ... 
 
 6945 
 
 ,, ,, females 
 
 ... 258,760 
 
 From 5 to 9 years, males 
 
 690,803 
 
 ,, ,, females 
 
 ... 2,201,404 
 
 From 10 to 14 years, males ... 
 
 ■•■ 2,342,433 
 
 ,, ,, females 
 
 ... 6,016,759 
 
 Sir W. W. Hunter says, ' In Bengal, out of every 
 1000 girls between 5 and 9 years of age, 271 are 
 married. More than 10 boys in every 1000, between 
 5 and 10 years old, are bridegrooms ; while of girls, 
 28 in 100 are wives or widows at an age when, if they 
 were in Europe, they would be in the nursery or 
 infant school. The Brahmins are 4*94 (rather less 
 than 5) per cent, of the whole Indian population. 
 The Brahmin female population in 1889 was 6,606,000; 
 of this number 31 per cent, were widows, and 215 per 
 cent, unmarried.' 
 
 In England, out of every 100 females of 20 years of 
 age and upwards, 25*80 are single, 6o"6o are married 
 and 1360 widows. In the North-West Provinces
 
 86 CHILD MARRIAGE 
 
 and Oude, the corresponding percentages are — 
 single, O'Si ; married, 69/64 ; widows, 29*55. ' From 
 5 to 1 1 is the usual period of marriage for Brahmin 
 girls all over India.' 
 
 The gravest evils, it can be shown, 1 are connected 
 
 1 A specially repulsive form of polygamy and child marriage is 
 common in Bengal among Kulin Brahmins. It is a special honour to 
 be married to one of their rank, and they make a profession of it. 
 Instances are common of men who thus have married from ten to a 
 hundred wives without supporting any of them, and often never seeing 
 them after the marriage ceremonies and the receipt of the heavy 
 marriage dowry. The following instances quite sufficiently illustrate 
 the offensiveness of such a custom. 
 
 According to a correspondent of the Sangibani, a marriage was 
 recently performed between one of these much-married Brahmins and 
 fourteen girls belonging to one family. He writes : ' Sarbeshwar 
 Mukerji is a native of Belghoria, at present residing at Burdwan, aged 
 64 years. He is a Brahmin and a Kulin by birth, a polygamist by pro- 
 fession. The corresponding families, where he can marry by rules of 
 Debinor Ghatak, are the Banerjis of Amgram, in Fedipore district. 
 We learned that fourteen Misses Banarji were to be given away. 
 I went to the spot out of curiosity. I saw the bridegroom, older than 
 a grandfather, seated on a painted wooden seat, and fourteen girls, 
 varying in age from 3 to 26 years, seated before him in the form of a 
 crescent. The ladies were veiled, with faces cast down, as if cursing 
 their parents for shaming them.' This was not done a century ago. 
 It was done in the latter half of this year of grace 1897 {Indian 
 Witness). 
 
 ' A Brahmin of Bengal gave away his 6 aunts, 8 sisters, and 4 
 daughters, in a batch of altogether 18, in marriage to one person — a boy 
 less than 10 years old. The brides of three generations were in age 
 from about 50 years to 3 months at the lowest. The baby bride was 
 brought to the ceremony on a brass plate. Among the Kulin Brahmins, 
 as a rule, the man who receives in marriage the majority of the 
 daughters of a family is bound to have the rest, otherwise the 
 minority must suffer a lifelong celibacy. Hundreds of instances like 
 the above may be given if needed ' (Times of India).
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE 87 
 
 with this custom, and it has its absurd and ludicrous 
 side. Such instances as the following are by no means 
 rare. A young Brahmin in Calcutta, 16 years of age, 
 was seen to be much depressed. On inquiry, he 
 stated he was in trouble on account of his daughter's 
 marriage. The class to which he belonged betroth 
 their daughters immediately after birth. His trouble 
 was that he could not find a suitable husband for his 
 daughter, nor, if he could, had he the customary 
 money to pay the usual heavy marriage expenses ; 
 hence the danger that his honour and respectability 
 would be lowered ! 
 
 We have heard of child bridegrooms, becoming 
 frightened amid the din and excitement of marriage 
 festivities, crying at the momentary absence of 
 their mothers, and when somewhat quieted by the 
 threat of a severe beating, sobbing, ' Where is my 
 mother ? ' 
 
 Every missionary in charge of a good school is 
 familiar with scenes like the following. A little 
 fellow not in his teens, with the politeness inherent in 
 his race, makes a request for leave of absence for three 
 weeks, which always signifies that he is going to be 
 married. ' But three weeks' absence will greatly 
 interfere with your class work,' says the missionary. 
 'Yes, sir ; I am sorry, but I am obliged to ask 
 leave.' ' Why ? ' 'I am going to be married, and 
 all the arrangements have been made.' ' Have you 
 ever seen the little lady you are to marry ? ' ' No. 
 sir.'
 
 88 CHILD MARRIAGE 
 
 The manner in which marriages are negotiated is 
 twofold : either directly by the parents in mutual 
 conference, or through the intervention of professional 
 matchmakers, called gkatuks. Marriage is a delicate, 
 difficult, and most expensive affair. Even some of 
 the members of low-caste families are as punctilious 
 in its arrangements as are Spanish grandees. Suit- 
 ability of caste is the first and most vital consideration. 
 Then the limits of consanguinity are carefully guarded. 
 The husband must always be older than the wife, 
 but, with strange inconsistency, whilst her seniority by 
 one year would be a grave hindrance, his by twenty or 
 even forty years would not usually be so considered. 
 But higher conditions are not overlooked, for most 
 parents are by no means indifferent to the social, 
 moral, and physical qualities of those they bring into 
 their families. Family life is far more isolated than 
 with us. There is more suspicion and distrust, and 
 none of that freedom which is one of the charms of 
 English life ; for even if there be intercourse, it never 
 becomes very confiding, or inclusive of the two sexes. 
 Marriages, therefore, are never, as here, the result of 
 intercourse, mutual inclination, and the gradual growth 
 of affection on the part of those most concerned. 
 Parents look out for suitable alliances among their 
 neighbours and friends ; but since their opportunities 
 for this and acquiring all necessary information are 
 very limited, the services of the ghatuks are engaged — 
 a useful class of women and men who make it their 
 business to gather all the information possible of
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE 89 
 
 eligible brides and bridegrooms, keeping, in fact, a 
 kind of registry office of all such cases for a whole 
 neighbourhood, for its convenience and their own 
 profit. When the most eligible person on the list 
 is selected, negotiations are commenced by the 
 ghatuk, and then by the fathers or some other 
 members of the families, until all the tedious and 
 intricate conditions as to time, ceremonies, and 
 expense are settled, or the negotiations broken off. 
 The actual marriage may be delayed for months, or 
 even years, and then usually a considerable period 
 elapses after marriage before the husband and wife 
 live together ; he abides in his father's house, she in 
 her father's. But even in cases where they have lived 
 apart, never having seen each other but at a point 
 in the long and morally unedifying marriage rites, 
 she is doomed to a life of perpetual widowhood, 
 should her child husband die. 
 
 The origin and authority for early marriage are 
 worthy of inquiry. Like so many Hindu customs, 
 it claims a quasi-divine authority, and is based on 
 certain reasons which, from the Hindu point of view, 
 are of great weight. ' Reprehensible,' says Manu, 
 ' is the father who gives not his daughter in marriage 
 at the proper time.' And all commentators say the 
 proper time is before the age of puberty. Thus 
 Gautama, ' A girl should be given in marriage before 
 she attains the age of puberty.' ' If,' says Vashista, 
 ' a father neglects to give away his daughter after 
 a suitable age, he destroys himself.' A high legal
 
 90 CHILD MARRIAGE 
 
 authority, Mr. Justice Moothoswami Tyer, recently 
 said, 'According to custom now obtaining, a Brahmin 
 girl is bound to marry, for fear of social degradation, 
 before she attains maturity. Marriage is of the 
 nature of a sacrament which no Brahmin is at liberty 
 to neglect without forfeiting his caste.' He shows 
 that the Smritis, or Things heard from God, ' declare 
 it to be a duty of a father to bestow his daughter in 
 marriage before she attains her maturity.' ' A father 
 should try his best to perform the marriage of his 
 daughter from the fourth year of her age upward, till 
 before the completion of the tenth year ' 1 (Brahma 
 Parana). Thus a religious or sacramental purpose 
 has been operative here, as in most other departments 
 of Hindu life and thought. Marriage, as we have 
 been assured repeatedly in recent native discussions, 
 is a most sacred and important rite. Its leading idea 
 is a belief in the necessity of offspring, not only that 
 the funeral rites essential for the well-being of a 
 father's soul may be duly performed, but that the 
 ritual and service necessary for the family ancestors 
 may be perpetuated by competent descendants. As 
 Mr. Barnes, the Census Commissioner for Bombay, 
 says, 'According to the ideal code of Manu, every 
 man ought to marry, in order that he may have a 
 son to perform at his death the sacrifices to his 
 
 1 ' For girls 9 and 10 are middling good ages for marriage, 11 a bad 
 age, and 12 is one requiring the observance of penance to wipe away 
 the sin. If a girl resides under the roof of her father unmarried up 
 to 12 years of age, her father commits a sin' (D/iarma Sindhu, a 
 modern work on Hindu law).
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE 91 
 
 ancestors, and pour out the customary libation to 
 their spirits. Without such ceremonies the father's 
 soul cannot be delivered from the hell called " Putt." 
 As regards the father of a damsel, it is his duty to 
 see her married, as she is put into the world to become 
 a mother.' 
 
 There follows from this exaggerated idea of the 
 necessity for male offspring, a corresponding want 
 of mindfulness for the happiness of parents. It has 
 been said, ' In the elaborate Hindu marriage ritual, 
 the happiness of the married couple is not mentioned, 
 either as a primary or secondary purpose of marriage. 
 Its main ingredient is a desire for offspring as a 
 necessity of religion.' 
 
 Among the inducements to child-marriage are those 
 which proceed from the superstition, ignorance, and 
 love of excitement on the part of mothers and other 
 feminine members of the family. They, much more 
 than the other sex, press forward all initial arrange- 
 ments for marriage, and are restless until the long, 
 elaborate, expensive, and by no means refined rites 
 are completed. And the two general characteristics 
 of Hindu women explain why it is so. To have a 
 daughter well and early married is the fixed idea of 
 the mother. She talks to her child continually of 
 this, almost from its infancy. Poor woman ! there 
 is little beside that she can talk about. She cannot 
 read or write ; she seldom hears others read, and if 
 she does, it is most likely from books tedious in 
 their speculativeness, or wild and indecent in their
 
 92 
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE 
 
 narratives of gods, demons, or men. She has probably 
 never even listened once to an intelligent conversa- 
 tion. What does she know, and what can she teach ? 
 
 HINDU WATER-CARRIER. 
 
 Her ideas are necessarily few, intense, and concen- 
 trated on what is around her. But she is superstitious, 
 affectionate, and a slave to custom. To her foolish
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE 93 
 
 mind it never occurs that her daughter may remain 
 unmarried until womanhood, or never marry at all. 
 That would seem to her unnatural and disgraceful, 
 since in her inane, most uninteresting life, a birth, a 
 death, a great religious festival, and a marriage are 
 almost the only events which break its dreariness. 
 She is much more disposed, both from a mistaken 
 sense of duty and a craze for pleasure, to hasten 
 on than to retard the event. 
 
 Some of the causes originating and perpetuating 
 this pernicious custom "may be further indicated. 
 The gloomy distrust and suspiciousness of Indo- 
 Aryan human nature has been one of these. This 
 characterizes most Eastern races, but Hindus more 
 than any other. It prevails not only toward strangers, 
 and those vested with power, but enters into the 
 more intimate relations of common life. How far 
 this is inherent as a race quality, and how far the 
 product of a weird and gloomy superstition and of 
 centuries of oppression, wrong, and untruthfulness, 
 cannot now be considered. The fact remains that 
 this is a marked feature of character exhibited toward 
 men, demons, and even gods, but concentrated with 
 a force often malignant and contemptuous on all 
 womankind. From the dreadful text of Manu, 
 already given in the first chapter, it is clear that 
 these sentiments were prevalent some two thousand 
 years ago. The construction of Hindu family life, 
 in all its customs and details, reflects this low opinion 
 of woman's power to take care of herself. One
 
 94 CHILD MARRIAGE 
 
 purpose, therefore, of wedlock is to guard her from 
 her own self, as well as from outward peril. The 
 sentiment and the custom to which it has led is a 
 long-standing insult of two thousand years' duration 
 against all womankind. 
 
 There has been one strong incentive to early 
 marriage, which in the past might be urged in its 
 justification. The unsettled, precarious conditions of 
 life, from the remotest times until the establishment 
 of British power, encouraged parents to have their 
 children married as soon as possible, as a means of 
 defence and safety. Their lives were usually exposed 
 to peril and death. Even whilst the parents lived, 
 their power to protect their children from evils worse 
 than death was often inadequate. And when 
 Mahomedanism became dominant, a new danger 
 threatened daughters, through the sensual and poly- 
 gamous proclivities always characteristic of that 
 creed. Parents, therefore, in former ages distrustful of 
 their children and of all men, and of their own ability 
 to insure the safety of the weakest portion of their 
 families, have been eager to secure protectors for 
 them by early marriage. 
 
 One original motive for early marriage, as powerful 
 as any other, and perhaps the origin of the custom, 
 was that Hindu female virtue should by all means 
 be secured. The sentiment was alike honourable 
 to the affections, morals, and high sense of the value 
 of family integrity prevalent in early times, and of 
 great power to-day. But the ancient Aryans were
 
 CHILD MARRIAGE 95 
 
 probably unconscious of the sinister aspect of their 
 policy, and certainly did not foresee the abuses and 
 evils to which it would lead ; for whilst it tells ol 
 times of rapine and violence, prevalent throughout 
 all the ages of Indian history prior to our own, 
 and of parental affection and care, it has come to 
 indicate an entire lack of confidence in the honour 
 and virtue of Hindu men, and a base, unworthy idea 
 of Hindu women.
 
 ( c.6 ) 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 INFANTICIDE. 
 
 Infanticide has been common in India from the 
 remotest times ; but native writers give us no informa- 
 tion of a reliable kind on this or any of the main 
 features of social life, so that our knowledge, at the 
 best imperfect, is confined to the present century, the 
 period of British supremacy. 
 
 Three causes have led to it — 
 
 i. Great moral laxity, combined with indifference to 
 infantine life, and a desire to conceal wrong-doing, 
 which the privacy of native habits renders compara- 
 tively easy. 
 
 2. Religious fanaticism has led to the crime in 
 restricted areas. 
 
 Among the Khonds of Orissa and the Central 
 Provinces, children were stolen or purchased by 
 groups of villages, that, being sacrificed to the earth 
 goddess, their blood might secure a plentiful harvest 
 on all the fields on which it was shed. 1 
 
 The offering of children to Gungama, by casting 
 1 See Numbers XIV. and XV. of Calcutta Review.
 
 INFANTICIDE 97 
 
 them into the sacred stream, especially at Allahabad, 
 where the Jumna and Ganges meet, and at Gunga 
 Saugor, where the great river enters the sea, were 
 common in former times. Such places being regarded 
 as specially sacred, and therefore conferring on the 
 act additional merit. 
 
 3. But infanticide, springing out of disappointment 
 at the birth of girls, because of their assumed inferiority 
 to boys, the lowering of the family repute, and the 
 inevitable expense demanded by usage on their 
 marriage, chiefly requires our attention ; because it 
 grew into a system which was hardly concealed, and 
 became prevalent in Rajputana, Gujarat, Cutch, and 
 other great districts in Central and Western India, 
 inhabited by proud, brave, well-to-do races, who 
 therefore were free from the temptations to the crime 
 from poverty, want, and the dread of suffering, so 
 often leading to its commission in other countries. 
 And its marked peculiarity everywhere in India is 
 that, unless to avoid disgrace and punishment, girls, 
 not boys, are destroyed. 
 
 It is advisable to give a number of well-authenti- 
 cated statements, from undoubted authorities on this 
 subject, for the reason alleged by Lord Teignmouth, 
 as far back as the close of last century, when he and 
 others first became aware of the systematic nature 
 of the atrocity — 'That the practice of infanticide 
 should ever be so general as to become a custom, 
 with any sect or race of people, requires the most 
 unexceptionable evidence to gain belief.' And 
 
 G
 
 98 INFANTICIDE 
 
 the evidence is alike unexceptionable, varied, and 
 abundant. 
 
 A Resident of Benares, after a circuit through the 
 country inhabited by the Rajkumars, records, that in 
 conversation with several persons, 'all unequivocally 
 admitted that infanticide was customary.' 
 
 In 1800, when officiating Governor of Bombay, Mr. 
 Duncan stated, on the authority of the Newab of 
 Surat, that among the Rajputs, 'the birth of a 
 daughter was considered disgraceful,' and many were 
 put to death. 
 
 Many such reports led Mr. Duncan to institute 
 careful inquiries, which brought to light such startling 
 facts as the following: 'Among the Jharija in- 
 habitants of Cutch, the far greater part followed the 
 practice without remorse.' So was it 'throughout 
 the province of Gujarat.' ' The lowest estimate 
 was, that in Kattiawar about 1000, and in Cutch 
 2000 were annually destroyed.' It was found that 
 the custom was prevalent among the Rajputs of 
 Jeipore and Jhoudpore, the Jhats, and Mewats, ' and 
 other tribes of Hindustan.' ' Indeed, we may assume 
 it' — reports Colonel Walker, who conducted the in- 
 vestigations — 'as an unquestionable fact, that the 
 existence of female infanticide prevails to a far 
 greater extent in India than has yet come under the 
 observation of the British Government.' * 
 
 This general statement was based on a large number 
 of facts, of which the following are specimens : — 
 
 1 Calcutta Review, August, 1844, an< ^ Parliamentary Papers, 1S24-2S.
 
 INFANTICIDE 99 
 
 ' A register of a district in Ivattiawar was made by 
 the Bombay Government in 1817, and the whole 
 number of female children in 81 towns and villages 
 was only 63.' 'In 157 Kichi Rajput families, there 
 were found by an English official, only 32 daughters, 
 while there were 189 sons.' 'In another group of 
 63 families there were 19 daughters, but 75 sons.' 
 
 ' Elsewhere among other people and in another 
 province, in 13 villages, among 654 families, he 
 found more than 429 boys under 12 years of age, 
 but only no girls, some of the people admitting that 
 every girl born in their villages had been destroyed.' 
 
 Coming down a few years later, we find similar 
 statements. Thus : 
 
 ' In a few villages in the Rajput state of Udiapore, 
 containing about 500 families, there were at least 350 
 boys, while there were not above 90 girls ; and in four 
 villages in another adjoining state, containing 144 
 families, there were found to be above 90 boys under 
 12 years of age, and only 10 girls ; while in one village, 
 where there were 22 boys, the inhabitants confessed 
 that they had destroyed every girl born there.' x 
 
 Mr. Wilkinson, a political agent in Rajputana, said 
 in an official paper dated 1836, 'An intelligent Rajput 
 chief, in conversing with me, stated as his opinion 
 that not less than 20,000 infants were annually 
 destroyed in the whole of Malwa and Rajputana.' 
 There is now before me an elaborate table, taken 
 from the first volume of the Royal Asiatic Society's 
 
 1 Calcutta Christian Observer {ox 1S34, pp. 183, 471.
 
 i ob INFANTICIDE 
 
 Transactions oi a. Rajput population in Cutch of about 
 4000, living in 114 towns and villages, among which 
 there were 815 boys, but only 144 girls. 
 
 ' By the spontaneous admission of the guilty parties 
 themselves, it was ascertained that in one tribe the 
 proportion of sons to daughters was 118 to 16; in a 
 second, 240 to 98 ; in a third, 131 to 61 ; in a fourth, 
 14 to 4 ; in a fifth, 39 to 7 ; in a sixth, 20 to 7 ; and 
 in a seventh, 70 to 32.' 
 
 This was among Rajputs, but the usage was by 
 no means confined to them. Of eleven villages of 
 Puriar Minas, Mr. Wilkinson, a political agent, ascer- 
 tained, from a carefully conducted inquiry, ' that the 
 aggregate number of boys under 12 years of age was 
 369, and of girls only 87.' ' In one village there 
 were only 4 girls, but 44 boys ; in another, 4 girls to 
 68 boys ; and in a third, with a large proportion of 
 boys, no girls at all, the inhabitants freely confessing 
 they had destroyed every girl born in the village.' * 
 
 Such statements as these were corroborated by 
 almost all who paid attention to the subject, and 
 
 1 The British officer before alluded to, who, in Western India, 
 endeavoured to suppress the practice, tells the following startling 
 incident : ' As I was riding out one morning, I passed through the 
 Bunde Mina village of Muur. I was there beset by the cries of a 
 Mina woman, the wife of one of the watchmen, who clamorously 
 demanded of me to forbear all endeavours to procure the suppression 
 of an ancient custom and a religious rite, enjoined on them by divine 
 authority. When I endeavoured to pacify the unfeeling woman, she 
 boldly averred that daughters of their tribe had been foretold, if 
 preserved, to bring only trouble and misfortune to their families, and 
 that the event could not but be calamitous.'
 
 INFANTICIDE 101 
 
 were in a position to obtain the most reliable 
 information. Thus Sir Henry Pottinger writes, ' I 
 quite concur with Mr. Wilkinson, that infanticide is 
 carried on to an extent of which we have hardly yet 
 a complete notion in India.' One official reports that 
 'it prevailed among the Rajput tribes in the vicinity 
 of Gwalior;' another that 'it was not uncommon 
 among the Rajputs of the Jabalpore district;' 
 another, that ' it abounded in the territory of the 
 Rajah of Rewah ; ' another, that ' in Scindia's territory 
 the usage does not appear to be restricted to any 
 individual class or particular rank of life — that Gugurs 
 and Jats, with the Rajputs, rich and poor, high and 
 low, must be reckoned as different classes of people 
 who put to death all the female infants born in their 
 families ; that exceptions from this general principle 
 are rare, and that in the district of Sekarwari alone 
 from two to five hundred were commonly put to death 
 every year.' 1 
 
 Think of such a custom prevalent for generations, 
 over states and districts large and populous as 
 Portugal, Ireland, and Switzerland, and what an 
 aggregate of crime, shame, and suffering it suggests ! 
 
 A painful interest attaches to the methods by which 
 these little ones were slain. These differed in various 
 districts and nationalities. In some they killed their 
 infant daughters, or allowed them to die, by denying 
 them all sustenance from their birth. In others the 
 infant was often strangled. They were poisoned by 
 
 1 Calc ut la Review, 1844, p. 384.
 
 INFANTICIDE 
 
 the juice of the madder plant, or of the tobacco leaf, 
 or the datura plant, or the juice of the poppy, often 
 
 -^*^'i<®g&m& 
 
 HINDU INFANTICIDE. 
 
 placed on the mother's breast. They were drowned 
 in pans of milk ; suspended in baskets on trees ;
 
 INFANTICIDE 103 
 
 buried alive in shallow graves ; left out at night 
 to be devoured by jackals ; or, if near the sacred 
 Ganges, thrown in, with an invocation to the goddess 
 to be pleased to accept the gift. So deep rooted and 
 established was the practice, that the child was often 
 put to death without so much as apprising the father 
 of its existence. If he was informed, the brief reply, 
 ' To do as is customary,' or the half-indignant, half- 
 contemptuous remark, ' It is nothing,' or a gesture, 
 or total silence, was well understood, and acted on 
 without expostulation or further remark. 
 
 The little ones were usually destroyed immediately 
 after birth. Some features of the dreadful custom 
 require special attention. 
 
 Infanticide in India has usually sprung from causes 
 such as have not led to the crime elsewhere. Poverty, 
 the difficulty of rearing children in troubled times or 
 sterile regions, heartless indifference and want of 
 natural affection, have been its principal causes in 
 other countries. In India, where none of these causes 
 have been permanently and powerfully active, it yet 
 became an established custom, more systematically 
 practised by the upper than the lower castes and 
 classes, and confined as a custom to one sex. 
 
 The reasons for such a usage, widely established 
 among such people, and perpetuated through many 
 generations, are worthy of close attention. 
 
 Cruelty is not a Hindu characteristic. It has never 
 been reduced to a system, as by North American 
 Indians, or Chinese. But the people are callous
 
 104 INFANTICIDE 
 
 and apathetic. They would not deliberately inflict 
 suffering and take pleasure in it, but they would not 
 move hand or foot to rescue such as were greatly 
 suffering. They do not suffer by knowing that others 
 suffer. Therefore suffering and sorrow and wrong never 
 evoke private or public indignation and protest. This 
 goes far to explain the unchallenged prevalence for 
 ages of such atrocities as suttee and infanticide. 
 
 Then, human life is not valued and held sacred, as 
 with us. The great prevalence of all forms of life ; 
 the intensity of a gloomy imaginativeness, on fixed 
 pantheistic, fatalistic, and metempsychosis concep- 
 tions, leading to the idea that all life partakes of the 
 same material, evanescent, gross qualities, which if 
 suppressed in one form will appear in another, lowers 
 their idea of the value and sacredness of human life. 
 That great conception of man as superior to all other 
 living creatures because possessed of a soul, which 
 adds so much to the sacredness and dignity of human 
 life in our eyes, Hinduism knows nothing of; life, 
 therefore, is not reverenced as it is with us, unless its 
 distinct use is apparent. 
 
 And there is such a use supposed to belong to male, 
 but not to female life. A son is essential to a family, 
 a daughter is not, but is rather regarded as a failure, 
 an encumbrance, and a dishonour. 1 
 
 1 ' Though one may have attained the dignity of a prince, if he be 
 without male offspring, he liveth not ' (Bramholiua Caiidam). 
 
 1 Not by the power of charitable acts, not by fasting, not by burnt 
 offerings, can mortals obtain salvation ; unless male offspring be obtained, 
 there is no happiness either in this world or in the next' {Baradam).
 
 INFANTICIDE 105 
 
 'A mother of sons' is one of the highest compliments 
 that can be paid to a wife ; ' a mother of daughters ' 
 is one of the most contemptuous and scornful of all 
 terms of reproach. This explains the gladness with 
 which the birth of sons is welcomed, the disappoint- 
 ment manifest at the birth of daughters, and the 
 disposition to put them away. ' When a female is born, 
 no anxious inquiries await the mother ; no greetings 
 welcome the new-comer, who appears an intruder on 
 the scene, which often closes in the hour of its birth.' 
 ' It is nothing,' indicates the feminine sex of the little 
 one, or with equal contempt and more explicitness, 
 ' It is only a girl.' 
 
 When death was determined on, it usually followed 
 immediately after birth, for it was considered barbarous 
 to deprive a child of life after it had lived a day or two. 
 
 And infanticide is, perhaps, the most easily perpe- 
 trated of all crimes, and the most easy to conceal, 
 when concealment is desired. The frailty of child 
 life, the strict privacy of zenanas, the reticence of 
 the people, and their indifference to feminine child 
 life, . all tended to favour a practice which was 
 regarded more generally as the evasion of a mis- 
 fortune than the commission of a crime. ' For what 
 is easier to destroy than the blossom of a flower ? ' 
 
 But whilst these were the causes generally opera- 
 tive, there were two special ones, which were influen- 
 tial among the haughty, high-caste Rajputs and 
 kindred tribes — the difficulty of procuring suitable 
 husbands for their daughters, when the customary
 
 106 INFANTICIDE 
 
 age for marriage arrived ; with the supposed disgrace 
 of having unmarried daughters, and the difficulty of 
 defraying the heavy expenses which usage demands. 
 No families in the world, not even those of the 
 reigning houses of Europe, are more punctilious on 
 all questions of marriage and lineage. The condi- 
 tions and limitations of a suitable alliance are 
 extraordinarily minute, yet so binding, that the 
 Rajput would rather kill his child, and indeed in 
 many cases himself, than endure what he considers, 
 both to his race and caste, an indelible disgrace. 1 
 The excessive amount of marriage expenses has 
 been a fruitful cause of infanticide, and the pressure 
 toward ostentation and excess is felt more by the 
 higher castes and classes than the lower ; and 
 nowhere more than among the Rajputs. Into 
 details of the various items of expenditure, it is 
 unnecessary to enter ; it is sufficient to say that what 
 with gifts to the tribe, to Brahmins, minstrels, beggars, 
 and profuse festivities for days and even weeks, the 
 expenditure often amounted to one-half or more of 
 the year's income, or an equivalent amount, borrowed 
 at 20 or 40 per cent, interest, and entailing a heavy 
 burden of debt on the family for years. Many 
 instances are on record of from 2000 to 5000 guests 
 being entertained on such occasions, many of them 
 expecting and receiving a gift ; of gifts to favoured 
 
 1 A confidential agent of the Rajah of Cutch admitted that daughters 
 were not reared in his master's family, and being asked why, replied, 
 ' Where have they an equal on whom to be bestowed in marriage?'
 
 INFANTICIDE 107 
 
 priests and minstrels of hundreds and even thousands 
 of pounds ; of the total expenses of a marriage 
 amounting to ten thousand pounds, and of families 
 reduced from opulence to poverty by this senseless 
 yet exacting custom. 
 
 There was a close and subtle connection between 
 infanticide and suttee, a rite common in Rajput 
 families of distinction. The latter suggested and 
 encouraged the former. Suttee (literally the 'method 
 of purity ') was sanctioned by the Shastras, extolled 
 as a most meritorious act by the Brahmins, and not 
 unfrequently encouraged by male relatives as a 
 meritorious and convenient method for disposing of 
 female relatives who had become an encumbrance, 
 and were regarded as a dishonour. ' If,' reasoned 
 the Rajput father, 'we encourage a widow to die 
 thus for our convenience, her merit, and to preserve 
 her honour, surely we may destroy an infant daughter, 
 by starvation, suffocation, or neglect, of whose mar- 
 riage in the line of caste and family dignity there is 
 so little prospect ; ' and the Rajput mother, knowing 
 what the life of a woman might be, and how it might 
 terminate, would be inclined sorrowfully to acquiesce 
 in the decision. When a woman was expostulated with 
 for putting her children to death, she replied, ' Would 
 that my mother had killed me, for what a miserable 
 lot is mine, serving a cruel and tyrannical husband ! ' 
 
 The English Government, in harmony with the 
 humane and benevolent policy for which it has ever 
 been distinguished, has discouraged and forbidden
 
 ioS INFANTICIDE 
 
 infanticide. But its power to repress the crime has 
 not been equal to its will. Three causes especially 
 have stood in its way — the difficulty of suppressing an 
 immemorial family usage ; the ease and secrecy with 
 which the usage may be carried out ; and especially 
 the fact that our power to make laws affecting the 
 social life of the people was limited to a comparatively 
 small area of India during the earlier decades of the 
 century, and that even now we have no such absolute 
 power in the states where infanticide has been for 
 ages most prevalent. In the latter instances the 
 moral influence of the British Government has been 
 repeatedly exerted against the practice, and not in 
 vain. But wherever its power is supreme, infanticide 
 has been made a penal offence. 
 
 It is unnecessary to do more than state that as 
 long ago as 1802 the Government enacted laws for 
 the suppression of infanticide ; that subsequently, as 
 the British dominions extended, the prohibition was 
 declared and enforced ; and that, as the practice was 
 ascertained to be common as recently as 1870, the 
 Legislative Council passed the Female Infanticide 
 Act, which gave power to all magistrates to use 
 special means for the suppression of the crime 
 wherever it was supposed to be prevalent. This has 
 checked, though it has not eradicated, the evil, as 
 the following reports show : In the Administration 
 Report of the North-West Provinces for 1881-82, the 
 number of proclaimed villages was 2368. In the 
 report for 1883-84 it is stated that the crime was
 
 INFANTICIDE 
 
 /09 
 
 greatly lessened. In 1886-87 the practice is reported 
 as yet further diminished, and the proclaimed villages 
 to be reduced to 1573 ; and in 1887-88, to 1381. 
 
 Mr. Unvvin, magistrate, Mynpoure, in the North- 
 West Provinces, observing the absence of female 
 children in villages inhabited by Chohan Rajputs, 
 instituted a system of inspection to check infanticide. 
 All village watchmen were called on to report the 
 births of female children to the police, who reported 
 the cases to the magistrate. A month afterwards 
 the health of the child was to be reported on. If it 
 died under suspicious circumstances, a post-mortem 
 examination had to be held. In six years after the 
 institution of this inspection there were 1263 girls in 
 the Chohan villages of the Mynpoure district, whilst at 
 the beginning of the six years there were none at all ! 
 
 Happily, the crime is abating through the persistent 
 action of the Government, and yet more because of 
 that great wave of renewed opinion and sentiment 
 passing over the people. 1 But that this crime is yet 
 
 1 One of the rmst auspicious indications of this change was in 1S8S, 
 when forty delegates, many of them of high rank, and deputed to 
 represent various Rajput states, met to consider how the abuses con- 
 nected with female marriage could be corrected. Several days were 
 spent in conference, and resolutions of a definite nature were passed, 
 recommending many important reforms. 
 
 Referring to the age of marriage, the delegates reported, ' As a rule, 
 boys and girls are married at an early age, notwithstanding that the 
 evils of such a custom are well known to all, and need no description. 
 It seems proper that boys and girls should not marry before the age of 
 iS and 14 respectively.' The following recommendations, intended to 
 limit marriage expenses, suggests the wasteful extravagance commonly 
 practised. ' On the marriage, for instance, of the Thakur, or his son
 
 no INFANTICIDE 
 
 frequent, and the law evaded, is evident from four 
 facts : — 
 
 i. The Census returns for 1 880-81 showed that in 
 all India there were fewer women than men by over 
 five millions. 
 
 In 1891 the men were 146,727,000; the women, 
 140,496,000. 
 
 2. The Census returns for 1870 revealed that in 
 one year 300 children were carried off by wolves and 
 jackals from the city of Umritsur, and they all 
 happened to be girls ! 
 
 3. Even in 1894 the following confirmatory evidence 
 has been given. At the sitting of the Opium Commis- 
 sion in January, Miss Greenfield, superintendent of a 
 mission hospital for women at Ludiana, said, ' Fathers 
 insisted on daughters being killed, to avoid the 
 expense of weddings.' At the sitting of the Com- 
 mission at Umballa, Miss Carter, a medical 
 missionary, said, ' She knew one mother who had 
 destroyed seven children. Women could easily do 
 this by opium.' 
 
 4. Vice is prevalent in all Indian society, and is 
 almost shameless ; but an illegitimate child is rarely 
 seen. 
 
 or daughter, if the value of the estate was above R. 20,000, not more 
 than one-fourth of the annual income was to be spent. When the 
 income was below R. 10,000, but above R. 1000, not more than one-half 
 was to be spent.' 
 
 Referring to the conference and its decisions, Lord Cross stated in 
 the House of Lords that ' it was the greatest advance — in Indian 
 social reform — made in the present century, and might lead to changes 
 which no man living could foresee.'
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SUTTEE, OR THE IMMOLATION OF WIDOWS. 
 
 HAPPILY suttee has long ceased. By a decree of the 
 Indian Government, dated December 4, 1829, it was 
 declared illegal by the criminal courts. Not only 
 was the intended suttee to be restrained and punish- 
 able, but all persons convicted of aiding and abetting 
 in the sacrifice of a widow, by burning or burying 
 alive, were deemed guilty of culpable homicide, and 
 liable to punishment by fine, by imprisonment, or 
 by both. This was followed the year after by similar 
 decrees by the Madras and Bombay Governments. No 
 resistance, and but the feeblest protest was raised 
 against the prohibition, and but in the rarest instances, 
 even in the independent states, has this atrocity ever 
 since been perpetrated. 
 
 Why, then, devote even a brief chapter to an obsolete 
 custom, viewed by all intelligent Hindus of our age 
 with regret and shame? Because it was practised 
 more or less for long centuries ; was regarded as 
 a most exemplary and meritorious deed ; had its
 
 ii2 SUTTEE 
 
 raison d'etre in Hindu sentiment ; and was one of 
 the most singular and repellent customs that any 
 intelligent and mild-mannered race ever practised. 
 
 Let it not be assumed that the practice was 
 universal, or even general. It was almost restricted 
 to the higher classes and castes, and to certain 
 portions of the vast peninsula. It was most customary 
 in the great province of Bengal, and especially in the 
 districts around Calcutta. But in the North-West 
 Provinces, in Rajputana, Gujarat, Malwa, and Orissa, 
 suttees were frequent. 
 
 The custom was prevalent in Java, where once the 
 Hindus had power, and one low caste in North-East 
 India, the Jogees — weavers — encouraged the burying 
 alive of widows. 
 
 It is impossible to say to what extent this rite was 
 prevalent in times prior to British rule. 1 
 
 Statistical information is the indirect outcome of 
 
 1 From the following extract it is clear that suttee must have been 
 common, at least on the eastern coast of India, 300 years ago : ' They 
 had a custom that if any Hindu died, the wife had to burn herself of 
 her own free will ; and when she was proceeding to this self-sacrifice 
 it was with great merry-making and blowing of music, saying that she 
 desired to accompany her husband to the other world. But the wife 
 who would not so burn herself was thrust out from among the others, 
 and lived by gaining, by means of her body, support for the mainte- 
 nance of the pagoda of which she was a votary. However, when 
 Affonso de Albuquerque took the city of Goa, he forbade, from that 
 time forward, that any more women should be burned ; and although 
 to change one's customs is equal to death itself, nevertheless they were 
 happy to save their lives, and spoke very kindly of him because he 
 had ordered that there should be no more burning.' — Albuquerque's 
 Commentaries, vol. ii. p. 94.
 
 SUTTEE 113 
 
 Christian civilization, and where the latter is not in- 
 fluential, the former is vague and unreliable. Then, too, 
 an instinct of our humanity disposes races even far less 
 advanced than Hindus to conceal, or at least to be 
 reticent about, their deeds of darkness. Therefore, 
 African tribes are silent about cannibalism, the Chinese 
 on infanticide, and some negro and Hindu sectaries 
 relative to their secret forms of worship. All 
 through the East it is easy, and apparently ever 
 has been, to hide crime. Two features, however, of 
 this strange custom we do know — that it was 
 practised long ages ago, and that it was of very 
 common occurrence, especially in Bengal and North- 
 western India, at the beginning of this century. 
 
 Two ancient European writers, Diodorus Siculus 
 and Strabo, before the Christian era, notice it as one 
 of the peculiar customs of the East, which greatly 
 interested and perplexed all the Greeks who had any 
 knowledge of Indian life. Thus we may infer that 
 for two thousand years at least this Moloch devoured 
 annually a proportion of hapless Hindu widows. 
 
 But at the beginning of this century we come 
 to proximate data. It could not be otherwise that, 
 when the British were well established in Bengal, 
 where suttees were most common, their attention 
 should be drawn to a custom so repellent to all their 
 own usages. 
 
 The earliest movement in this direction was made 
 by the Serampore missionaries. In 1801, Dr. Carey 
 wrote, ' I consider that the burning of women, the 
 
 H
 
 ii4 SUTTEE 
 
 burying of them alive with their husbands, the 
 exposure of infants, and the sacrifice of children at 
 Saugor, ought not to be permitted, whatever religious 
 motives are pretended, because they are crimes against 
 the state.' 
 
 In 1804, the missionaries sent ten agents to travel 
 from village to village within a circle of thirty miles 
 from Calcutta, to collect information, when it was 
 found that more than 300 widows had been immolated 
 on the funeral pile within six months ! 
 
 Subsequent inquiry showed that in twelve years, 
 from 181 5 to 1826, 7154 widows thus perished in the 
 Presidency of Bengal, more than half of them taking 
 place in the Calcutta division. In one year the 
 number rose to 839. 
 
 In eight of the years between 181 5 and 1826 there 
 were 287 such combined murders and suicides in the 
 Madras Presidency, and in that of Bombay 284 in 
 nine years. There are adequate reasons for supposing 
 that these figures are below the number actually 
 immolated ; yet more certain is it that they do not 
 express the full extent of the evil. They include 
 no information relative to the vast populations of 
 Oude, the Punjab and Rajputana, in each of which 
 the rite was certainly more frequent than in South 
 India. 
 
 It is unnecessary to attempt any description of 
 the horrors that in every instance must have been 
 associated with the rite, but two features of frequent 
 occurrence serve to heighten its general repulsiveness.
 
 SUTTEE US 
 
 One was the tender age of many of these victims ; 
 the other, the number of widows sometimes thus 
 destroyed at the same time. 
 
 A list is given in the Parliamentary papers on 
 Suttee, vol. v. p. 17, of sixty-one widows all under 18 
 years of age, who thus perished between 18 15 and 
 1820. 
 
 \j<- ... I 17 I 16J I 16 j 15 I 14 I 13 I 12 I 10 I s 
 Number I 14 I 1 I 22 I 6 1 2 I 2 1 10 I 1 I 3 
 
 In the Calcutta division there were, in 1826, 279 
 suttees — more than five every week ; and of these 
 seventy- eight were under 40 years of age. In the 
 Asiatic Journal for Sept., 1827, occurs the remark, 
 ' It is lamentable to find that of the 24 young creatures 
 under 20 years of age who underwent the cruel rite 
 in 1824, one was aged 13, another 11, and another 
 only 9.' 
 
 In many instances several wives were immolated. 
 At the close of last century, a Kulin Brahmin died 
 three miles from Serampore. He had married more 
 than forty wives, of whom twenty-two died before him. 
 At his obsequies a great fire was prepared, into which 
 all the remaining eighteen threw themselves, leaving 
 more than forty children. In another instance, about 
 the same time, twenty-two women thus died at 
 Nuddea in Bengal. This Brahmin polygamist had 
 more than 100 wives. The fire was burning for three 
 days, and as the wives arrived they were immolated, 
 for only three lived with him ; the rest he had seldom
 
 u6 SUTTEE 
 
 seen. He had married four sisters in one house. 
 Some of those who thus perished were 40 years of 
 age, others were as young as 16. In one instance 
 given in a Government report for 18 12, a Brahmin 
 had married twenty-five wives. Thirteen had died in 
 his lifetime, but the remaining twelve all perished on 
 his funeral pile, leaving thirty children. Such instances 
 were not common, since polygamy is not frequent, 
 excepting with Kulin Brahmins ; but instances of the 
 juvenility of widows thus sacrificed, and of other 
 suttee widows being the mothers of two, three, or 
 more children, were of very frequent occurrence. 
 
 How came a custom so terrible and revolting to be 
 so widely and permanently recognized ? Several 
 causes, physical, social, and religious, contributed to it. 
 These had relation more or less to the widows them- 
 selves, their husbands, their families, the priesthood, 
 and society generally. 
 
 Diodorus Siculus explained that the rite was 
 encouraged, if not enforced, as a check on the 
 poisoning of husbands by their wives. 
 
 ' This wicked practice increasing, and many falling 
 victims to it, and the punishment of the guilty not 
 serving to deter others from the commission of the 
 crime, a law was passed that wives should be burned 
 with their deceased husbands, except such as were 
 pregnant and had children, and that any individual 
 who refused to comply with this law should be 
 compelled to remain a widow, and be for ever excluded 
 from all rights and privileges, as guilty of impiety.
 
 SUTTEE 117 
 
 This measure being adopted, it followed that the 
 abominable disposition to which the wives were 
 addicted was converted into an opposite feeling. For, 
 in order to avoid that climax of disgrace, every wife, 
 being obliged to die, not only took all possible care of 
 their husband's safety, but emulated each other in 
 promoting his glory and renown. Strabo is of the 
 same opinion.' * 
 
 This may not be an adequate explanation, but it 
 is not entirely to be set aside, remembering that 
 universal distrust and suspicion, especially of women, 
 seems formerly, as now, to have been general ; and 
 certainly it has been one of the fostering causes of 
 perpetual widowhood, an incentive for wives to take 
 the utmost care of their husbands, since, however base 
 and unworthy they might be, their state was better 
 with them than without them — they could not have 
 others. 
 
 A woman, according to Hindu sentiment, is not an 
 entity by herself, as a man is. There is no equality 
 whatever between them. He was created to rule, 
 she to serve. So entirely is she subordinate, that 
 she has no place in life but to serve his purposes and 
 pleasure. Therefore she begins to fulfil her vocation 
 in life when he marries her, and her vocation in life 
 is ended when he dies. Henceforth she has no true 
 or useful place in life. She is as a flower plucked, 
 as a weed even, only to be cast aside. She is a 
 
 1 India's Cries to British Humanity, p. 127, by James Peggs ; 
 Asiatic Journal fox 1823 and 1827.
 
 nS SUTTEE 
 
 burden on her husband's family, and a dishonour. 
 For all such there was no future, no hope. Life had 
 lost for them that one only feature which made it 
 desirable in the estimation of the small circle in 
 which each widow lived, but which to them was all 
 the world. To them the sweetness and the light had 
 passed out of life ; there was, therefore, so much less 
 to live for. And the personal as well as relative 
 inducements to flee from the ills they too well knew, 
 were very great. Death and torture are less terrible 
 to those of pure Asiatic race than to us. They are 
 sensitive, kind, pitiful, and can meet and even dare 
 death, whether by disease or violence, with a calmness 
 unusual with Europeans. Then the widow's honour 
 or vanity was appealed to. The suttee was praised 
 and held in repute as the most faithful and estimable 
 of wives by priests and sages. For instance, Ungera 
 recommends the usage thus : ' The woman that 
 mounts the funeral pile of her deceased husband 
 enjoys bliss in heaven with him for three and a half 
 crore (35 million years), and with her own power 
 taking her husband up in the same manner as a snake- 
 catcher takes a snake out of its hole ; if he be bound 
 in hell with strong chains, yet she takes him by the 
 hand and leads him to heaven by the force of her 
 piety.' ' She that goes with her husband to the other 
 world purifies three generations, that is, the genera- 
 tions of her mother's side, father's side, and husband's 
 side ; and so she, being reckoned the purest and best 
 in fame among women, becomes dear to her husband,
 
 SUTTEE 119 
 
 and continues to please herself with him for a period 
 equal to the reign of fourteen Indras ; and although 
 the husband be guilty of the sin of slaying a Brahmin 
 or friend, or be ungrateful of past deeds, yet she is 
 capable of purifying him from all these sins.' 
 
 Haruta adds a very significant inducement to these. 
 ' After the death of a husband, until his wife does burn 
 herself in the fire, she cannot get rid of her feminine 
 body.' And, finally, the Mahabharat says, that a 
 widow, thus dying, atones by such a meritorious deed 
 for being a shrew or even unfaithful all through her 
 married life, and secures her husband's company in a 
 future state, even if he is indifferent to her, or she 
 become a suttee through wrath, fear, or unlawful 
 affection. 
 
 It is not so surprising, therefore, that a proportion 
 of women, quite ignorant, very devout, affectionate, 
 vain, and with really little or nothing to make life 
 dear to them, should have accepted this method of 
 leaving the world, which to them would be but 
 too literally a vale of tears, for one which to their 
 superstitious fancy was to be a sure paradise for at 
 least millenniums of years. 
 
 The number of widows often found in families 
 where the resources of the family are very limited is 
 now a ground of complaint. She is a reproach to a 
 house as well as a burden. She usually lives with 
 her husband's family, not her own, and her presence, 
 therefore, is the less tolerable. Her existence militates 
 against favourable terms in negotiating the marriages
 
 120 SUTTEE 
 
 of other girls in the family. It was an honour to a 
 family for its widows to become suttees, an honour 
 with their neighbours, a merit with the gods. What 
 wonder, then, that women were encouraged thus to die ; 
 nay, that not seldom, as credible testimony declares, 
 they were often threatened, constrained, and drugged 
 for the purpose ? 
 
 But the sanction given to suttee by religion was the 
 great cause of its practice and perpetuation. As we 
 have seen, it was regarded as a most holy and meri- 
 torious deed, the most appropriate method in which 
 a true wife could end her life, and having such merit 
 and efficacy that, even in spite of obstacles, it carried 
 the suttee to beatification for millions of years, and 
 brought to her family untold blessings. The sages, 
 always regarded by Hindus as more or less divine 
 and inspired, taught all this ; the people, ever disposed 
 to look at all things in a religious light, implicitly 
 accepted these ideas, and the Brahmins encouraged 
 and fostered them. They were the directors on all 
 such occasions, officiating by virtue of their sacred 
 character, encouraging the victim, not seldom con- 
 straining her, and gaining for themselves no small 
 amount of merit and reputation. They were the 
 prominent actors in almost every instance of suttee of 
 which we have a record. And they encouraged the 
 opinion that the rite was meritorious and sacred. As 
 Colebroke says, ' The bystanders throw on butter and 
 wood ; for this they are taught that they acquire merit 
 exceeding ten millionfold the merit of an aswamedha
 
 SUTTEE 121 
 
 or other great sacrifice. Even those who join the 
 procession from the house of the deceased to the 
 funeral pile, for every step are rewarded as for an 
 asivamedha? 
 
 It is for the glory of God, the good of India, and 
 the honour of England that this atrocity has come to 
 an end. It has long ceased, and both we and the 
 people seem almost to have forgotten that it was once 
 a horror daily perpetrated ; but if England had done 
 nothing more for India than suppressed suttee and 
 greatly diminished infanticide, she could well claim 
 the admiration and gratitude of the civilized world. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 The editor of Kammohun Roy's English works says, ' In a great 
 many instances the suttee was the victim of her greedy relatives, and 
 in more, of rash words spoken in the first fit of grief, and of the vanity 
 of her kindred, who considered her shrinking from the first resolve an 
 indelible disgrace. Many a horrible murder was thus committed, the 
 cries and shrieks of the poor suttee being drowned by the sound of 
 tom-toms, and her struggles made powerless by her being pressed down 
 by bamboos.' 
 
 An able writer in a Calcutta journal, reviewing such portions of 
 Sir Henry S. Maine's book on Ancient Village Communities as relate 
 to the laws of inheritance, says, ' Sir Henry Maine's inquiry as to the 
 reasons which have led to the unfavourable position of Hindu women, 
 is a deeply interesting one. The Hindu wife had, theoretically, more 
 ample rights of property than those accorded to married women either 
 by the Roman jurists or by the Common Law of England. During 
 her husband's life, the Hindu codes secured to her a larger independence 
 in the exercise of those rights. After his death, she succeeded, if 
 childless, to the life-rent of his whole property. Whence came it that 
 a class of persons with so high a legal status fell into the condition in
 
 122 SUTTEE 
 
 which the Anglo-Indian courts found the women of this country? 
 How did it happen that a system of jurisprudence which showed so 
 great a tenderness to the proprietary rights of women, proved so 
 indifferent to their life ? What explanation can be given of this ample 
 independence of women as regards their property co-existing with the 
 most cruel disregard of their personal sufferings ; of Stridhan, or 
 the liberally conceived separate estate of the Hindu wife, appearing 
 side by side with Sail, or the burning of the Hindu widow? 
 
 'The answer given by Sir Henry Sumner Maine is a deeply suggestive 
 one. Many earnest Englishmen are at present labouring to improve 
 the chances of their countrywomen in the struggle for existence. Some 
 of the projects by which they have proposed to accomplish this object 
 would, in the opinion of thoughtful lookers-on, force women into a 
 position for which they are not suited by the fundamental facts of 
 human life, a position that they would not be able to maintain, and one 
 which, by placing them in harsh competition with the other sex, would, 
 on the whole, injure, rather than improve, their practical condition. 
 The immediate social value of Sir Henry Maine's chapter on Hindu 
 women consists in this, that it shows how an experiment of a similar 
 sort has already been tried, and how it has failed. Hindu institutions, 
 at some early period in their history, gave to women a proprietary 
 independence more ample than Hindu society in its later development 
 found convenient. The ancient law came down with the sanction of 
 religion, and could not be formally repealed. 
 
 ' But the Brahmans, who administered it, found means to defeat its 
 intent. These sacerdotal jurists deemed it very unsuitable that a 
 childless widow should step into her husband's whole property for life. 
 The proper use for such an estate they held to consist in expenditure 
 on religious ceremonies for the benefit of the dead, and women could 
 not, according to their system, conduct these rites. It is true that the 
 most liberal of commentators denies that all a dead man's property is 
 intended for religious uses, and points out certain acts of a quasi- 
 religious character, which a woman can properly perform — such as 
 digging tanks. But, generally speaking, the whole influence of the 
 priestly and legal professions was arrayed against the extensive 
 proprietary rights which the ancient Hindu law had conferred on 
 women. In like manner the male members of a family looked with a 
 grudging eye on the young widow who excluded them from her 
 husband's estate. Neither the Brahmans, nor the collateral relatives, 
 could alter the law, but they discovered that they might defeat it by
 
 SUTTEE 123 
 
 getting rid of the woman. Self-immolation, which finds no authority 
 in the Vedas, was urged upon widows ; a sacred text was corrupted, so 
 as to give it the sanction of a religious duty ; and the whole influence 
 nl the Brahmans and collateral male relatives was brought to bear on 
 the unhappy victim at the moment when a recent sorrow had rendered 
 her indifferent to life. 
 
 'This detestable practice, whatever its remote origin, received its 
 development from the conflict which had thus taken place between 
 " the liberality of Hindu institutions to females at some long past 
 period of their development, and the dislike towards this liberality 
 manifested by the Brahminical lawyers," and by the male collateral 
 relatives. In Bengal proper, the liberality of the law had been carried 
 to its furthest extent, and, to use the words of Sir Henry Maine, " a 
 considerable portion of the soil of the wealthiest Indian province is in 
 the hands of childless widows, as tenants for life. But it was exactly 
 in Bengal proper that the English, on entering India, found widow- 
 burning not merely an occasional, but a constant and almost universal, 
 practice among the wealthier classes ; and, as a rule, it was only the 
 childless widow, and never the widow with minor children, who burnt 
 herself on her husband's pyre. There is no question that there was 
 the closest connection between the law and the religious custom, and 
 that the widow was made to sacrifice herself in order that her tenancy 
 for life might be got out of the way." 
 
 'The Hindu law, in short, gave to woman a status which Hindu 
 society found it inconvenient to maintain, and the weakest went to the 
 wall.' 
 
 When Sir Charles Napier was in charge of a feudatory state in 
 the North- West of India, he dealt with widow immolation in a very 
 summary, conclusive manner. Preparations were being made for a 
 suttee, and Sir Charles objected. 'But,' said a high native official, 
 with equal politeness and assurance, * this is a religious rite — a most 
 sacred one— which must not be interfered with.' ' Yes,' replied Sir 
 Charles, ' and we have a custom that any one who burns women alive 
 must be hung.' The immolation did not take place.
 
 ( .25 ) 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 WIDOWHOOD. 
 
 ACCORDING to the Indian Census Report for 1891, 
 the population had reached the immense total of 
 287,223,331. Of these 146,727,296 were males, and 
 140,496,135 females. Of the former 6,412,483 were 
 widowers, whilst of the latter no less than 22,657,429 
 were widows. Of these 13,878 were under 4 years of 
 age ; 64,040 between 5 and 9 ; 174,532 between 10 
 and 14; 4,160,548 between 15 and 34; 6,996,592 
 between 35 and 49; 11,224,933, 50 and over; and 
 22,906 whose age was not returned. 
 
 These figures are most suggestive, since they differ 
 in almost every feature from what is found in every 
 European state. 
 
 In Europe there are about 2500 widows to every 
 1000 widowers ; in India the proportion of the former 
 rises to about 3570. It will be noticed that almost 
 one-sixth of the entire female population are widows. 1 
 
 1 ' A serious development of the Brahminic system, indicated in 
 some of the census reports, is the tendency in the present day of 
 peace and plenty to manifest their prosperity, firstly by prohibiting the
 
 126 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 This arises from three causes : early marriage, 
 the universality of marriage, and enforced widow- 
 hood. 1 In many parts of South India, thirty-three 
 per cent, of the Brahmin women are widows. Some of 
 
 marriage of widows, and then by insisting upon carrying out strictly 
 the Brahminic injunction, and save themselves from the place to 
 which the law-maker consigns them, by getting all their girls married 
 before they have reached womanhood. Many cases have occurred 
 within recent years to show that any movement among the literate 
 classes in the direction of the abrogation of these two precepts is but 
 mouth deep, whilst their heart is with the observance of them to the 
 utmost. Lougiim iter per precepta, breve et ejficace per exempla ; but 
 when opportunities occur for carrying into practice amongst them- 
 selves or their families some of the reforms they have been so strenu- 
 ously endeavouring to impose upon others, it is remarkable to note 
 what an amount of filial piety, and of deference to the feelings of those 
 to whom their respect is due, comes into play, to prevent them from 
 becoming martyrs to their principles. On the other hand, amongst 
 the castes below the Brahmin and Rajput, who have no education, 
 and make no pretence of being sensible of any defects in their social 
 system, we find continual attempts to conquer society by proving their 
 claim to recognition through the adoption of these very tokens of high 
 rank, which, by the admission of many who observe them, are blots on 
 the social arrangements of the community, which it is the duty of men 
 of light and leading to suppress. Thus, whilst the mouth is proclaim- 
 ing its enlightenment and progress, the trunk is waddling backwards 
 as fast as the nature of the ground will permit.' — Census Report for 1891, 
 p. 260. 
 
 1 ' The universality of marriage, in the leading province of Bengal, 
 is very striking among women. Taking the lives of 100 girls from the 
 cradle to the grave ; at the age of 10, 83 will be single, and 12 married ; 
 at 30 the same proportions nearly are maintained, but they are twisted 
 round, for 87 are married, 12 widows, and 1 unmarried ; at 60 there 
 are no spinsters, but there are 87 widows, and 12 married women. 
 The thorough and complete succession of the three stages of conjugal 
 condition is striking. Half the girls who marry do so between 10 and 19, 
 but the boys marry much later — two-thirds of all males, marrying at 
 all, having been married between 20 and 29.'
 
 WIDOWHOOD 127 
 
 the lowest castes recognize social unions with widows, 
 but they are not celebrated with the same ceremonies 
 as the first marriages, nor regarded with the same 
 respect. They are a kind of civil contract ratified by 
 the members of the caste, and though not accompanied 
 by the elaborate religious ceremonies of a first 
 marriage, are held to be a formal and legal union, 
 which without the concurrence of the punchayat or 
 representative caste committee, they would not be. 
 
 But in the upper castes no widow marriage is 
 recognized. English law holds such marriages, duly 
 solemnized, to be valid, but Hindu opinion and 
 practice does not. A widow re-married, however 
 suitably in age, rank, and circumstances, immediately 
 loses her caste ; and the act deprives her of the 
 respect and association of her parents, brothers, sisters, 
 and caste people generally ; though probably no 
 such result would follow on the clearest evidence 
 of scandalous sin. 
 
 The prejudice against such marriages is intense 
 beyond conception. It is no doubt slowly abating 
 wherever English and Christian ideas are gaining 
 power ; and the usages associated with widowhood 
 have always been modified here and there, by love 
 and pity ; nevertheless, they have had, and even yet 
 have, intense force, and among a people so callous, 
 so bound by custom, and so entirely resolved to 
 acquiesce in what to them seems the conditions of 
 destiny, it could not be but that the lot of widows 
 would be most pitiable. It may, indeed, be safely
 
 128 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 asserted that the habitual condition of no class of 
 human beings has been more so. 
 
 The rights of a widow to property are considerable, 
 but she has hardly any other. Anyhow and any- 
 where a woman is not a free agent, and especially so 
 if she be a widow. If her husband dies early, she 
 remains in her father's house, or, if childless or with 
 very young children, she will probably return to it ; 
 otherwise, she remains in the family of her late 
 husband. In the former instance, there is the 
 probability of some alleviation to her sorrows. 
 Natural affection and womanly pity will flow out 
 in sympathy, and ease, as far as may be, the heavy 
 burden laid by inexorable custom on her tender life. 
 But anyhow her state is pitiable. It is so, not only 
 because of its physical conditions. As we have seen, 
 the lot of a married woman is generally cheerless and 
 restricted. But if her husband die, the small amount 
 of respect she has had as a wife and mother ceases, 
 for not only does general sentiment turn against her, 
 she is exposed to a series of pains and penalties such 
 as no other large class of women have ever had to 
 endure. 
 
 Her troubles begin on the day of her husband's 
 death, for along with the lamentations of his family 
 are mingled reproaches and even curses and exe- 
 crations on her. Then may begin, and probably 
 does, to continue all through life, the following 
 usages : — 
 
 The tahliy a symbol hung round the neck of a bride
 
 widow i toon 129 
 
 by her husband at the time of marriage, and answer- 
 ing somewhat to our wedding ring, is taken away. 
 Her long, carefully cherished hair, regarded as her 
 greatest natural ornament, and dressed carefully every 
 day, is cut clean off, and she must be shaven every 
 ten days. On her forehead certain vermilion marks, 
 indicative of the glory of the married state, must no 
 more appear. Her pleasant attire is taken away, and 
 replaced by coarse common clothing, without border, 
 fringe, or trace of beauty. Her numerous ornaments, 
 so dear to her foolish, ignorant mind, never taught to 
 prize higher and better things, are taken away, per- 
 haps torn off her person by violence. She is made 
 a household drudge. She is expected to get up 
 early, before the servants of the family. No one will 
 supply her with water, she must go to the well and 
 fetch it for herself. It is unlucky to meet her. She is 
 supposed to be in eternal mourning for her deceased 
 lord, though she may never have seen him except 
 at her child-wedding. In short, she suffers a living 
 death. She must bathe on a different day from 
 married women. She must not sleep on a pleasant 
 and easy couch ; she must have but one meal in the 
 day, and that of coarse fare ; and twice during each 
 month she must neither eat nor drink during the 
 twenty-four hours. If there is a wedding or other 
 festival in the house, it is best that she should not 
 be present, lest, like a planet of evil omen, she 
 bring her own ill fortune into the lot of others. An 
 evil destiny is supposed to cleave to her ; she herself 
 
 I
 
 130 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 is held to be subject to malign influences, and may 
 possibly transmit them to others. 
 
 The treatment of widows arises from two deeply 
 rooted ideas, each of them powerful enough to affect 
 all the conditions of life in any society by which they 
 are received — a belief in transmigration, and a settled 
 assumption that women are altogether inferior and 
 subordinate to men. 
 
 Transmigration is far more than a belief with the 
 great mass of the people. Whether owing to the vivid- 
 ness of their imaginations, natural distrust, intense 
 religiousness, the profusion of all forms of life around 
 them, the tremendous power with which the forces of 
 nature act, or a combination of these, the Hindus 
 accept unquestioningly this weird belief, which 
 strongly influences all their thoughts, feelings, and 
 actions. What they may become depends far more 
 on what they are and have been, and on caste obser- 
 vances relating to what is eaten, and physical contact 
 and association, than on moral integrity and purity. 
 The Brahmin expects to be a divine man in a future 
 birth because he is a Brahmin now, and punctilious on 
 all questions relative to food and touch, though he lives 
 in the habitual violation of every moral duty. But to 
 eat beef, to partake of food with a European, or even 
 with a Hindu Sudra, entails degradation of being 
 through numerous forms of existence ! Then, too, 
 whilst it is very easy to fall, it is very difficult 
 to rise. 
 
 Through these causes it is that every typical Hindu
 
 WIDOWHOOD 13 r 
 
 has an intense suspicion and dread lest he should lose 
 his caste, which he may do unconsciously, and through 
 no fault whatever of his own, and hence be born a 
 woman, a Sudra, a pariah, or even a toad or a jackal, 
 in a future birth. What he now is, and whatever 
 happens to him that to an important extent affects 
 his prosperity, is assumed to spring out of the condi- 
 tion of soul thus inherited from a previous birth. For 
 a wife, therefore, to lose her husband is considered con- 
 clusive evidence that an evil destiny clings to her, and 
 now, perhaps for the hundredth time, hurls her down 
 to misery. She is, therefore, not commiserated, but 
 abhorred, dreaded, and condemned. All this is very 
 illogical, irrational, and inconsequent, but it is Hindu 
 sentiment struggling ardently, honestly, though 
 blindly, to interpret the mystery of being. And it 
 assists us best and most charitably to understand the 
 mingled dread and dislike with which widows are 
 regarded. A son is the dearest possession of a family ; 
 but should he die, it is assumed, especially by the 
 ignorant, superstitious v/omen of the family, which 
 usually means all of them, that this has happened as 
 a part of his wife's evil destiny ; not as punishment 
 to the deceased husband or to the members of his 
 family, but to her. But her evil destiny is their 
 misfortune. Had he not married her, this would not 
 have happened to him. Therefore she is abhorred, 
 degraded in person, made the drudge of the house, 
 and reproached with such terms of scorn as only 
 superstitious and ignorant women can use.
 
 13- 
 
 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 And a most potent clement in the Hindu disposi- 
 tion lends itself either to inflict suffering in such cases, 
 or to be indifferent to its infliction. No race is more 
 
 HINDU GIRL. 
 {From an electro supplied by the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission.) 
 
 ready to acknowledge a divine or supernatural power 
 in human affairs and to submit absolutely to destiny. 
 Let a Hindu arrive at the conclusion — which he very 
 readily does — that an event is according to destiny,
 
 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 destiny being above and superior even to the will of 
 God — he accepts it with a submissiveness which 
 Christian resignation seldom approaches. If a wife 
 
 ,. >.-- -n , 3» 
 
 THE SAME AFTER THREE YEARS' CHRISTIAN TRAINING. 
 (From an electro supplied by the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission.} 
 
 becomes a widow, he assumes that she should suffer, 
 that he is working with destiny to allow her to suffer, 
 and that to make her happy or honoured would be 
 impious, because an attempt to evade the workings of
 
 134 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 destiny, and therefore possibly bring on himself a 
 malign influence, from the supernatural forces by 
 which he believes all life is surrounded. There may 
 be a great lack of reasonableness in this, but he does 
 not reason too closely, though he thinks much, and 
 imagines still more. Then, if it be considered that 
 Hindu women are not only intensely ignorant but 
 profoundly superstitious, it will be seen how easy it is 
 for them to be passive at the degraded state of their 
 widowed sisters, or even active in assisting to degrade 
 them. 
 
 Further, widowhood and its hard conditions are 
 based on the deeply rooted idea that a woman by 
 nature is inferior and subordinate to man. For her 
 to aspire to equality would be thought improper, 
 presumptuous, and almost impious. Even if she be 
 gifted, and her husband be intellectually and morally 
 debased, she must be in all things subordinate to him. 
 To recognize his superiority is her highest virtue ; she 
 exists only for him. When he dies, her use in life is 
 ended. For her to marry a second time is regarded 
 as unnatural, a violation of all that is proper and even 
 decent. She has fulfilled her destiny, henceforth she 
 is not even a flower born to blush unseen, but a 
 broken branch left to wither and die. This is the 
 intense sentiment which governs society in its treat- 
 ment of widows. I call it intense, for nothing short 
 of this can explain the perpetuation, among a race 
 naturally gentle, of a custom so irrational, so wide- 
 spread, so inconvenient, and so calculated powerfully
 
 WIDOWHOOD 135 
 
 to affect and influence the life and imagination, and 
 productive of so much evil and crime. It is the cause 
 of more heart-break and hopeless sorrow than any 
 one custom among mankind. For we must take into 
 account, first, the systematic and most humiliating 
 features of repression to which widows are subject ; 
 then the sternness of the custom, dooming as it does 
 to hopeless widowhood mere children, who though 
 married, never lived with their husbands ; and, finally, 
 the immense number who are doomed to such a life. 
 Think of it : 22,600,000 women of all ages, from even 
 the tender child of five, thus thought of, and multitudes 
 of them leading such a life ! But it is out of our 
 power to understand what this stupendous number 
 signifies ; a few illustrations will assist to bring it more 
 within our comprehension. It means one in six of 
 the entire female population. It means almost as 
 many widows in India as there are men, women, and 
 children in all England, with only Lancashire left 
 out. And of these, 252,000 are under 15 years of 
 age ; that is, as many girl-widows as there are people 
 of both sexes and all ages in Bristol or Nottingham, 
 or Bradford or Edinburgh. Think of what all this 
 signifies ! l 
 
 And widows are powerless. Custom, society, public 
 sentiment, are passive or unfriendly. If she is yet a 
 child in her father's house, or if after bereavement she 
 return to it, pity and affection may shield her from 
 some of the cruelest effects of superstition and 
 
 1 Westminster Reviciv, 1 891, p. 11S.
 
 136 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 custom. So, too, this may happen if her loss comes 
 later in life, after she has gained influence, and 
 her children are sufficiently old and well trained to 
 protect and shield her ; especially will this be so if 
 she has sons, for though looked on as a sinner, her lot 
 will be alleviated on account of her being the mother 
 of the superior sex. But these conditions may be 
 wanting, and in every case social and public sentiment 
 are against her. 
 
 How did such peculiar usages originate and become 
 so intense ? Indian ideas of marriage are based on 
 conceptions different from those held elsewhere. 
 The object of marriage in the East is primarily 
 religious. ' Viewed from the woman's side, it is — (i) 
 that she may have some male in whose rear she may 
 walk into heaven, for her own good deeds gain her no 
 entrance there, or (2) if she has no brothers, that the 
 said male may lead the family procession within the 
 gates. Viewed from the father's side, it is that he 
 may leave behind him some one to pray his soul out 
 of hell ' (Putt), and offer sacrifices to the supernal and 
 infernal deities. A male descendant only can do this, 
 and so regnant is this idea that every other con- 
 sideration has become subordinate to it. The wife 
 is only esteemed as the mother of the son. She is 
 supposed to belong sacramentally to one husband, in 
 such a manner that she must never belong to another. 
 A father in selecting a wife for his son will prefer one 
 out of a family in which boys are more frequently 
 born than girls, and avoid one in which widowhood is
 
 WIDOWHOOD 137 
 
 frequent ; for next to the loss of caste the prevalence 
 of girls and widows in a family are regarded as the 
 greatest misfortunes. It is considered unlucky for 
 women to see the face of a widow before seeing any 
 other object in the morning, and most men would 
 postpone any business on which they were setting 
 out if their path were crossed by a widow. Their 
 persons, their state, their names are held in contempt. 
 The name rand by which they are generally 
 designated, is the same that is generally given to a 
 nautch girl or a harlot. ' Every town, every village, 
 almost every house is full of widows who are debarred 
 from all amusements, and, if childless, converted into 
 household drudges. They often lead bad lives. 
 Their lives, like those of lepers, are as a living death, 
 and they would often give themselves up to be burned 
 alive, if the law would let them. The spirit of Sati 
 still survives.' x 
 
 The influence of her position on the widow must 
 be most disastrous. Credible report states that 
 multitudes are driven or drawn to a life of sin. But 
 if she has any power of imagination and thought, how 
 must she regard herself? She is abhorred or despised 
 or pitied by all she knows. There is no hope for her : 
 a widow she must remain to the bitter end. She is 
 ignorant of books and learning, shut out from all 
 knowledge of the opinions and thoughts of the outer 
 world. She is deeply superstitious, and religious in 
 
 1 Sir M. M. Williams' Modern India, p. 78 ; Census oj in did, 
 1891, chap. be.
 
 [38 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 her way, taking it for granted that many gods are 
 vengeful and malignant, and that destiny rules the 
 lot of all. She has become a widow — that is, either 
 she did something, or failed to do something, ages ago, 
 which has brought her under evil and malignant 
 influences, and which may pursue her through many 
 births or states of being ; or some lapse or failure in 
 this life has brought this evil on her. She connects 
 what she is with what she has been and done, con- 
 cluding that she is under a ban and curse, pursued 
 by evil either in the form of an implacable divinity 
 or an unfeeling irresistible force, it would be as 
 vain as it would be impious to oppose. Every one 
 around her thinks on these lines, and regards her as 
 an accursed being to whom cleaves misfortune and 
 misery. From her childhood this is how she has 
 been habituated to look at all people and things ; she 
 has never heard anything else ; she has no chance of 
 knowing anything else ; she has never been taught 
 to think or to reason. If she has ever ventured 
 openly to do so, she has most likely been told, in no 
 veiled words, that she is only a woman, and that it 
 is her part to submit and obey, and not presume to 
 think for herself. I can imagine, out of perdition, 
 nothing so moving and pathetic as the conflicting 
 terror, fear, loathing, and despair of such a woman. 
 Is it surprising if numbers of such sink into imbecility 
 or insanity, or commit suicide, or turn to a life of 
 shame? Her state is but too accurately described in 
 the lines —
 
 WIDOWHOOD 139 
 
 • And death and life she hated equally, 
 And nothing saw for her despair, 
 But dreadful time, dreadful eternity. 
 No comfort anywhere.' 
 
 Such a state of society as this presents may seem 
 almost incredible, and not a few Hindus say and 
 write a good deal in an apologetic and faint-hearted 
 manner in excuse, if not in vindication of the status 
 and treatment of women generally. But five facts 
 are clear — 
 
 1. The general drift of Hindu sentiment, as ex- 
 pressed in all ancient writings, is unjust and injurious 
 to women. 
 
 2. The ruling features of female infanticide, early 
 marriage, perpetual widowhood, suttee, and subordina- 
 tion have more or less prevailed in purely native society 
 from remote times. 
 
 3. There is the general admission, on the part of 
 the great majority of unprejudiced, educated men, 
 that the entire system of native sentiment and usage 
 relating to female society, needs to be revised and 
 reformed. 
 
 4. Every educated Hindu woman in modern life 
 whose voice has been heard, declares the condition 
 of her sex to be most unjust, injurious, and heart- 
 breaking. 
 
 5. There is the almost uniform testimony of 
 European and American men and women, who arc 
 competent to express an opinion, to the same effect. 
 
 A remarkable book was privately circulated in
 
 140 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 Bombay in 1890, called The Story of a Widow Re- 
 marriage ; being the Experiences of Madliozvdas 
 Rugnatkdas, Merchant of Bombay. Mr. Rugnathdas, 
 a widower, forty-three years of age, of good caste and 
 social rank, married a widow suitable in rank, family, 
 and age ; and this is how the news of her marriage 
 was received in the bride's family. ' Her mother and 
 grandmother, her sister and sister-in-law, and all the 
 rest of the friends and relatives, joined in a chorus of 
 cries. The women beat their breasts and foreheads, 
 and the demonstrations of grief were loud enough to 
 startle the whole neighbourhood. Her poor mother 
 and other near relatives were inconsolable. They 
 could never have dreamt that the news could have 
 been so very bad. Nothing could persuade them to 
 touch food. The house was filled with gloom.' 
 
 And then followed for eighteen years, up to the time 
 the book was written, a series of attempts to boycott, 
 ruin,and annoy Mr. Rugnathdas and his wife,which,but 
 for ample evidence, would be incredible. They were 
 threatened with violence, put out of caste, maligned 
 to European society ; systematic attempts were made 
 to ruin Mr. Rugnathdas as a banker and merchant ; 
 and, strangest and saddest of all, though they lived 
 happily together, and in all the relations of life were 
 virtuous and honourable, their relatives were implac- 
 able, and early friends, who professed, advanced, and 
 in theory advocated, widow-marriage, withdrew their 
 friendship, and in some instances were hostile, though 
 knowing well, and admitting in private, that enforced
 
 WIDOWHOOD 141 
 
 widowhood was the cause of endless sorrow and 
 crime, the weak,' timid excuse being, 'The time is 
 not yet come for widow re-marriage. At least fifty 
 years must elapse before the time will be ripe for it.' 
 
 The book is a pathetic illustration of Hindu 
 character and the singular difficulty of introducing 
 any reforms, however rational and humane. 
 
 The dreadful sentence said by Dante to be written 
 over the portals of hell — 
 
 ' All hope abandon, ye who enter here ' — 
 
 describes the state of widowhood in the long ages of 
 the past. But now, happily, the dawning of a better 
 time is perceptible. The thick darkness which has 
 for many centuries rested on the fortunes of these 
 tens of millions of gentle, graceful women is being 
 lifted. But it will be long, far longer than is usually 
 supposed, before the day breaks and the shadows flee 
 away ; for how few adequately understand what a 
 stupendous task it is to change the ideas and customs 
 of a vast and ancient Asiatic race ! But the beginning 
 of the end is seen. The people are beginning to 
 realize the evils of their own usages. 
 
 About fifty years ago, Motee Lai Seal, a well-known 
 resident in Calcutta, knowing well the power of 
 example over his countrymen and their excessive 
 timidity, offered a thousand pounds to any respectable 
 Hindu who would marry a widow, and no one claimed 
 the tempting sum ! 
 
 In 1856 the Indian Government passed an Act
 
 (42 WIDOWHOOD 
 
 removing all legal obstacles to the marriage of widows. 
 But though the law is favourable, and public sentiment 
 declares that widows should be humanely treated and 
 their marriage encouraged, and societies have been 
 formed to advocate such views and encourage these 
 marriages, it is surprising to think how little, at least 
 in the latter direction, has been done. 1 Nowhere does 
 sentiment run so far ahead of practice as in India. 
 Nevertheless, the leaven of the new ideas is powerfully 
 at work, and as they have reason, humanity, and social 
 good on their side, the new ideas must finally be 
 victorious.' 2 
 
 1 ' It is in reality, however, a dead letter, as the Hindus regard it 
 with abhorrence, and have not mitigated in the least their strenuous 
 opposition to the re-marriage of the widow. Thirty years after its 
 enactment only about sixty re-marriages are reported in all India. It 
 was a generation or more in advance of native opinion, which, however, 
 at the present time is beginning to agitate for larger liberty in the 
 matter' (The Missionary Review for March, 1898, p. 200). 
 
 - The ideas governing the status of women described in this chapter 
 are common to the Hindu race; but the enforcement of the customs 
 and usages varies with the caste and nationality of the people. What 
 I have written applies most closely to the extensive and populous 
 province of Bengal. But the usages described are most enforced — as 
 easily they can be — in high caste and well-to-do families. In some 
 instances the severity of daily discipline on a widow is mitigated in the 
 case of children of tender years. In others the heartless and almost 
 savage manner in which a widow is initiated into her forlorn state by 
 tearing off her ornaments, shaving her head, and otherwise degrading 
 her, are not enforced, and among the lower castes everywhere, as we 
 have stated, instances are found of widows living with widowers, under 
 imperfect religious and social sanction. Such unions, though dissolved 
 at pleasure, are mutually convenient, and an escape, as by a back door, 
 from the evils of widowhood ; they are therefore indulgently regarded 
 by a people who, whilst intolerant of any violations of caste-purity, are 
 lax on most questions relating to chastity.
 
 A ZENANA LADY IN BENGA 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE EVILS ARISING OUT OF THE STATUS OF 
 WOMEN. 
 
 The great domestic and social evils of Hindu life are 
 beginning to be recognized by the people themselves, 
 though pride of race and an intensely conservative
 
 144 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OE WOMEN 
 
 habit of thought, lead them to minimize such evils and 
 be half-hearted in any attempts to remove them. 
 Those evils have never been adequately described ; 
 they are too far-reaching, and touch too closely and 
 tenderly the entire structure of native society, with 
 its mystery, reticence, and distrust, to be understood 
 by any ordinary observer. There are few Hindus 
 who could or would give a candid portraiture of native 
 domestic life, and no one of Western race, however well 
 acquainted with the facts, has the knowledge, or can 
 have, of the inner life of the women of India requisite 
 to enable us to understand what it is. Possibly some 
 Hindu lady in the near future, possessed of ample 
 knowledge, and with adequate courage, candour, and 
 descriptive power, may give this to the world ; and 
 when it is done it will bring to missionary and bene- 
 volent effort tenfold zeal, sympathy, and aid. But the 
 facts, so far as known, should awaken the profoundest 
 interest and sympathy of Christian women toward 
 their Indian sisters. 
 
 i. That great physical evils arise out of early 
 marriage, and other customs in a lesser degree, can 
 easily be imagined. Every medical man of sufficient 
 experience, and all ladies who as doctors or nurses 
 have access to native families, declare that disease, 
 ill health, and delicacy of constitution are unusually 
 prevalent. The possibilities — nay, even probabilities 
 — of family life, when wives are ten or twelve years of 
 age, have recently been brought under public notice in 
 instances of revolting crime, and shown the need of a
 
 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 145 
 
 great change in early marriage relations. But ever 
 since child marriage became customary — how many 
 hundreds of years ago none can tell — such tragedies 
 have been possible, and doubtless have occurred in 
 tens of thousands of cases, before humaner sentiments 
 began to prevail, and when there were no British 
 tribunals to take cognizance of such sins against 
 humanity. 
 
 But besides the probability of a violent death 
 through this custom, we must take account of the 
 immense amount of suffering and disease, often 
 ending only with life, it has caused. The facts 
 brought to light, and the evidence of medical and 
 other authorities, have roused public attention to this 
 evil, and led, happily, after much agitation, to a change 
 in the law, raising the age of consent from ten to 
 twelve years — the law and the necessity for it all 
 too plainly revealing the unsatisfactory, repellent 
 features of early married life. 
 
 And one evil produces another. What is likely to 
 be the pliysical state of both mother and child, when 
 the former herself may be but a child thirteen or 
 fourteen years of age, and even more a child in all 
 true knowledge, and be the mother of a large family 
 ere she is twenty years of age ? It is well known to 
 all familiar with native society that, generally graceful, 
 and often beautiful as Hindu girls are, they cease to 
 be either at thirty, and are even old at forty ; and 
 reliable report states that delicacy of constitution, ill 
 health and disease are very common. And this is 
 
 K
 
 146 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 inevitable, not only because of premature maternity, 
 the most ignorant midwifery, and the physically 
 ruinous and cruel treatment to which a mother is 
 exposed through the caste usages, which separate her 
 for many days from the small comforts of the family, 
 but also from the want of air, exercise, and change 
 of scene. To the great mass of women belonging to 
 the middle and upper classes good physical exercise 
 is not practicable. The roof of a house, a verandah, or 
 a small yard or garden, are the only places accessible 
 to them. Even where the area is greater, the monotony 
 of treading it day by day and year by year, seeing only 
 the same few faces and gazing on the same scene, 
 often only a patch of the sky or a dull courtyard, or 
 an ill-cultivated garden, must be most depressing and 
 detrimental to health. There must be many myriads 
 of women who have never since childhood enjoyed a 
 good walk or ride, or gazed on any scene which did 
 not lie between their husband's and their father's 
 house, multitudes of them for years never leaving 
 the house in which they are immured. 
 
 2. And moral evil ensues. 
 
 Marriage is an engrossing topic in all feminine con- 
 versation. And there is little reserve in the manner 
 in which it is spoken of. The people have in some 
 directions a delicate sense of propriety, but it does 
 not extend to questions relating to marriage. Native 
 servants, even, will talk to English little children 
 of their courtships, weddings, and future husbands 
 and wives with a freedom which to us is shocking
 
 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OE WOMEN 147 
 
 and indecent, but which they are surprised to hear 
 is so. 
 
 Among themselves, since they have so little to think 
 and talk of, and marriage, especially to women, being 
 the most exciting and important event in life, the 
 occasion when they receive public recognition, it is not 
 surprising that it should absorb their attention and 
 be a topic for incessant talk. But what must be the 
 effect on the minds of boys and girls, not even in their 
 teens, when their marriages are talked about in their 
 presence in no veiled terms ; when from her fifth 
 year a girl is taught habitually to pray for a good 
 husband, who will love her, who may live long, never 
 take a second wife, and that she may be the mother, 
 not of daughters, but of many sons ; and the boy of 
 seven or eight, who is taken from school for three 
 weeks or a month to be married with elaborate cere- 
 monies, great festivity, indecent speech, to a child of 
 yet more tender age he has never before seen ? Can 
 there be any wonder the little ones grow up to be 
 deficient in intellectual force and physical stamina, 
 through having their minds absorbed in affairs of 
 which they should know nothing ? 
 
 3. Social evil ensues, and that in many ways. 
 
 A boy who marries a girl can neither support him- 
 self nor his wife, nor can he in any true sense care for 
 and protect her. He and she for years must be 
 dependent on his parents or hers, and possibly their 
 children also. As they are dependent, they must be 
 subject to others, and this is so especially with the wife,
 
 148 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 who is far more dependent on her mother or sister-in- 
 law than on her own husband or parents. Thus there 
 intervenes, from the time of marriage, grave obstacles 
 to the husband and wife being one in affection, 
 sympathy or interest. Three illustrative instances 
 may be quoted here : — 
 
 ' When examining a girl of sixteen for some skin 
 trouble, I noticed a large scar which covered almost 
 entirely the sole of her left foot. On inquiry I heard 
 a sad tale. The girl was brought up in a happy 
 home, but after marriage the illtreatment she received 
 at her husband's often made her run away to her own 
 sweet home. One day, finding no kind of punishment 
 would cure the girl of this habit, the husband and his 
 mother tied the girl to a pole, and mercilessly branded 
 her foot with a hot iron ; but the girl managed to run 
 away within two days to her mother, who carried her 
 on her back to a hospital in Bombay. The police took 
 up the case, and got the husband sentenced to three 
 years' rigorous imprisonment. After his release, she 
 would be afraid to go to him, for fear of losing her 
 life. In this land of idolatry and immorality, with 
 no education, would it be strange if this girl falls into 
 the crooked path ? 
 
 ' Another young girl was brought to me in a strange 
 way. Although the girl was suffering from a bad fever, 
 yet the mother-in-law would neither give her medicine 
 nor consent to her going to her parents. The girl 
 had to eat stale food, do the grinding, and had only a 
 mat on the damp floor to lay her weary and feverish
 
 5 is 
 3 =1 
 
 w "3 
 
 ai \
 
 150 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 body at night. Knowing that the girl would accom- 
 pany her younger brother-in-law to a festival, the 
 father on that day waited on the road, and on seeing 
 her brought her at once to the dispensary. I found 
 her quite emaciated, and marks of violence were seen 
 on her back. Her father — a frail little man — was so 
 agitated that he was shivering from head to foot. I 
 had to give him some medicine to soothe his nerves. 
 The mother-in-law made a great row, took away her 
 ornaments, and notified a lawyer. If the friends 
 succeed in settling this affair, the girl will return to her 
 husband after two or three years, or he will marry 
 another girl. It is hard for me to relate to you such 
 heart-rending tales,but I must, in order that you should 
 know the deplorable state of women here. Christ 
 alone can bring liberty and joy into such homes.' l 
 
 ' Some months ago the wife of a man in one of the 
 villages near Baharvva was ill. Mrs. Brown went to 
 see her, and said she looked wretched, just lying out 
 on her parkom, and with no extra clothing save her 
 sari. She could not eat, so Mrs. Brown told her 
 husband that she would give her some milk if he 
 would send for it. 
 
 ' " Oh, who should I send ? " he asked. 
 
 ' " Come yourself." 
 
 ' " I have the buffaloes to see to when they come in." 
 
 ' " But after that ? " 
 
 ' "Then there are the children to see to." 
 
 ' " Well, send your daughter." 
 
 1 Mrs. Doctor V. Karmarkar, Bassim, Bombay, Dec, 1895.
 
 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 151 
 
 ' " Oh, she cooks the evening meal." 
 
 ' And so no one came for the milk. 
 
 ' A few days after, at evening-time, I saw this poor 
 woman's body carried out into the fields, and soon 
 bright flames leapt up, and I knew it was being burnt. 
 She had gone ; and last week, when at that village, 
 I saw the new wife, who had already taken her 
 place, and who was nursing the wee baby she had left 
 behind.' : 
 
 And marriage always involves a great expenditure of 
 money, which in many cases means a heavy burden 
 of debt. The poorest parents, as well as the richest, 
 spend extravagantly on weddings. Even the poor will 
 spend a sum equal to half a year's wages, and the rich 
 tens of thousands of rupees ; and since all classes are 
 improvident, the money has often to be borrowed at 
 a usurious rate of interest, which impoverishes the 
 family for years. Custom demands this folly, and 
 though parents know what it involves, and groan at the 
 prospect, pride and cowardice induce them to submit 
 to the evil. This undoubtedly was one great cause 
 of infanticide. To be quit of a daughter was not 
 only to be saved much trouble, but an inevitably 
 heavy expense, out of all proportion to the parents' 
 means. 
 
 Such customs are among the great causes why 
 so many families, once wealthy and powerful, have now 
 declined, and why indebtedness, with all its evils 
 humiliations, and temptations to crime, so abounds. 
 
 1 India's JVome/i, Dec, 1892.
 
 152 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 4. The evils flowing from the heterogeneous assem- 
 bling of so many variously related persons, bound 
 together by social ties and caste relations, but diverse 
 in usage, sympathy, interest, cannot but be great. 
 They have varying interests, and nothing to attract 
 their minds toward higher affairs, or to train them 
 to be forbearing, self-controlled, and unselfish. The 
 men are little different, and morally no better. What 
 temptations there must be in such families towards 
 envy, jealousy, strife, and intrigue ! There is the 
 evidence of a lady most competent to speak, and 
 although her remarks apply specially to the influence 
 of Islam in Mahomedan lands, they are applicable to 
 Buddhist and Hindu countries also. 
 
 'They (false faiths) degrade women with an infinite 
 degradation. I have lived in zenanas, and harems, 
 and have seen the daily life of the secluded women, 
 and I can speak from bitter experience of what their 
 lives are — the intellect dwarfed, so that the woman 
 twenty or thirty years of age is more like a child 
 of eight intellectually ; while all the worst passions of 
 human nature are stimulated and developed in a fear- 
 ful degree ; jealousy, envy, murderous hate, intrigue, 
 running to such an extent that in some countries I 
 have hardly ever been in a woman's house or near a 
 woman's tent without being asked for drugs with 
 which to disfigure the favourite wife, to take away 
 her life, or to take away the life of the favourite wife's 
 infant son. This request has been made of me nearly 
 two hundred times. This is only an indication of
 
 O -5
 
 154 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 the daily life, of whose miseries we think so little, and 
 which is a natural product of the systems that we 
 ought to have subverted long ago.' 1 
 
 5. National or race life suffers. — India is more 
 suggestive of great problems to the philosopher, 
 philanthropist, and historian than any other country. 
 And one of these is how a great race, probably more 
 numerous for a thousand years than the population 
 of the Roman Empire at its zenith ; most richly 
 dowered with intellectual and artistic gifts, and placed 
 where nature is most prolific and beneficent, should 
 have been unprogressive for centuries, never really 
 united into one great empire or confederation of 
 states, but subject all through the ages of credible 
 history, to the partial domination of first one and then 
 another of its more martial nationalities, Rajputs, 
 Mahrattas, or Punjabis ; or to foreigners whose pre- 
 sence is disliked, whose lack of caste defiles, and 
 whose religions have very little in common with their 
 own. Whence this weakness, this repeated and con- 
 tinuous subjugation? Undoubtedly, one important 
 factor in the solution of this problem is the generally 
 low opinion held of women, and the corresponding 
 status to which they have been degraded. Any one 
 familiar with all that is sung and said of women, 
 wives, and home, in the dramatic, lyric, and patriotic 
 literature of Rome, Israel, and Western Europe, will 
 recognize how much the courage, strength, and virtue 
 of their races have been associated with the place 
 
 1 Mrs. Isabella Bishop.
 
 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 155 
 
 they have given to women, and the respect in which 
 they have been held. Manu gave expression to a 
 deep truth when he said, ' When female relatives 
 are made miserable, the family soon wholly perishes ; 
 but that family where they are not unhappy ever 
 prospers.' But the text which follows suggests a 
 base motive and a low estimate of the sex even at 
 that early age — ' Hence men who seek their own 
 welfare should always honour women on holidays and 
 festivals with gifts of ornaments, clothes, and dainty 
 food.' The policy suggested indicates an imperfect, 
 if not low idea of the tastes of women. It assumes 
 that they are but children of a larger growth, who are 
 to be petted and managed by indulgence rather than 
 treated and trained as rational beings. As the method 
 is injurious to a child, so is it to wives and husbands 
 alike, and, where everything runs into system, to the 
 whole community. 
 
 6. The unwise treatment of women has reacted on 
 men. 
 
 The suspicion, fear, tyranny, and contempt, mingled 
 with indulgence, with which they have long regarded 
 women, have tended to make these qualities inherent 
 parts of the national character. They mark the 
 bearing of man towards man ; of caste towards 
 caste; of nationalities toward nationalities ; of Bengali 
 toward Rajput, of Hindustani toward Mahratta ; of 
 each, indeed, toward all others, and of all who have 
 caste toward all who have it not. Hindus have great 
 qualities, and a reserve of capabilities that will give
 
 156 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 them a foremost place in the future of the world's 
 history ; but it will not be, cannot be, and would be a 
 calamity to human nature if it were to be, before 
 their entire system of domestic life were revolutionized 
 and reformed. 
 
 Evil is wrought in another way. Men have 
 selfishly built up an intricate, monstrous system of 
 sentiment and custom for the control of women, 
 which has for its corner-stone the supremacy of man 
 and the subordination of women ; and according to 
 natural law, by which the nonuse or misuse of a 
 faculty destroys or maims it, and the law of mental 
 and moral retribution so surely at work in this life 
 even, through which men reap as they sow, and nations 
 rise or fall as they obey or violate the great laws of 
 eternal righteousness, they are injured by what they 
 have done to others. They selfishly and unjustly have 
 dealt with one-half their race, and detriment has come 
 to themselves. It has been as when some subtle poison 
 has been taken which permeates the whole system. 
 Men have brought themselves to believe, and have con- 
 strained women to accept the custom, if not the belief, 
 that early marriage, seclusion, implicit obedience, 
 ignorance of letters, and permanent widowhood are 
 the proper conditions of feminine life ; thus, unwit- 
 tingly but surely, lowering the tone and character 
 of all national life, and causing there to be a wilder- 
 ness where there should have been a garden, a 
 desert where should ; have been springs of water, 
 winter where should have been summer. For who can
 
 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 157 
 
 imagine the loss of wisdom, learning, and knowledge, 
 
 of intelligence and skill, of happiness, sympathy, and 
 
 helpfulness, of courage, endurance, and refinement, 
 
 caused all through many centuries, by millions of 
 
 women being left mentally and morally undeveloped 
 
 and uneducated ? Despised, distrusted, treated as 
 
 incapable of taking care of themselves, and taught 
 
 that to be kept, as it were, under lock and key is 
 
 their privilege and safety ; such treatment must 
 
 inevitably tend to make them timid, helpless, and 
 
 trivial. They are most affectionate as mothers, but 
 
 how disqualified they must be to train, either 
 
 physically or intellectually, their sons to be manly, 
 
 courageous, and enduring ! If the half even be true 
 
 of what we are taught to believe, of the power and 
 
 influence of mothers on their children, and if the 
 
 greater indebtedness of great men, consciously and 
 
 unconsciously, to their mothers, rather than to their 
 
 fathers, then we may well regret that the women of 
 
 India are left so much in a state of nature, and that 
 
 such training as they receive should be on mistaken 
 
 and pernicious lines. Think of the wide difference 
 
 between a mother educated or uneducated, respected 
 
 or distrusted, and then the lack of all intellectual 
 
 training of the women of India generation after 
 
 generation ! It must be obvious that multiplied 
 
 evils will ensue where social and domestic life are 
 
 on so perverted a basis. The result cannot but be 
 
 disastrous. It is so on the women themselves. It 
 
 narrows and dulls their minds ; it makes them timid,
 
 158 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 superstitious, helpless ; it hinders their usefulness 
 and efficiency ; it degrades them ; it limits their 
 sources of enjoyment, and bars all progress. And 
 it is disastrous to men and families, for such women, 
 though sympathetic and affectionate, cannot be wise, 
 helpful, reliable companions to their husbands, or 
 exert over their children the moral and intellectual 
 influence requisite to make them wise, virtuous, well- 
 balanced, energetic members of society. 1 
 
 7. The seclusion and isolation in which they are 
 kept is injurious. 
 
 This insulting and degrading usage goes to make 
 them what they are assumed to be ; for stripped of all 
 euphuisms, the customs have their root in the intense 
 distrust men have of men, and the suspicion that the 
 integrity of women is only to be secured by allowing 
 them no freedom, though they vainly assume that 
 privacy is a mark of their husbands' care and respecta- 
 bility. They are excessively restricted in what they 
 can hear and see — and thus are not only deprived of 
 pleasures that are perfectly innocent, but of influences 
 that are highly disciplinary and educational. So is 
 it a loss to them and to men that the two sexes, even 
 in the same house, dwell apart. Especially is the 
 fact disastrous to men. It fosters pride, conceit, and 
 ill manners. Left without the refining and restraining 
 
 1 ' Especially do I want people to recognize that the women of our 
 Western Hemisphere represent the highest type of woman, greatly 
 owing to the respect and honour paid to them by men ; but that the 
 moment the honour and respect are diminished, the high type of 
 woman will vanish' (Tennyson).
 
 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 159 
 
 influences which always flow from the society of 
 virtuous women, they become the more coarse, selfish, 
 and unclean, in conduct, conversation, and character. 
 
 8. Evil produces evil. It is unnecessary to do more 
 than call attention to the striking manner in which 
 an original error in opinion and wrong in policy has 
 led on to the great evils here laid bare. Women, it is 
 assumed, are of an evil nature, and not to be trusted ; 
 therefore restrict their liberty and limit their influence, 
 say the Shastras. Hence came child marriage, seclu- 
 sion, and the discouragement of education. Then as 
 children cannot choose their own partners, parents 
 must select for them. But marriage was not easily 
 brought about. It was difficult to find husbands, 
 expensive to marry daughters, troublesome to take 
 care of them ; hence came the disappointment with 
 which the birth of a daughter is received, infanticide, 
 perpetual widowhood, entailing on families a heavy 
 expenditure and a great weight of watchfulness and 
 solicitude ; and from these probably came the sug- 
 gestion and certainly the encouragement of suttee. 
 History gives us no instance of the subtle and wide- 
 spread influence of mistaken opinion equal to this. 
 
 9. Think of the suffering and sorrow arising out of 
 the status of women. Suffering and sorrow are no- 
 where so abundant as in heathen lands, and this is a 
 fact the significance of which few sufficiently lay to 
 heart. As Mrs. Isabella Bishop says of her extensive 
 travels in Eastern lands, ' Wherever I have been, I 
 have seen sin and sorrow and shame. There is an
 
 160 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN 
 
 infinite degradation of men. The whole continent of 
 Asia is corrupt. It is the scene of barbarities, tortures, 
 brutal punishments, oppression, official corruption, 
 which is worst under Mahomedan rule ; of all things 
 which are the natural products of systems which are 
 without God in Christ. There are no sanctities of 
 home ; nothing to tell of righteousness, temperance, 
 or judgment to come ; only a fearful looking for, in 
 the future, of fiery indignation from some quarter, they 
 know not what ; a dread of everlasting re-births into 
 forms of obnoxious reptiles or insects, or of tortures 
 which are infinite, and which are depicted in pictures 
 of fiendish ingenuity.' 
 
 ' The dark places of the earth are full of the habita- 
 tions of cruelty.' ' Their sorrows are multiplied that 
 exchange the Lord for another god.' This was so 
 more than 2000 years ago, and it is equally so to-day, 
 because it is according to an eternal law. False 
 religion is neither productive of goodness nor happi- 
 ness ; and whilst all Asia and Africa abound with the 
 evidences that it is so, the most obvious of all proof 
 is in the condition of Hindu women. Try to imagine 
 not only the possible but actual sorrow, suffering, and 
 heart-break that have come through long ages, and 
 that are coming even in our age, to millions of 
 daughters who, with the dawn of intellectual con- 
 sciousness, learn that they are little better than a mis- 
 fortune to their families, and less esteemed than their 
 brothers. Girls married to men they have never seen 
 or known ; wives not treated as equals, not trusted
 
 EVILS DUE TO STATUS OF WOMEN i6r 
 
 with money or liberty or family affairs, and not even 
 gently spoken to ; mothers who fear that the birth 
 of a daughter may cause them to lose the affections 
 of their husbands, disappointment to their family, 
 reproach from their neighbours, and perhaps a second 
 wife, to their humiliation and shame ; — to widows, 
 hunger, thirst, disfigurement, reproach, scorn, and 
 personal loathing. It is as well, perhaps, that we are 
 slow to comprehend what all this means, for if we 
 could but realize one-hundredth part of it, we should 
 be deprived of rest and peace, if indeed our hearts 
 were not broken. But to understand something of its 
 extent and depth is salutary, since it makes us grate- 
 ful for our national exemption from such a crushing 
 weight of woe, and eager to remove the intolerable 
 burden from the lives of those who now faint and fall 
 beneath its weight. The greatest causes of human 
 misery now at work in the world are war, intemper- 
 ance, despotic government, slavery, and Hindu usages 
 of women. I am inclined to think that none of them 
 produce such an aggregate of human misery as the 
 last. It affects more or less the lives, from beginning 
 to end, of tens of millions of women, and that day by 
 day all through life.
 
 A SCHOOL IN NORTH INDIA.
 
 i6 3 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 THE CAUSES PRODUCTIVE OF THE CONDITION 
 OF WOMEN. 
 
 THESE are worthy of close investigation, because of 
 their peculiarities, and since they seem in many 
 respects out of accord with some of the leading 
 features of Hindu human nature. 
 
 Among an intelligent, courteous, gentle, placid, 
 unemotional, and certainly not cruel race, it is singular 
 that customs should have arisen and prevailed for 
 centuries which press so heavily on the most gentle 
 and attractive half of the race. These customs have 
 been accepted for ages as implicitly as if they were 
 laws of nature it would be hopeless if not impious to 
 oppose, no instance being on record of a protest by 
 any considerable number of people against any of 
 these, on the ground of irrationality, injustice, or 
 inhumanity. To Christianity solely belongs the honour 
 of protest and practical action against them. 
 
 When a Hindu was asked if there were any points 
 on which all, however sectarian, were agreed, he
 
 1 64 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 
 
 replied, ' Yes ; we all believe in the sanctity of the 
 cow and the depravity of women.' 
 
 Hindu customs are the outcome of race character- 
 istics and conditions, though the one often seem 
 contradictory to the other. This is so everywhere, 
 and on all such subjects it is important to notice how 
 powerfully one passion or feature of character or 
 sentiment, or a concurrence of circumstances, may 
 modify and affect individual and even national 
 character. Refinement and moral laxity, intem- 
 perance and good nature, pride and meanness, 
 amiability and vice, manly virtues and one besetting 
 sin go together. And every nation is swayed by 
 some sentiment or enthralled by some usage which 
 astonishes all others, and of which it is half ashamed. 
 Religious sentiment, for instance, has over the Hindu 
 race a power in everyday life such as it has not over 
 any Western race. Any one wishing to understand 
 the people and their ways will meet with paradoxes 
 and incongruities, or things that seem so to the non- 
 Aryan observer, and which he is inclined to regard at 
 first as irrational, wondering how an intellectual and 
 meditative race, more averse to destroy life than any 
 other, can have come to adopt them, but which from 
 the Hindu point of view seem rational, and even 
 inevitable. Grant, for instance, the postulate, which 
 has been accepted in all ages by all classes, male 
 and female, learned and unlearned, that women are, 
 through the subtle but inevitable laws of transmigra- 
 tion, inferior to men, intellectually and morally — so
 
 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 165 
 
 little able to take care of themselves, that they need 
 ever to be dependent on men, and protected by them 
 for their own safety and the well-being of families. 
 Grant this, and all else that we see easily follows. 
 
 One continually finds, in the investigation of Oriental 
 questions, that the people are not as bad as they seem, 
 but, on the contrary, humane and rational. This is 
 no reason why their opinions and usages should be 
 accepted, but it is why their sentiments, and even 
 prejudices, should be treated with respect, and they 
 not misjudged and condemned — as too frequently they 
 are — as cruel, vicious, and irrational. They are neither 
 one nor the other, and it is evidence of this that 
 invariably the better they are known by intelligent 
 Europeans, the more they are respected and liked. 
 
 The customs, laws, and general condition of a 
 people usually have their roots in their intellectual, 
 moral, and emotional qualities. This is specially 
 so with Eastern races, for they have been far less 
 affected and modified by emigration, conquest, travel, 
 and imitativeness than any of the nations of Southern 
 and Western Europe. This is almost as true of the 
 Hindus as of the Chinese. The former brought 
 with them into India a consciousness of their own 
 superiority over other races, a complacency in their own 
 institutions, a religiousness of temperament — always 
 an element of great strength — and an immobility 
 of character which have given marked peculiarities 
 to their institutions, and enabled them to resist 
 external modifying forces with the silent, solid force
 
 r66 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 
 
 with which a granite mountain resists the waves of 
 the sea. The course of events which led them to 
 migrate from Central Asia tended to develop strong 
 and exclusive race qualities. Though they were 
 superior to the aborigines in all the arts of civiliza- 
 tion — and evidently, from their old Vedic hymns and 
 songs, very conscious of their superiority — they had 
 ever to be watchful to preserve their supremacy as 
 conquerors and their hereditary purity as a race ; 
 and the assertion of such claims in these times of 
 struggle and danger depended, or was supposed to 
 depend, entirely on men. Whenever they received the 
 aborigines into their communities, it was not as equals, 
 but inferiors, doomed to hereditary subordination. 
 
 Thus an original pride of race and love of power 
 hardened into a system of domination and exclusive- 
 ness such as nowhere else has ever been seen. This 
 haughty and intense assumption of superiority in 
 opinion, and as far as practicable in position and 
 affairs, claimed for and finally secured for one class 
 over another an unchallenged right such as the world 
 has nowhere else seen : Hindu over every other race, 
 caste over no caste, Khetriya over Shudra, man over 
 woman, and Brahmin transcendently over all. These 
 became fixed ideas, which found expression in the 
 assumed divine laws and customs of the whole race, 
 and were made strong and authoritative by the 
 sanction of religion ; so strong that for centuries they 
 have shaped society, and resisted all hostile influences. 
 When, for instance, Hindu supremacy gave way to
 
 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 167 
 
 Mahomedan domination, Aryan ideas and customs 
 had become so fixed that they not only resisted 
 Mahomedan proselyting zeal more successfully than 
 any other Asiatic or African race, but have Hinduized 
 Mahomedanism to a marked degree. 
 
 Of all people they have least sought intercourse 
 with others, and are the most reluctant to leave their 
 own manner of life, and adopt that of foreigners. 
 They dread and dislike emigration, and even to leave 
 their own province for permanent residence in another. 
 During three thousand years there is but one feeble 
 instance on record of any attempt on their part at 
 conquest or colonization. That which has been handed 
 down from past generations is accepted as sacred and 
 immutable, and to change is to dishonour parentage, 
 to discredit the community, and come perilously near 
 an act of sacrilege. From these causes it has come to 
 pass that Hindu society has developed and hardened 
 into a form more exclusive, conservative, and immobile 
 than is to be found in any other race. The status 
 of women is one of its most marked manifestations, 
 and some of the intellectual characteristics which 
 have led to such a peculiar result are quite traceable. 
 
 Asiatic habitude of mind and sentiment is one of these 
 conditions. Two features have always characterized 
 Asiatics : a low estimate of women and an acqui- 
 escence in absolute rule, whether in the state or the 
 family. Nowhere is the position of women what 
 it should be. It varies, of course, but nowhere does 
 it approach to that which is now the recognized ideal
 
 1 68 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 
 
 of Protestant Christendom. And it is lower in India 
 than anywhere else. Power, not right, or truth, or 
 love, or justice, has always been the supreme ruler. 
 So absolute and unchallenged has been its sway 
 that it is everywhere acknowledged as conferring a 
 right to its arbitrary use, and is submitted to with 
 a patient acquiescence perplexing to Western minds. 
 It is an historical fact that despotism has been the 
 note of every monarchy throughout Asia ; that a 
 representative government, either under the form of 
 a constitutional monarchy or a republic, has never 
 existed, or even been seriously thought of ; and that 
 all uprisings against despotism and tyranny have 
 had their basis, not in popular rights or a sense of 
 justice, but in a crave for vengeance or a thirst to 
 possess power. The idea that power confers right, 
 that its possessor is above law, or, if there is a law, 
 may ignore or evade it if he can, pervades all classes. 
 It is as characteristic of the peasant, the policeman, 
 the strong man, the capitalist, and the landholder, as 
 of the emperor. Even where law is recognized, as 
 in China, and wherever the Koran is accepted as 
 divine, it either confers absolute authority on rulers, 
 or power in the practical forms of despotism, and 
 tyranny overrides law. This is the general drift of 
 things, since corruption is universal, and the people 
 are too ignorant, abject, and suspicious to combine 
 for good or useful purposes ; for the oppressed would 
 become oppressors, and slaves despots, if fortune gave 
 them the opportunity. Appeals, therefore, such as
 
 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 169 
 
 rouse men of Western race to face peril and dare 
 danger for freedom, for justice, for the right, never 
 have been raised in Eastern lands, and would have 
 elicited no response if they had. This assists us to 
 understand how and why men oppress women, and 
 why the oppression for these long weary centuries 
 has been so patiently endured, and why women arc 
 nowhere placed side by side as the equals of men, 
 but behind or below them. They are physically 
 weaker, and their intellectual and emotional qualities 
 are, however admirable, of a nature that non- 
 Christian men neither easily perceive nor cheerfully 
 recognize ; so that though their beauty, grace, and 
 delicacy of perception are freely acknowledged, they 
 are pressed down to a subordinate, if not servile, 
 condition in the family as well as in the state. 
 
 Suspicion and distrust are among the strongest and 
 saddest of Asiatic characteristics, but nowhere are 
 they more seen than in India. These have been in- 
 tensified by long centuries of despotism, oppression, 
 and wrong. Few trust even their own kindred. 
 Women suffer the most from this for two reasons. 
 Being the weaker and more dependent, men can exert 
 their power over the conditions of woman's life as 
 women cannot over men's ; hence the latter, when able, 
 allow no freedom of thought or action to the former. 
 Then, further, men, knowing what they and other men 
 are, and untaught by the popular forms of religion 
 the necessity and duty of moral restraint, become 
 suspicious of the fidelity and moral integrity of others,
 
 i7o CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 
 
 and exhibit their jealousy by restricting the liberty 
 of all women, whenever they have the power to do so. 
 An acute writer, familiar with the people, has well 
 said, ' To the Hindu, jealous to madness of ceremonial 
 purity, on which, as he conceives, the happiness of his 
 future life depends, and drilled by centuries of foreign 
 domination to suspect oppression in the very breezes 
 — his shrouded domestic life is all in all, the one thing 
 in defence of which he will die or be ruined.' It 
 inevitably follows that by a process of reasoning and 
 feeling it is unnecessary to describe, women are 
 distrusted, and when practicable, guarded in a manner 
 suggestive of utter distrust, and which by all 
 European women would be regarded as alike 
 degrading and insulting. 
 
 Then the inveterate caste idea favours a low estimate 
 of women, and the various forms of repressive treat- 
 ment to which they are liable. Believing that each 
 of the four great castes were distinct creations, as 
 separate from one another and from non-Hindu races 
 as one race of animals is from another, and that inter- 
 course and intermixture partake both of sinful and 
 unnatural qualities, and that degradation of birth 
 comes from the taint acquired in a previous form of 
 existence — it is easily assumed that women are not 
 the equals of men, and may properly, therefore, be 
 treated as inferiors. 
 
 If distrust and sentiment, not far apart from con- 
 tempt, shapes man's policy toward them, so does 
 affection and a jealous concern for the integrity and
 
 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 171 
 
 well-being of the family and the caste of which he is 
 a member. Kindness and benevolence, indeed, in- 
 fluence him, strange as may seem to be the forms they 
 assume ; and if he were charged with cruelty or heart- 
 lessness in his treatment of the female members of his 
 family, he would indignantly repel the charge. How- 
 ever mistaken, he acts as their guardian and protector, 
 and assumes he best discharges his duty by treating 
 them as dependents, not equals, and allowing them the 
 exercise of as little power and liberty as possible. 
 
 Women need a powerful protector and friend, and 
 in India they have seldom had one. 1 Physically they 
 are weak, socially they are dependent, and intellectu- 
 ally they are less able to combine for common aims 
 than men. This is specially so in barbarous states of 
 society, such as heathenism almost always exhibits. 
 Unless, therefore, some strong power or principle of 
 right, mercy, love, soften the hearts of men toward 
 them, they will be thrust down and degraded, and 
 then distrusted. That is man's way all the world 
 over toward women — when left free and uncontrolled. 
 
 1 This has been a fact all through history, but it will not remain so, 
 and the change, wherever Christianity gains power, is evidence of its 
 essential superiority to every other religion. No other has ever given 
 to women the opportunity to become their better, nobler selves. The 
 love and justice it ever teaches, the strong and settled conditions of 
 society it establishes, the respect for women it ever cultivates in men, 
 and the freedom it gives to women, with the culture of mind, character, 
 and life which grow into such mingled strength, purity, and beauty 
 where it gains power, contrasts purely Christian society with every 
 form of heathen life. These will surely grow, and their richest de- 
 velopment will be seen in the higher status and blessed influence of 
 womankind all through the East.
 
 172 
 
 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 
 
 In religion should reside that benignant, restraining 
 power. But it has never existed in Hinduism. It 
 has always been on the side of the strong. It has 
 never protected the weak or protested against 
 oppression, or striven to lift up the fallen or protect 
 the unfortunate. It knows nothing of justice, charity, 
 pity. Its entire drift has been to brand and degrade 
 
 A HINDU TRAINING CLASS (SOUTH INDIA). 
 
 women, and to keep them degraded. What else has 
 it ever done for them ? and yet this is one of the 
 religions of the East we are invited to respect and 
 admire ! Christianity has done more in the past fifty 
 years to soften and brighten the lot of Hindu women 
 — to wipe away their tears, to break their fetters, to
 
 CAUSES OF WOMEN'S STATUS 173 
 
 give them their true place of right and charm — than 
 Hinduism has done in 3000 ! And herein is one of 
 the great glories of our sublime and divine faith ; it 
 holds back the strong from oppressing and wronging 
 the weak, and makes for women opportunities for the 
 exercise of their gifts and charms, which win for them 
 their true place by the side of men, and not behind or 
 below them. 
 
 Happily, this benignant power, which ever makes ' 
 for righteousness, is beginning to work, and already 
 there are signs of its power to cause even ' the 
 wilderness and solitary place to be glad, and the 
 desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose.' 
 
 It is usual for those who, in the present age, arc 
 sufficiently enlightened to desire social reform, to 
 ascribe the subordinate and secluded condition of 
 women to the influence of Mahomedanism. No 
 doubt it everywhere sanctions polygamy, crushes down 
 liberty, endangers the purity of domestic life, and 
 never gives women the respect and honour which 
 are their due. And in India, being no better than 
 elsewhere, it has given abundant cause for suspicion 
 and dread. But it did not introduce, though it 
 stimulated, the pernicious sentiments referred to. 
 After the dawn of Aryan history, in the Vedic age, it 
 is doubtful if women have ever had their true place 
 in society, whilst the evidence is conclusive that 
 some of the worst evils from which they have suffered 
 had a distinctly Hindu origin, and were in force lono- 
 anterior to the ages of Mahomedan domination.
 
 ( 175 ) 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE REMEDY. 
 
 The history of Hinduism is very suggestive and 
 disappointing. If it could be adequately written, it 
 would be a record of minds unusually acute, specula- 
 tive, and devout, attempting to interpret for their own 
 satisfaction and the guidance of the multitude, the 
 great features of nature and the deep mysteries under- 
 lying all systems of religion. And with results neither 
 adequate nor satisfying. Such a history would be 
 a most valuable contribution to our knowledge of 
 comparative religions, and an extraordinary record of 
 devoutness, intellectual subtlety, unfruitful speculation, 
 and progress downward. 
 
 The old idea that the immobility of the East 
 extended to the domain of speculative and practical 
 religion has been exploded. Hinduism has been 
 subject to modifying influences all through its history. 
 Philosophers, priests, rulers, reformers ; powerful in- 
 fluences from the aboriginal tribes it absorbed ; the 
 sects and parties which have arisen in its own bosom ;
 
 176 THE REMEDY 
 
 external influence from Mahomedanism, and internal 
 pressure from pundits on one side and the superstitious 
 multitude on the other, have all had a formative 
 influence in making it what now it is — the most 
 complex, varied, and stupendous system of abstract 
 speculation and practical superstition the world has 
 ever seen. 
 
 And it is a most impressive evidence of the absolute 
 need of a Divine revelation ; a convincing proof that 
 ' the world by wisdom knows not God ; ' that in the 
 course of centuries the attempts to reform it have 
 been so few and so ineffectual, whilst it has even 
 tended to become more polytheistic, gross, and 
 debased, like an animal in the quicksands, whose 
 struggles to be free increase its weakness and 
 danger. 
 
 It should be remembered, in justice to Hindus, 
 that this tendency to religious deterioration is not 
 confined to them. Wherever mankind are left 
 without the Divine light and moral force which come 
 from the Sacred Scriptures, a lack of power to find 
 out God, to rise toward the good, the pure, and the 
 true, and a greater tendency to drift downward, and 
 to allow evil rather than to combine for the purpose 
 of resisting and overthrowing it, is seen. Nowhere 
 are the evidences of this more abundant than in 
 India. It is, for instance, admitted, even by those 
 who take the most optimistic views of the present 
 status of Indian women, that their position in Vedic 
 times, in the heroic ages, and even for a long
 
 THE REMEDY 177 
 
 subsequent time, was far higher than in the centuries 
 nearer our own. And there is no evidence that any 
 serious attempt was made to guard the simpler and 
 purer usages of ancient times from changes that were 
 alike unjust and cruel. 
 
 During the long ages that some of these usages at 
 least have been prevalent, over populations greater 
 than those of European kingdoms, no great popular 
 movement, or protest even, from any class of in- 
 fluential leaders has been uttered against perpetual 
 widowhood, infanticide, child marriage, female 
 immolation, or any combined movement taken 
 place to elevate their status or improve the hard 
 conditions of their lot. 
 
 Happily now for Indian society generally, and for 
 women specially, ' the night is far spent, the day is at 
 hand.' The light of Christianity has begun to shine 
 even where the darkness was most dense. It is being 
 borne aloft and carried forward by a race gifted and 
 qualified for so great an enterprise, and the evidence 
 that they will be honoured to bring light and peace 
 and joy to Indian homes is seen in this — that the 
 light and love they bring are heaven-borne, and 
 therefore have a Divine force ; that the race who 
 bear them have evidently been called by the Divine 
 voice and guided by the Divine hand ; and that, to 
 the extent the remedy has been applied, it has been 
 most efficacious. 
 
 Christianity comes to all as a revelation from 
 God. It bears the evidences of its Divine origin in 
 
 M
 
 i7<S THE REMEDY 
 
 the righteousness, love, goodness, and sweet reason- 
 ableness of its spirit, principles, and precepts. The 
 evidence of this is seen in all the foreshadowings of 
 its gracious reign ; in the utterances of Jewish seers, 
 when surrounded by the injustice, oppression, cruelty, 
 and vice of heathen nations ; in the perfect character 
 and life of the Founder of our religion, the Flower 
 of our humanity ; in the truths taught and the spirit 
 expressed by Him and His inspired disciples ; in their 
 adaptation to all men and all ages ; and in the actual 
 power of this religion to combat and destroy all the 
 evils afflicting society, as far as it is truly applied. 
 It is sufficient evidence of this here to point out 
 that it abolished amphitheatrical games throughout 
 the Roman Empire, and slavery and serfdom 
 throughout Europe ; has everywhere raised and 
 purified the status of women ; whilst for the social evils 
 that vex Christian lands it cannot be held responsible, 
 since they exist in direct violation of its commands. 
 It may be added that the present institutions and 
 usages of Hindu feminine life could not possibly 
 continue if Christianity prevailed ; the former would 
 melt away as inevitably as snow in April. 
 
 Then, Christianity in India, as in every land to 
 which it is faithfully carried, comes to change ' the 
 wilderness into a garden,' ' to break every yoke,' ' to 
 proclaim liberty to the captive and the opening of the 
 prison to them that are bound.' 1 And it is prosecuting 
 its beneficent aims under circumstances singularly 
 
 1 Isa. lx,, lxi. ; Ps. lxxii.
 
 THE REMEDY 179 
 
 auspicious. Chiefly it has been brought, and certainly 
 prosecutes its peaceful aims, under the protection of 
 a race which, however defective otherwise, exhibits 
 the social and domestic virtues more attractively than 
 does any other. 
 
 This race seems to be guided to this and analogous 
 work by a power higher than their own, that is, to be 
 an agency designed by God, providentially to serve 
 His purposes by greatly benefiting another and yet 
 more numerous race. 
 
 1. That the English should be supreme in India is 
 one of the most marvellous events in history ; and 
 the course of events leading to this, justifies the con- 
 viction that God has led us to this unique position — 
 that in and beyond the aims of men and communities, 
 urged onward by the mixed motives common to 
 humanity, a Divine power has been drawing England 
 and India alike into unique relations. That a com- 
 pany of merchants and adventurers, without any 
 purpose other than making money by honest trading 
 and without a thought of imperial supremacy, should 
 have been led on unconsciously to lay the foundations 
 of an empire, then only reached by a three or four 
 months' voyage, containing one-fifth of the human 
 race, or more than twice the population of the Roman 
 Empire when at its zenith, is the most unique event 
 in the history of conquest and empire. England 
 never dreamt of such a splendid issue, but it has come, 
 we believe, by the leadings of Divine providence. 
 Through treaties and alliances with native states ;
 
 i So THE REMEDY 
 
 through conflict or competition with four European 
 nations ; through wars more frequently forced on us 
 or waged in self-defence than is usually supposed ; 
 and the responsibilities of our position, constraining 
 us to defend ourselves and the people who have come 
 under our rule ; — we have been led on to supreme 
 authority over this vast and varied empire. Surely 
 the hand of God has been in this ! As He led the 
 Israelites into Canaan, to witness for monotheism and 
 purity of life against the heathenism and immorality 
 of the surrounding nations, and in a subsequent age 
 dispersed them over the civilized world to witness for 
 Him and to prepare the nations for the Gospel message, 
 so now has He given to the most Protestant, free, 
 tolerant, and morally earnest of nations, dominion 
 over the most polytheistic and mentally and morally 
 enthralled of all the great races of mankind. It is 
 not presumption, but a true and devout interpretation 
 of events, which leads us to believe that God thus 
 designed to give to our race a supreme opportunity 
 to glorify Himself and to bless and elevate a vast 
 and ancient race. 
 
 2. Defective as the British race may be, it yet has 
 special, definite qualifications for the stupendous and 
 glorious work needing to be accomplished. 
 
 Into the details of this interesting question we can- 
 not enter, but confining our attention to the one great 
 question of the emancipation of women, it may 
 confidently be alleged that domestic life is purer in 
 Anglo-Saxon society, and women more justly and
 
 THE REMEDY 181 
 
 respectfully treated, and made more the equals and 
 companions of men, than anywhere else. Further, we 
 have offended less against the laws of purity in our 
 intercourse with darker races, and done far less to 
 awaken suspicion and arouse race hatred than any 
 other people ; than, for instance, the Portuguese, the 
 Spaniards, the French, or even the Dutch. 
 
 Not only has there been, especially for two genera- 
 tions, a marked avoidance of sins against family 
 integrity, all over British India — alas, that there should 
 be exceptions to this rule ! — but in most of our civil 
 stations, where the people have the means of observing 
 what manner of lives we lead, and are usually 
 sagacious in their observations, and in the few great 
 centres where now official Europeans reside, there are 
 seen practical illustrations of the purity, freedom, and 
 happiness of family life, which, though matters of 
 course to us, are narrowly observed by the people, 
 and impress them greatly. English women are 
 free ; they walk and ride abroad ; they sit at the 
 same table as men ; they mingle in public society ; 
 they are seen with unveiled faces, and they look 
 happy and unconstrained ; they read, they write, 
 they bear themselves with modesty and grace, and are 
 always treated with respect and courtesy. All this is 
 observed, talked about, wondered at, and contrasted 
 with native ways and all the traditions of the past. 
 
 But there is this difference between their observa- 
 tion of our ways and ours of theirs. They look at ours 
 passively, with much amazement, but with little effort
 
 1 82 THE REMEDY 
 
 to bring theirs into accord with ours, and with but a 
 sluggish wish, here and there, that theirs should be 
 abandoned for ours. Usage, rules, and example have 
 little force, being neutralized by the sentiment, which 
 whilst seeming to us expressive of indolence and 
 apathy is to them conclusive that nothing more is to 
 be said, 'Yes, that is their custom, and of course it is 
 proper for them ; but ours is different, and it would 
 be improper for us to do as they do.' Therefore the 
 weary yoke is borne meekly and patiently. We, on 
 the other hand, with our contempt for mere usage, 
 our eager wish for change and progress, our habit of 
 asking to know the reason why, our energy, our 
 moral indignation against any customs and usages 
 which seem to us unjust and cruel, especially if they 
 are so to the oppressed and weak, our reluctance to 
 stand passively by whilst others suffer, even if their 
 relations to ourselves are remote, our English race 
 qualities, sanctified and directed by the leaven of Chris- 
 tianity, are impelled and eager to seek by every fair, 
 wise, just method, the emancipation of Indian women 
 from all usages that to us seem wrong. We are as 
 the Stanley expedition, resolved to rescue and free 
 the Emin Pasha of Hindu womanhood, even in spite 
 of its own apathy and helplessness ; and, though slowly 
 and sluggishly, this immense stream of erroneous 
 thinking and feeling is giving signs of change. 
 
 And our history in India is in this direction not 
 only free from reproach, but most honourable. We 
 have abolished suttee. We have made it penal
 
 THE REMEDY 183 
 
 to bury parents alive, or to kill any one, under 
 the veil of religion, on the banks of sacred 
 rivers. We have caused to cease human sacrifices 
 in temples, and offerings of living boys and girls to 
 propitiate the earth goddess. We have brought to 
 an end the sacrifice of children in the Ganges, at 
 the great centres of pilgrimage at Allahabad, Gunga 
 Saugor, and elsewhere. We have prohibited infanti- 
 cide throughout our empire, and greatly diminished 
 it in the feudatory states. We have legalized the 
 marriage of widows. We have initiated and en- 
 couraged every movement for the elevation of 
 women. We have, in all these movements, been 
 considerate of the usages and even prejudices of 
 others. We have been respectful of native suscepti- 
 bilities, and have never rudely or haughtily dis- 
 regarded them. We have used argument and 
 persuasion rather than force. We have usually 
 carried the wisest and best, and therefore the most 
 influential portions of society with us by the sweet 
 reasonableness of our polity, its unselfishness, and 
 its appeal to the deeper, truer springs of native 
 humanity. Therefore, the vast and varied changes 
 that are passing over Indian society are attended with 
 so little friction, and win for the English race con- 
 fidence and respect rather than distrust and ill will. 1 
 
 1 All this justifies the following words, which go far to vindicate the 
 East India Company's government from unmerited depreciation. 
 ' At no period in the history of the Christian Church, not even in the 
 brilliant century of legislation, from Constantine's Edict of Toleration
 
 184 THE REMEDY 
 
 And now that the people have some knowledge 
 of the truths and principles of Christianity, and owe 
 allegiance to a race which, whatever its defects, loves 
 truth and justice, respects the rights of all men, 
 abhors cruelty and wrong, has sympathy with the 
 oppressed and weak, and gives to women a higher 
 and more rational place of respect and honour than 
 any other people, it is inevitable that the change 
 of opinion and sentiment relative to the status of 
 women, seen here and there, must extend and affect 
 all castes and classes. Various forces press in this 
 direction, and must finally triumph over ancient 
 customs and prejudices. Among these are the 
 monogamous customs and chivalrous sentiments of 
 Europeans ; the spread of enlightened opinion among 
 the people ; the readiness of the Government to 
 legislate when public opinion encourages and justifies 
 its action, and, above all, the Divine energy of 
 Christian missions. England takes the lead in this 
 most Christ-like of all enterprises, happily emulated 
 by that larger England across the sea. Few indeed 
 understand the grandeur and far-reaching benefi- 
 cence of the missionary idea, and many, through 
 lack of Divine insight and want of knowledge and 
 sympathy with spiritual and Divine aims, fail to 
 
 to the Theodotian Code, has Christianity been the means of abolishing 
 so many inhuman customs and crimes, as were suppressed in India by 
 the Company's Regulations and Acts in the first half of the nineteenth 
 century.' Is not all this the pledge and presage of inevitable progress 
 and glorious issues in all the relations of family life? — The Conveision 
 of India, p. IIO, by Dr. George Smith.
 
 THE REMEDY 185 
 
 appreciate its principles and results. They stand, 
 nevertheless, as the highest of all attempts to express 
 to all men the love and pity of God through the 
 Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ; and 
 of their aims and policy in India, this may be said 
 — in addition to their primary aim of preaching the 
 Gospel to every creature, they have done more than 
 any other agency, perhaps more than all others 
 united — to guard our countrymen from irreligious- 
 ness and moral deterioration, to draw them toward 
 Christ and true Christianity ; and to influence the 
 Government toward a beneficent and humane policy. 
 They have uniformly and courageously taught the 
 great principles of truth, justice, and righteousness ; 
 they have led the attack on every abuse and evil 
 which have so long afflicted society ; and the new 
 ideas about the status of women, which everywhere 
 are springing into life and vigour, owe more to them 
 than to any other source. 
 
 God has called the English race by imperial rule, 
 and His Church by the beneficent and holy power 
 of religion, to bring about one of the greatest — 
 perhaps, indeed, the greatest — social, moral, and re- 
 ligious changes ever wrought in a vast empire. 
 Would that we comprehended the grandeur of our 
 mission, and were suitably impressed with a con- 
 sciousness of our responsibility! 
 
 The relative influence of these, the methods and 
 policies it were wisest for them to pursue, in the prose- 
 cution of their stupendous and difficult task, demand
 
 1 86 THE REMEDY 
 
 an amount of attention they never receive, and that 
 cannot now be attempted to define. A part of this 
 great question, cognate to our subject, may, however, 
 here be suggested. For instance, on what lines and 
 in what directions should the elevation of Hindu 
 women proceed ? Is our Western ideal of social 
 and family life the true one for an Eastern race ? 
 Are there not deep differences of country and 
 nationality, which may render it advisable for change 
 to move in a direction of its own — somewhere, for 
 instance, between what it and ours now are ? the most 
 advisable age for marriage ? the degree of parental 
 control in marriage ? the most suitable education for 
 a Hindu woman ? — her place in the family, in the 
 councils of her husband, and the extent of her, free- 
 dom and intercourse with others, and the relative 
 merits of collective patriarchal family life as in India, 
 and our separative method ? — these are features 
 of importance, worthy of more consideration than 
 they receive. This only now need be said — It is 
 most important that all change of opinion, sentiment, 
 and practice should be gradual, and that native 
 opinion should precede, not only a change of usage, 
 but all legislative action.
 
 CHRISTIAN GIRLS' SCHOOL (CALCUTTA). 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 EFFORTS ALREADY MADE TO BENEFIT WOMEN. 
 
 The earliest mission schools were intended for both 
 sexes and all castes and classes ; but increased 
 knowledge and experience convinced the missionaries 
 that prejudice was far too strong for their good 
 intentions, and their schools were left almost entirely 
 to boys belonging to the inferior castes. When it 
 became known that, whilst education was greatly 
 valued for boys, there was a deep prejudice against it
 
 rep EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 for girls, and that this was but one feature of the 
 degradation and unhappy condition of their sex, the 
 desire became strong to instruct and elevate them in 
 some practicable way. The construction of society 
 and the prejudices everywhere dominant, alike among 
 rich and poor, high caste and low, made this most 
 difficult They could preach, but the women were 
 not present to listen. They conversed with men, but 
 few opportunities were allowed them to do so with 
 women. They published books and tracts, but not 
 one woman in 20,000 could read, even if a Christian 
 publication could have been placed in their hands. 
 It may seem strange that zenana visitation was not 
 thought of as a means of reaching the most secluded 
 and influential class of women, but a long leavening 
 process was necessary to make that practicable, and 
 far into this century even, where now it is cautiously 
 and suspiciously received, the force of custom, the 
 seclusiveness of zenana life, the distrust of the men, 
 the fear of the women, and the dread of intercourse 
 with Christians, prevented the idea from being even 
 entertained. 
 
 But Christian women were not indifferent, and 
 brooded sorrowfully over the sad state of their native 
 sisters. And they did what they could. They formed 
 schools wherever practicable, for Eurasian and native 
 Christian girls, and to these Hindus and Mahom- 
 edans were usually welcome. But, since they could 
 induce few to attend, they established boarding-schools 
 and orphan asylums, into which were received the few
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 191 
 
 children offered by their relatives, and now and then 
 the many who were left orphans and homeless by 
 terrible famines. 
 
 These, however, were neither satisfactory in them- 
 selves, nor did they reach any considerable part of the 
 community. The board of each child cost little, but 
 the general expenses of a school were considerable, 
 and the girls and boys thus brought up seldom 
 exhibited marked features of energy, strength of 
 character, and self-reliance. They were for the most 
 part exotics, not hardy plants ; nor did such schools 
 influence, either by their character or number, the vast 
 populations surrounding them. 
 
 Bazaar day schools, therefore, were formed in towns 
 where missionaries resided, and common schools for 
 girls in villages where their influence extended. In 
 some few instances even mixed schools were formed- 
 In 181 5, the Rev. M>. May, of the L.M.S., had about 
 29 schools under his charge around Chinsurah, in 
 Bengal, in which were 3500 scholars ; and since in one 
 of these there were 40 boys and 17 girls, it is fair to 
 conclude that some of both sexes were received into 
 some at least of the others. In 1820, the same society 
 had in Madras a circle of schools in which were 
 1 between 600 and 700 boys, beside females.' In the 
 year following, it is reported of a section of these 
 schools that 'the number of boys amounted to 126, 
 and that of girls to 68.' l 
 
 1 An attempt to advance beyond this by establishing a school for 
 l, r irls of a more respectable class met with no encouragement, for we
 
 192 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 The general character of the bazaar schools exhibits 
 the difficulties with which missionaries had to contend. 
 Parents could understand that education was a 
 privilege, and might be a gain to boys, but for girls 
 it seemed to be useless, if not pernicious. Female 
 education had evil associations, for were not harlots 
 more generally trained than any other women ? The 
 superstition was general that educated women made 
 disobedient wives, and that the husbands of girls who 
 could read were most liable to die. Education, it 
 was everywhere assumed, would cause girls to be 
 
 read in the report for 1822, ' There exists no immediate prospect of 
 establishing the projected female school, as the national prejudice 
 against the education of females continues to prevail in its full vigour.' 
 And a year or two later, referring to the same design, ' The repugnance 
 which is felt by the natives generally to female education imposes a 
 serious impediment to this branch of the mission.' 
 
 In Bombay Mrs. Wilson had to contend with similar difficulties, but 
 met with more success. She and Dr. Wilson reached India early in 
 1829, and before the end of the year both of them were conversant with 
 the Maraithi language. ' She visited native women, induced them to 
 send their daughters to a school she had organized, and before three 
 months had expired she had 53 scholars, and before she had been 
 double that time in Bombay, there were six schools with 120 scholars.' 
 She then founded a home for poor and destitute girls, into which 23 
 were received. 
 
 ' In about three years, 126 girls attended the mission classes, and 
 much good work was in progress, though hindrances were many and 
 wearying.' 
 
 This noble woman died, after a brief but remarkably useful life, in 
 1835. A sentence from one of her letters suggests where true honour 
 and happiness are seldom sought, but often found : ' Had I contem- 
 plated at a distance the number and variety of duties which now 
 devolve upon me, I should have been appalled at the prospect, 
 but, instead of lessening, they add greatly to my enjoyment.' The 
 results of her labours still live.
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 193 
 
 conceited and unmanageable. Since purdah ladies 
 were untaught, what presumption was it for the poor 
 and low caste to learn to read and write ! Nothing 
 but evil and danger could spring out of such an 
 unheard-of revolution ! Think of the trouble and 
 danger it would cause ! How could girls, however 
 low in caste and poor, go to school unwatched and 
 untended ! It would interfere with their meals, their 
 devotions, their freedom, and endanger their caste, if 
 not their lives ! Such were the difficulties suggested 
 by ignorant and superstitious parents, in whose wide 
 circle of relationship no reader probably could be 
 discovered for generations. 
 
 To meet these objections, many expedients were 
 adopted. A woman was sent round to conduct the 
 girls to school and home again, who was stimulated 
 to zeal by payment for as many as were brought. 
 Often the scholars were paid for attendance. Usually 
 food or sweetmeats were provided for them, and 
 periodically they received, even for meagre attendance, 
 gifts of money or presents of cloth. Each sum was 
 small, but the aggregate amount was considerable. 
 The results were far from encouraging. The attend- 
 ance was most irregular. It ceased altogether for 
 trivial or imaginary causes. A desire to learn was 
 seldom seen on the part of scholars or parents, but 
 greed and suspicion were ever on the alert to have 
 discipline and rule relaxed, or to obtain additional 
 gifts. Now and then the school would be entirely 
 deserted through some foolish or evil report. An 
 
 N
 
 194 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN- 
 
 attendance of twenty-five girls was regarded as 
 encouraging. They almost always came from the 
 lowest castes and classes, and left before they were 
 eleven years of age, to be married, or on some trivial 
 pretence or other. Thus, through their early age, 
 the superficiality of their knowledge, and the dense 
 ignorance of all their surroundings, they retained little 
 of what they had learned, which usually soon dis- 
 appeared as raindrops in the rushing river. 
 
 These schools, however, though few and small, were 
 educational in a wide and general sense. They were 
 in every instance the outcome of the zeal and love 
 of missionaries' wives and their friends. They drew 
 the attention of the high and low castes alike to 
 Christianity and its principles. They exhibited the 
 mindful, disinterested zeal of the missionaries for the 
 poor, the ignorant, and the despised. They conveyed 
 some knowledge of Christian truth and doctrine, and 
 the ability to read and write to a few in various towns 
 in many Indian provinces. They helped to familiarize 
 the people with missionary methods, and some aspects 
 of European life and policy, and they assisted to make 
 Christian people more conscious of the degradation 
 and dense ignorance of Hindu women, and the 
 peculiar difficulties to be encountered in reaching 
 them. 
 
 There was much searching of heart and a large 
 expenditure of love and pity as well as of much time 
 and money, on the part of individual missionaries and 
 their wives, before as well as after concerted and
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 195 
 
 combined action was taken to improve on these im- 
 perfect and even doubtful methods ; for be it observed 
 the missionaries — the only class who cared practically 
 for the education of women — were by no means 
 satisfied with what they were doing. They desired 
 to do more, to reach a much wider circle. But custom, 
 prejudice, and the strange immobility of native society 
 barred their way, as a vast wall of ice the southward 
 progress of the antarctic voyager. 
 
 A glance at the general state of education early 
 in this century may now be given. There had always 
 been a strong appreciation of education among the 
 people. Colleges for the training of Brahmins in 
 Sanscrit lore existed here and there, and were held 
 in high repute. But all over India primitive 
 elementary schools for boys were valued. 
 
 Early in the century the Indian Government saw 
 the importance of encouraging education, and in 
 a crude, tentative manner did so on a limited scale. 
 Colleges were established at Benares and Calcutta 
 in 1 78 1 and 1 791, on a purely vernacular basis, and 
 one of much importance on a broader basis in 
 Calcutta in 18 16. But an important step was taken 
 in 1823, when the Government resolved on the 
 formation of a ' General Committee of Public Instruc- 
 tion, for the purpose of ascertaining the state of 
 public education, for the introduction of useful know- 
 ledge, and for the encouragement of native literature.' 
 The Council was formed, but for twelve years the 
 policy to be adopted was the subject of warm and
 
 1 96 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 even bitter controversy. It was composed of able 
 men and enthusiastic educationalists like Lord 
 Macaulay and Sir Charles Trevelyan, but whether 
 the policy of the Government should be Oriental or 
 Anglican, with various side issues, was only settled 
 in 1835, when it was decided 'that the great object 
 of the British Government ought to be the promotion 
 of European literature and science among the natives 
 of India.' There was need indeed of education, for 
 a thorough official inquiry made in 1835 — the first of 
 the kind — led to a report that only two and a half 
 per cent, of the great province of Bengal could read 
 and write, and that the proportion for all India was 
 1 in 400. 
 
 A great advance was made in popular education 
 in 1844, when Mr. Thomason, Governor of the North- 
 West Provinces, adopted the policy of basing all 
 schemes of popular education on existing native 
 institutions. This, with modifications, was adopted 
 by the other provincial governments, and was finally 
 embodied in the celebrated educational despatch of 
 Lord Dalhousiein 1854. But in that year the Govern- 
 ment educational institutions contained only 12,000 
 pupils, though they rapidly increased to more than 
 180,000 in 1859. But none of these schools were for 
 girls, nor was it until after the middle of the century 
 that any recognition was made by the Government 
 of the importance of female education. Meanwhile, 
 the missionary party, with much earnestness, but 
 scanty resources, sustained their schools, urged the
 
 198 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 importance of female education, and initiated the first 
 combined movement in this direction. 
 
 To trace this we must return as far back as the 
 second decade of the century. The honour of 
 advancing beyond individual efforts in small separate 
 schools for united action, and to secure higher 
 efficiency in teachers and teaching, is claimed by 
 Dr. Duff for some young ladies associated with the 
 Baptist Missionary Society in Calcutta. 
 
 In April, 18 19, an address was issued setting forth 
 the actual condition of women in Bengal, and pro- 
 posing the formation of a school for the education 
 of Hindu women. This led to the formation of an 
 association under the title of the Calcutta Female 
 Juvenile Society \ for the Education of Native Females. 
 But for nearly twelve months, notwithstanding the 
 most strenuous exertions, the number of scholars did 
 not exceed eight. Still the promoters of the scheme 
 went on. At the end of two years the number 
 amounted to 32, and in three more years the schools 
 had increased to six, in which were 160 scholars. ' On 
 December 14, 1823, was held the anniversary of the 
 society. And that must ever prove a memorable 
 day in the history of feminine native education, as 
 it was the first time that the establishment of native 
 female schools of any description could be spoken 
 of as in the remotest degree practicable, without 
 opening the windows of incredulity and drawing down 
 showers of ridicule and contemptuous scorn.' x 
 
 1 Dr. Duff in the Indian Female Evangelist, vol. i. p. 59.
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 199 
 
 But though this was the first combined effort in 
 behalf of female education, it was symptomatic of a 
 deepening interest, and was overshadowed by another 
 society destined to accomplish great and unexpected 
 results. In September, 18 19, The Calcutta School 
 Society was founded under influential auspices, and 
 was intended to unite Europeans and natives in a 
 combined movement. Its leading design was ' to 
 assist and improve schools, organized and supported 
 by the natives themselves ; to establish new schools ; 
 to improve the general system of education ; and to 
 diffuse useful knowledge of every description among 
 the inhabitants of India, but especially within the 
 province of Bengal.' In the course of inquiry previous 
 to active operations, it was ascertained that in the 
 district around Calcutta, containing at least 750,000 
 people, there were only 4180 children in the native 
 schools, and that with scarcely an exception Hindu 
 girls were wholly uneducated. Further investigation 
 brought out the appalling truth that for the entire 
 mass of the female population there was no system of 
 education whatever, and that out of forty million 
 females then supposed to be in British India, probably 
 not 400, or one in 1 00,000, could read or write, and 
 of these the greater number had been educated by 
 the wives of missionaries. 1 
 
 1 The Indian Female Evangelist, vol. i. p. 16. The society received 
 considerable aid from missionaries. In the report of the L.M.S. for 
 1821, we read, 'It is well known that the Calcutta School Society is 
 vigorously employed in the establishment and support of schools. The 
 directors are happy to state that the operations of the society are
 
 2oo EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 The society had influential friends, and acted with 
 vigour. It applied to the British and Foreign School 
 Society ' to select and send from England a well- 
 qualified lady to institute schools for native girls.' 
 Even then, however, the first idea was not so much to 
 begin with schools, but to ' institute and superintend 
 a school for training native female teachers, who should 
 be selected from the daughters of our countrymen in 
 India already acquainted with the native languages, 
 in order that, after proper instruction, they might be 
 fixed as schoolmistresses in suitable stations.' The 
 first result of this movement was very remarkable, 
 though it was not what had been arranged for. The 
 British and Foreign School Society issued a circular, 
 setting forth the claims of Indian women, and asking 
 for aid that a suitable agent might be sent out. Miss 
 Cook fortunately was selected, and reached Calcutta 
 at the end of 1821. The issue proved that no more 
 suitable agent could have been found, for she won for 
 native female education an interest and enthusiasm of 
 the highest value ; and as a system and a recognized 
 department of missionary education of the highest 
 importance, it dates from that time. 
 
 likely to prove of the greatest importance, and have interested them- 
 selves very warmly in behalf of the native female population of that 
 country, with a view to extend to them the advantages of education.' 
 1 With a view to promote a design so closely connected with the 
 ultimate success of missionary operations in Hindustan, the directors 
 have committed to the disposal of Mr. Townley, one of its missionaries, 
 the sum of ^125, to be appropriated as he shall deem proper, toward 
 the encouragement of native female education in India.'
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 201 
 
 A significant difficulty had to be overcome at the 
 very commencement of her labours. To interest 
 natives in the work of the School Society, it was 
 stipulated that its managing- committee should 
 consist of two-thirds Europeans and their descendants, 
 and one-third natives of India. But it soon appeared 
 that the latter had no desire to engage in any general 
 plan for female education. 1 On this the Correspond- 
 ing Committee of the Church Missionary Society 
 undertook to promote the special purposes of Miss 
 Cook's mission. Thus her labours for many years 
 were conducted under the auspices of that society. 
 
 A touching incident, however, led Miss Cook to 
 establish her first girls' school much sooner than was 
 anticipated. Two months after her arrival, when 
 
 1 ' In the case of male education, the natives themselves have always 
 been ready to co-operate with us. Nay, they have eagerly seconded 
 our efforts, and their own indigenous institutions have furnished a 
 common standpoint for concerted action. The same men who would 
 have wasted their powers in elaborating ingenious word-puzzles in 
 Sanskrit verse or in trying to comprehend incomprehensible abstractions 
 of Sanskrit philosophy, have devoted themselves to the acquisition 
 of scientific truth through the medium of English. But in the case of 
 female education all the conditions have been reversed. No basis of 
 common action has been found, no ground has been cleared, no open 
 door has invited us to enter. Every avenue of approach has been 
 barred and barricaded. The natives have been more than content to 
 leave their women engulfed in the depths of profound ignorance. 
 They have opposed every attempt at raising or enlightening them as 
 an offence against religion and morality. Without doubt any scheme 
 of direct Government interference for the education of Indian women 
 would have threatened the people with vast social changes. It would 
 have contravened the sacred usages of the most obstinately conservative 
 nation in the world' {Modem India, p. 331. By Sir M.M. Williams).
 
 202 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 learning Bengali, she paid a visit to one of the School 
 Society's boys' schools, with no other thought than to 
 learn the true pronunciation of the language. The 
 presence of an English lady in that part of the native 
 town drew a crowd around the school-door, and in 
 the crowd was an eager, interesting little girl, evidently 
 well known to the head-teacher, though he drove her 
 away. Miss Cook observed the incident, and on 
 inquiry was told that for three months the child had 
 come daily, begging to be allowed to learn to read 
 with the boys. When called and questioned, she 
 expressed her eagerness to learn, and Miss Cook was 
 informed that many more were anxious to learn, and 
 that she could have twenty scholars next day. On 
 the following morning she went, accompanied by a 
 lady who spoke Bengali fluently. Thirteen girls came, 
 and with them several women drawn by curiosity, 
 and to them were the intentions of Miss Cook fully 
 explained, apparently to the great satisfaction of the 
 women. But when two days afterward she went, only 
 seven pupils appeared, and several women as spec- 
 tators, who asked suspiciously, ' What will be the use 
 of learning to our female children ? What advantage 
 will it be to them ? And what benefit \v'i\\ you derive 
 from it? We suppose this is a holy work in your 
 eyes, and will be pleasing to God. Our husbands now 
 look upon us as little better than brutes.' Within a 
 month, two other schools were established, contain- 
 ing altogether between fifty and sixty girls. The 
 success seemed so great that the Church Missionary
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 203 
 
 Society Committee issued a circular, asking for 
 additional aid, and the response from persons of 
 distinction, headed by the Governor-General, Lord 
 Hastings and his lady, was such that by the end of 
 the year 1823 the number of schools had increased 
 to twenty-two, and of scholars to between three and 
 four hundred. All this was accomplished in spite of 
 many hindrances. Most parents were indifferent, not 
 a few were hostile, and all were suspicious and appre- 
 hensive that some dark and selfish plot on the part 
 of the Government was being hatched ! Some parents 
 went daily to see that nothing wrong was going on. 
 They could not understand how any human 
 beings could be so disinterested as to labour and 
 spend money without any profitable return. ' Who 
 knows,' they said, ' but they will by-and-by take 
 away all the children?' One teacher was so impor- 
 tuned that he had to sign a written document, ' that 
 they should take and hang him if any such thing as 
 they dreaded should ever happen.' 
 
 The constitution and management of these schools 
 had some of the defects we have already indicated as 
 belonging to bazaar schools. It was difficult to obtain 
 suitable schoolrooms in suitable localities, and yet 
 more so to obtain teachers who were moderately com- 
 petent, or adequate to supervise their work or to 
 give any solid Christian instruction. To remedy as 
 far as practicable these defects, and to give the work 
 'a more prominent and imposing attitude,' a Ladies' 
 Society for Native Female Education in Calcutta and the
 
 A HINDU CHRISTIAN FAMILY,
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 205 
 
 Vicinity was formed, and at the fourth public 
 examination of the schools, at the close of 1828, the 
 number of schools was thirty, and the average daily 
 attendance four hundred. It was deemed advisable 
 to improve and consolidate the work by the erection 
 of a central school and dwelling-house for the 
 European lady-superintendent, as a convenient and 
 efficient centre for a training and model school, and 
 the more efficient supervision of schools in the city 
 and its suburbs. This was completed at consider- 
 able cost, and became for some years the centre of 
 Miss Cook's — now Mrs. Wilson's — labours, where 
 daily from two to three hundred girls were more 
 efficiently taught ; the former schools being gradually 
 improved or abandoned. 
 
 The influence of this movement was great. It 
 encouraged the formation of new schools, and 
 suggested improvements in those already existing ; 
 and in the course of a kw years every mission in 
 Calcutta, and not a few elsewhere in Bengal, had one 
 or more girls' schools. The good results indeed 
 extended to Southern India, and yet more to Bombay. 1 
 
 1 In the latter city, the wife of Dr. Wilson did much to awaken an 
 interest in girls' schools, where the small but influential Parsee 
 community adopted the idea with an enthusiasm nowhere else seen. 
 But the following resolutions passed by Brahmins in Bombay on 
 September 14, 1843, and intended to influence all castes and both 
 sexes, is illustrative of the deep-seated hostility with which a Christian 
 education was regarded generally by the sacerdotal class all over India 
 until recently : — 
 
 ' 1. No Brahmin shall ever attend the school of the Christian 
 missionaries to learn their religion or to hear their instruction, nor
 
 206 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 Such schools accomplished a large amount of good, 
 and for a long time seemed all that was practicable. 
 But they were comparatively few in number, greatly 
 restricted in influence, and did not attract any pupils 
 from the leading or secondary classes of Hindu 
 society. Even as far down as 1840, when Mrs. 
 Wilson was asked, 'What may be the number of 
 females in Bengal actually now under instruction ? ' 
 her reply was, ' I know only of about 500 girls.' 
 And of that relatively small number, one-half at least 
 were in her own schools. But preparations were 
 being made in many directions for an advance. 
 
 The societies already formed were active. The 
 Society for the Promotion of Education in the East 
 had been formed in London in 1834, an d gave 
 generous aid and sympathy to many mission stations. 
 This was followed, in 1838, by the Scottish Ladies' 
 Association for the Advancement of Female Education 
 in India, which subsequently, in 1843, the year of the 
 disruption of the Scotch Church, became two, both of 
 them having a distinguished history. Nor were the 
 Missionary Societies inactive, though they had no 
 separate organizations for female education. Even 
 natives now began to be interested in the question, 
 though it was much more in a theoretical than 
 practical manner. A few Hindus of rank, observant 
 
 shall they allow their children, or any under them, to attend their 
 schools. 
 
 ' 2. All Brahmins must follow the above rule, and whoever does not 
 follow it must be regarded an outcaste.'
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 207 
 
 of English society, and among the first to be power- 
 fully affected by an English education, saw some of 
 the evils afflicting native life, had some glimpses of 
 a possible remedy, but were, with the rarest excep- 
 tions, too weak t.o apply it, or were restrained by the 
 hostile prejudices and usages prevalent. Here and 
 there, however, was one who sympathized with the 
 new movement, privately himself instructed his wife, 
 or for a time engaged the services of a daily 
 governess, until feminine pertinacity or social opposi- 
 tion closed the door. But no school for respectable 
 or high caste girls existed anywhere, nor indeed ever 
 seems to have existed, though it is stated, that what 
 appears a school for girls is sculptured on the rock 
 caves of Ajunta. Neither for some years before and 
 after the writer's arrival in India, in 1848, was there 
 a single zenana in Calcutta open to any lady 
 missionary. But two ideas became clear to the 
 missionaries, and it was in their sphere of influence 
 only that, up to the middle of the century, any 
 practical steps were taken to educate Hindu women. 
 The first was that the education of the men must 
 precede the education of the women ; the other, that 
 women of the higher castes could not be reached by 
 schools, but by family or house to house instruction. 1 
 
 1 ' From the unnatural constitution of Hindu society, the education 
 of females in a national point of view cannot possibly precede, cannot 
 even be cotemporaneous with, the education of males ; a generation of 
 educated males, educated, that is, after the European model, must be 
 the precursor of a generation of educated females.' — Dr. Duff in 1837. 
 
 ' I do not think the respectable classes will at present suffer their
 
 2o8 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 But though these ideas were seething in some 
 minds, it was Dr. Thomas Smith who first gave 
 voice and form to the latter idea. In a powerful 
 article in the Calcutta Christian Observer for 1840, 
 on Hindu Female Education, he declared, ' If it be 
 impossible to get the daughters of the higher classes 
 to attend schools, then we must teach them without 
 requiring their attendance at school. If the men of 
 India will not permit their female relations to come 
 to us for instruction, we must send our teachers to 
 tliem! ' If a society such as the Scottish Ladies' 
 Association would send out several well-qualified 
 female teachers, who should offer gratuitous instruc- 
 tion to females in their own houses, they would very 
 soon have their hands full. And in a few years the 
 cause would by that means so gain respectability 
 that the middle and lower classes would, with tenfold 
 avidity, seek after instruction in schools.' ' As a 
 beginning, if three well-qualified female teachers 
 were sent out, they might undertake the instruc- 
 tion of eight or ten families, privately, and at the 
 
 females to attend any public school. Even if any solitary individual 
 may desire to do so, the tone of society which would pronounce his 
 conduct to be ungenteel, if not impious, is likely to deter him. . . . The 
 custom of secluding females must undoubtedly prove an obstacle to 
 public female education, inasmuch as no Hindu can suffer his wife or 
 grown-up daughter to be seen by any person without incurring the 
 displeasure of the fraternity, and entailing much odium on himself. . . . 
 I conceive there will be no difficulty in persuading many natives to 
 accept the blessings of education for their women when these shall be 
 offered within their own doors."' — Rev. Krishna Mohan Banerjea, in 
 the Calcutta Christian Observer {ox 1840, p. 127.
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 209 
 
 same time conduct, with native assistance, a public 
 school.' l 
 
 It will seem surprising to those unacquainted with 
 the state of Hindu society in the middle of the 
 century, but less so to those who are, that these 
 suggestions took no practical form for some time, 
 though the general question of female education 
 engaged the attention of many minds. But it was not 
 until the beginning of 1855 that zenana teaching 
 on any well-conceived and definite form began by 
 arrangements made by the Rev. J. and Mrs. Fordyce. 
 This delay is easily explained. It was caused by the 
 intense reluctance of Hindus, even when educated, 
 to set aside the seclusion of the zenana by the admis- 
 sion of Englishwomen, however educated and refined ; 
 and of Europeans, who were so wedded to the school 
 system, and so impressed with the difficulty of reaching 
 zenana ladies, that it was only after much delay and 
 abortive efforts in the school direction that a more 
 excellent way was adopted. But the leavening process 
 went on, now and then illustrated by some well-meant 
 but imperfect experiment. The superior English 
 education given daily in Calcutta to some thousands 
 of young men in Government and Missionary institu- 
 tions, almost all of them belonging to the upper 
 classes of society, was even before the middle of the 
 century producing a great change of sentiment on all 
 questions relating to feminine life and customs ; and 
 no questions were more debated in native newspapers 
 
 1 Calcutta Christian Observer for 1840, p. 125. 
 
 O
 
 2fo EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 and literary gatherings. This, however, led to little 
 beyond talk, until a most important but cautious 
 movement was made by the Honourable Drinkwater 
 Bethune, who in 1849 established a Native Female 
 School in Calcutta, for ladies of the highest rank, and 
 in the following year spent ,£6000 in providing for 
 it a suitable building — a larger sum probably than 
 had been spent from the beginning of the century on 
 all the buildings erected for female education in every 
 form through India. Mr. Bethune's high position as a 
 member of Government, his remarkable zeal and 
 liberality, and the precautions taken to disarm native 
 fear and prejudice, and to secure the active co-opera- 
 tion of native gentlemen of the highest influence, all 
 favoured his most benevolent and disinterested en- 
 deavours. But they had to contend with the most 
 deep-seated prejudices, and the silent though powerful 
 hostility of almost all the heads of families, and there- 
 fore met with no success adequate to the great cost. 
 The issues, nevertheless, were important, though they 
 were indirect rather than immediate. An imperfect 
 education, from which Christianity was carefully 
 excluded, was given to many young ladies belonging 
 to the most influential families in Calcutta ; attention 
 was drawn to the question of female education in all 
 its forms ; the sympathy of the leading European 
 Government classes with the general movement stood 
 revealed — a most important step — and something was 
 clone to break down intense prejudice and disarm 
 fear. But the school never accomplished the great
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 211 
 
 hopes of its founder and his friends, in spite of their 
 great social influence, and the pains taken, even to 
 the sacrifice of cherished principles, to conciliate 
 native prejudice. 
 
 The example, and probably also the defects of Mr. 
 Bethune's school led Dr. Duff to establish, in 1857,. a 
 school for high-caste girls. Notwithstanding his 
 intense convictions of what education would accom- 
 plish for the overthrow of Hinduism, he was slow to 
 realize that the time had come for an attempt at 
 least to give to the upper class of girls what with 
 such splendid energy he had given to boys. But the 
 interest taken in the Bethune school, with its limita- 
 tions and defects — its attempts to reach a class shut 
 in by brazen bolts and bars, and its obsequiousness to 
 some of the worst features of Hindu prejudice, and, 
 above all, its careful exclusion of all Christian teach- 
 ing, stirred his intense evangelical ardour, and he 
 founded a school which in theory combined the 
 praiseworthy aims of the former with a rigid exclusion 
 of its defects. It was a brave and noble attempt, and 
 it has done much good for many years ; but few 
 benevolent and religious attempts in India are what 
 in English estimation would be called brilliant 
 successes ; for Indian sentiment and usage change 
 most slowly and resist impression, as granite rocks 
 resist the air and dew and rain. 
 
 We now return from the record of personal efforts 
 such as those of Mr. Bethune and Dr. Duff — for the 
 latter was complementary to the former — to narrate
 
 2i2 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 in chronological order the various steps by which the 
 education of women has so far been made practicable. 
 
 A most important step in advance was the forma- 
 tion in 1 85 1 of the Normal School for the Training 
 of Christian Female Teachers. As schools increased 
 in number, the need of more trained and competent 
 teachers began to be severely felt. Missionaries' 
 wives and daughters did noble, disinterested service, 
 as indeed they had ever done. They engaged, 
 superintended, and not infrequently paid for, the 
 services of Eurasian and native women, who for the 
 most part had little zeal and less qualification for 
 the teacher's office. The only trained teachers were 
 the few sent by the Missionary Societies or the 
 Society for the Promotion of Female Education in 
 the East, which then stood almost alone, unobtrusively 
 doing a great work, which should be held in grateful 
 remembrance. There was urgent need, therefore, for 
 some influential organization to supply competent 
 teachers for schools and private visitation. The 
 Normal School was founded for the purpose, and its 
 history affords ample proof of its great efficiency 
 and success. Mrs. Wilson's Central School had for 
 some time made this a part of its aim, and in 1857 
 the two institutions were united under the title of 
 Normal, Central, and Branch Schools, and ever since 
 have rendered invaluable service to the cause of 
 female education. 
 
 A great demand had happily arisen for respectable 
 and well-trained teachers, through an event which
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 213 
 
 merits more than a passing notice, for it marks the 
 commencement of organized zenana instruction, one 
 of the most important and successful of the agencies 
 revolutionizing the position of the many tens of 
 million women in India. In January, 1853, the Rev. 
 John Fordyce arrived in Calcutta to superintend the 
 Free Church Female Institution, and intercourse with 
 Dr. Smith and his own sagacious observation soon 
 convinced him that zenana visitation was the true 
 way to reach the higher classes, and make female 
 education effective and popular. But the difficulties 
 were great and peculiar. Even when the idea of Mr. 
 Fordyce and Dr. Smith was considered by the Calcutta 
 Missionary Conference, nearly all the members, many 
 of them men of wide experience, accounted the idea 
 to be impracticable ; nevertheless Mr. Fordyce per- 
 severed, greatly aided by the wide influence among 
 native gentlemen of Dr. Smith. He lectured on ' The 
 Emancipation of Women in India ; ' wrote ' Fly-leaves 
 for Indian Homes ; ' visited native gentlemen, that he 
 might overcome their scruples, learn their objections, 
 and gain their support ; collected subscriptions, ad- 
 vanced the necessary funds, organized a small staff 
 of teachers ; obtained permission for them to visit 
 regularly some families, and the promise of payment 
 for instruction given. Mr. Fordyce writes, 'As Miss 
 Toogood and Rebecca, the native teacher, left the 
 house to begin these visitations, I said to Mrs. Fordyce, 
 "This is the beginning of a new era for India's 
 daughters." It had been a subject of much thought,
 
 214 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 consultation, and prayer, and we expected great 
 results, but the rapidity of the extension had gone 
 beyond our expectation. We had no opposition, 
 but few encouraged us, and many thought that we 
 were attempting impossibilities.' l 
 
 The enterprise so happily begun went on and 
 prospered. ' As the experiment was successful, friends 
 of the mission multiplied,' and in September, 1855, 
 when Mr. Fordyce read a paper on Female Education 
 before the Bengal Missionary Conference, in which 
 the results of his work for some months were recorded, 
 the following resolution was passed : ' They rejoice 
 in the hopeful commencement of the Zenana School 
 scheme, both as a sign of progress and a new means 
 for the elevation of women in India.' 
 
 We have here given the true history of the zenana 
 movement, since its origin has been ascribed to at least 
 four persons. A vague idea of some such method was 
 no doubt brooding in many minds. The native 
 gentlemen who thought on the subject knew that 
 family instruction alone would be feasible ; but they 
 were silent. In the few instances where instruction 
 was desired, it was obtained through the services of a 
 daily governess. A few English ladies, as Mrs. Tracey 
 in Benares, Miss Bird at Goruckpore and Calcutta, 
 Mrs. Sale in Eastern Bengal, Mrs. Mullens in Calcutta, 
 and probably others, were zealous for female education, 
 and had given instruction, each probably in two or 
 
 1 Women s Work in Heathen Lands: After many Days, by the 
 Rev. John Fordyce, late of Calcutta and Simla.
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 215 
 
 more zenanas prior to 1853. 1 From personal know- 
 ledge, the writer can state how zealously and efficiently 
 Mrs. Mullens did this from about 1850 to the time 
 of her death. But the honour of erecting zenana 
 teaching into a system, and of popularizing it by 
 public advocacy and efficient practical organization, 
 belongs to Mr. Fordyce and Dr. Thomas Smith, the 
 latter being the original advocate of the idea in 1840, 
 and the most zealous helper of Mr. Fordyce. 
 
 How female education has advanced in late years, 
 after its long struggle with opposing influences, may 
 be briefly stated for the glory of God, the honour 
 of Christian ladies, and a fine illustration of the 
 power of Christian beneficence to triumph over 
 difficulties and to confer blessings. 
 
 According to Dr. Duff, as far as the second decade 
 of the century, ' female education of any kind did 
 not exist in India at all. And not only so, but any 
 attempt to initiate it was resented as absolutely 
 impracticable.' There were a small number of in- 
 digenous schools, but from these, 'with scarcely any 
 exception, girls were wholly excluded.' In 1840, as 
 we have seen, Mrs. Wilson stated that she did not 
 know of more than 500 girls at school in all Bengal. 
 Even in 1855, the number of girls being taught was 
 not more than 1000 or 1200, in a population of 20 
 millions ; and in the presidencies of Madras and 
 Bombay, it being assumed that a somewhat larger 
 
 1 See Women's Work in Heathen Lands: After many Days, by the 
 Rev. John Fordyce. Published by Menzies & Co., Edinburgh.
 
 216 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 number were at school, ' there would only be 5000 
 or 6000 females under tuition in a total Indian 
 female population of from 80 to 100 millions, or one 
 girl out of about 15,000 females.' l 
 
 Until the middle of the century, female education 
 had been left entirely to missionary and private 
 effort ; but, in 1849, Lord Dalhousie, the greatest of 
 the Governor-Generals, excepting Warren Hastings, 
 ' on his own responsibility,' committed the Govern- 
 ment to what he termed the ' frank and cordial 
 support of native female education.' ' He gave 
 grants of public money to girls' schools, and bestowed 
 public honours on native gentlemen who established 
 such schools, and all that he was free to do, apart 
 from legal authority, he encouraged by his vast 
 influence and example.' But it was not until the 
 issue of the great educational despatch of 1854 that 
 the Government declared itself in favour of female 
 education, and even after for some years, languidly, 
 if not timidly, gave practical effect to its public 
 declaration. 
 
 The earliest and most detailed report of the pro- 
 gress of Christian female education was made by Dr. 
 Mullens in 1 85 1, and again in 1861 : — 
 
 
 1851. 
 
 1S61. 
 
 Day Schools 
 
 285 
 
 261 
 
 Pupils 
 
 8919 
 
 12,057 
 
 Boarding Schools ... 
 
 86 
 
 108 
 
 Pupils 
 
 2274 
 
 3912 
 
 1 Paper read before the General Conference of Bengal Missionaries in 
 December, 1855, by the Rev. J. Fordyce.
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 217 
 
 At the latter date, Government schools were 71, 
 with 2545 scholars. 
 
 From this time education in all its forms has 
 spread, but most markedly in zenanas, among the 
 upper classes of society, though the immense numbers 
 yet without any instruction seems to dwarf what 
 progress already is made. For instance, in 1870-71, 
 out of 26 million boys and girls who ought to have 
 been at school, only 1,100,000 received any education 
 worthy of the name, and of these only 50,000 were 
 girls ; 22,000 being in schools belonging to Govern- 
 ment. The rest were cared for chiefly by Christian 
 missionaries, with the aid of small grants. 1 
 
 The following table, from the Census Report of 
 1 891, gives a general summary of the educational 
 state of nine-tenths of India : — 
 
 
 Total. 
 
 Males. 
 
 Females. 
 
 Learning .. 
 
 3,195.220 
 
 2,997,558 
 
 197,662 
 
 Literate 
 
 12,097,530 
 
 ••• ",554,035 
 
 543,495 
 
 Illiterate 
 
 • 246,546,176 
 
 118,819,408 
 
 127,726,768 
 
 Total .. 
 
 . 261,838,926 
 
 ••■ 133,371,001 
 
 128,467,925 
 
 Here is abundant food for reflection. It is pleasant 
 to observe that the number of readers has now reached 
 twelve millions, but only one in 22 are girls ; whilst of 
 all females only six in every thousand are in any sense 
 literate. 
 
 It is to the honour of the Missionary Societies that 
 they have been, in every instance, the pioneers of 
 
 1 'Government Education in India,' by Dr. George Smith, in the 
 Female Evangelist for April, 1S72.
 
 Foreign and Eurasian Agents 
 
 1871. 
 370 
 
 Native Christian 
 
 837 • 
 
 Non-Christian ... 
 
 — 
 
 Day Schools 
 
 664 
 
 Scholars 
 
 24,07s 
 
 Orphans 
 
 2905 
 
 Zenanas 
 
 1300 
 
 218 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 
 
 female education and its most active workers in every 
 department ; and in no sphere of evangelistic effort 
 have they advanced more rapidly, as the following 
 
 tables will show : — 
 
 1871. 1890. 
 
 711 
 
 3278 
 
 3S3 
 
 1507 
 
 62,414 
 
 1784 
 
 40,513' 
 
 Satisfactory as these numbers are, they leave much 
 untold. For instance, non-Christian teachers were 
 employed before 1890, for often no others were to be 
 had. 
 
 The zenanas represent a much larger number cf 
 
 1 Statistical Tables of Protestant Missions in India for 1890. It 
 is important to call attention to the great need of elementary education 
 for the masses, since there is clanger that the interest in zenana missions 
 may cause them to be unduly neglected. The education of a zenana 
 lady is far more important than that of a ryot's child, for it may carry 
 with it far-reaching issues. But zenana ladies are the tens in the great 
 mass of the population, the others are the millions. If, happily, a 
 desire for education is spreading among the former, it is also spreading 
 among the latter as rapidly. Any given sum of money will educate 
 several times as many daughters of the people as zenana ladies. Wise 
 economy in the use of mission funds, so as to do the most good with 
 the least expenditure, is of prime importance. Common day schools, 
 open to all girls, in which simply reading and writing with the 
 elementary truths of religion are taught by native women — a circle of 
 such schools being in charge of a competent native woman, where such 
 can be found, all being under missionary supervision — are of much 
 importance. 
 
 Such are everywhere needed. They cost little, and they may be 
 made of great use as an evangelizing agency.
 
 EFFORTS TO BENEFIT WOMEN 219 
 
 persons than of houses. It is a low estimate to 
 suppose that two in each family are pupils, and that 
 double the number listen to what the visitor reads or 
 talks of. 
 
 The figures take note of education, but not of the 
 beneficent and evangelistic agencies, which cannot 
 adequately be tabulated. Zenana visitation is now 
 largely developed in these directions. 
 
 Bible-women are now largely employed, and find 
 free access to poor and low-caste houses. 
 
 So do ladies who more directly preach and teach 
 in village missions. Nor should we fail to take note 
 of the relief which now reaches the sick and suffering 
 through hospitals, dispensaries, and even house-to- 
 house visitation.
 
 SOME LITTLE PATIENTS. 
 {From an electro supplied by the Zenana Bible and Medical Mission.) 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THE VARIOUS FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY. 
 
 AGENCIES for the elevation of women have come 
 into use, as increased knowledge on the part of 
 Europeans and the removal of hindrances on the 
 part of natives made them practicable. That now 
 can be done which formerly was hardly possible, 
 and which, if attempted, was regarded as extravagant 
 and Utopian.
 
 2 2 2 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 
 
 All through the weary past, there were missionaries' 
 wives who had a wider and nobler ideal than they 
 could ever realize. If they did not dream of advancing 
 as far as now we venture, they certainly longed to 
 carry woman's training farther, and to lift it higher 
 than they actually found practicable. They were 
 held back by prejudices and usages intensely strong 
 and almost universally prevalent. Let no one despise 
 their day of small things, for they laboured nobly, 
 though it was cultivating a sterile soil in an ungenial 
 climate, for if they had not sown in tears, their sisters 
 would not now be reaping in joy. This needs to be 
 said in vindication of missionary consistency, and as 
 a proof of missionary persistence and triumph over 
 immense social obstacles. The early labourers did 
 the little they could do, but persistently pressed on 
 to do more. As soon as they had gained entrance 
 to one door they pressed on to another, desiring to 
 impart to all women the blessings of the gospel of 
 the grace of God, and to put it within their power to 
 obtain earthly as well as heavenly good. 
 
 Until far in the present century, lady missionaries 
 can hardly have been said to exist as a class. There 
 were literally no spheres open to them. The 
 missionaries' wives and daughters superintended the 
 few small day schools that struggled for existence 
 and the boarding-schools, with the assistance of native 
 Christian women. The first advance in these arose 
 from the formation of superior boarding-schools in 
 the Presidency cities, usually under the care of a
 
 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 223 
 
 well-qualified superintendent. These were in some 
 instances the spheres for training Eurasians and natives 
 for such schools as were then in existence. Gradually, 
 however, under the peaceful revolution 1 passing over 
 Indian society through vernacular schools for the lower 
 classes, English ones for the higher, the example of 
 Europeans, and the leavening power of native female 
 education, the former agencies have not only formed 
 immensely widening spheres, but new ones have 
 opened to an extent formerly undreamt of. 
 
 It is important to consider how these remedial 
 agencies have been extended and modified, and to 
 take some account of their relative value. 
 
 Bazaar schools have greatly multiplied. Eor a 
 long time the missionary laboured in this vast but un- 
 promising field alone, but since 1854 the Government 
 has established many common schools for girls, and 
 encouraged missionary societies and the people to 
 
 1 ' Of course, much is done by other than missionary agency. Any- 
 thing that tends to break up old beliefs, aids, in its degree, the reception 
 of a new creed. In this point of view, almost everything we do in 
 India is more or less missionary work. Not only railways and 
 printing-presses, education, commerce, and the electric telegraph, our 
 impartial codes, and uniform systems of administration ; but our 
 misfortunes and our mistakes, our wars, our famines, and our mutinies. 
 
 ' It is, in truth, a perception of this fact which blinds many observers 
 to the extent and character of the change which is taking place in 
 matters of belief; everything in India is in a state of revolution. 
 Happily for mankind, it is as yet peaceable, generally silent, and often 
 almost unnoticed ; but still it is revolution — more general, more com- 
 plete, and more rapid than that which is going on in Europe ' {Indian 
 Missions, by Sir Bartle Frere). This was written in 1874. The 
 intervening time has been one continued illustration of its truth.
 
 224 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 
 
 form such schools by liberal supplementary grants. 
 Landholders, village communities, and missionaries, 
 as well as the Government, now establish them. In 
 most no Christian instruction is given, and generally 
 parental apathy, irregular attendance, and the early 
 age at which the children leave, greatly interfere with 
 efficiency. On the other hand, native prejudices and 
 customs must be considered. Such schools may be 
 sustained at little cost. They encourage order, 
 discipline, and intelligence ; they impart the magic 
 gift of reading and writing ; they are unfriendly to 
 idolatry and all its sentiments and usages ; and in 
 mission schools the Christian knowledge given, though 
 small, is important, and often in after-life is a 
 preparation for higher progress — when the gospel is 
 heard or sorrow comes — revives and leads to God, and 
 widows in their loneliness have turned their early and 
 it may be long-neglected gift to good account as 
 teachers. One of the earliest and most helpful of 
 native women to Mrs. Mullens was of this class. 
 
 Here and there, in large cities, day schools of a 
 higher order for the middle classes of society have 
 been established ; but they are neither numerous nor 
 popular, nor can be until the sentiments rooted in 
 Hinduism are destroyed. The middle classes who 
 attend such schools in England are in India very 
 small, though under British rule they are rapidly 
 growing ; but the indifference of even these classes to 
 female education, their servile habit of imitating the 
 social usages of those above them, and therefore
 
 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 225 
 
 encouraging early marriage and female isolation ; the 
 lack of the power of imitation on the part of the 
 people, produced by centuries of almost unchallenged 
 caste domination ; and the small number of middle- 
 class Christians found in any one place, and their habit 
 of expecting things to be done for them which they 
 should do for themselves, — have all checked the 
 increase of such schools ; but their social as well as 
 economic and intellectual value should cause them 
 to be encouraged wherever practicable. 
 
 Boarding-schools have not greatly advanced in 
 number, but have been modified in character. 
 
 They now contain more native Christian girls, and 
 fewer orphan waifs and strays. Opinion as to their 
 value is divided. Whilst it is obvious that, as a duty 
 and an example, Christian girls should be educated, 
 it is objected that the education given often Euro- 
 peanizes girls, and is such as unfits them for the future 
 humble stations in life they are likely to occupy. 
 Such schools often foster on the part of girls and their 
 parents habits of the obsequiousness and dependence 
 on mission funds, and those thus brought up seldom 
 possess much energy or vigour of character. Such 
 schools, moreover, are more expensive than they 
 appear to be. Food and clothing cost little, but the 
 aggregate amount for years of training is considerable, 
 and the cost for agency is usually much more so. 
 
 Most native Christians are small farmers, living in 
 quiet villages, in primitive style, and on incomes of 
 astonishing minuteness ; the women working with no 
 
 P
 
 225 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 
 
 small skill and industry as well as the men. To take 
 girls too far away from such surroundings into houses, 
 and to food and habitudes very different from those 
 of the class out of which they come, and to which 
 most of them must return, is alike an error in policy 
 and finance. Great firmness is therefore necessary 
 to secure the good such schools may produce, and to 
 guard against the defects they are liable to suffer 
 from. 
 
 The remarkable increase of zenana visitation has 
 been pointed out, but its popularity has led to various 
 modifications, or improvements they may properly be 
 called. Formerly, zenana ladies were supplicants for 
 admission, and the few natives who were willing to 
 receive them, astutely knowing that they were con- 
 ferring a favour as well as receiving a benefit, stipulated 
 for a free education, or that school material and books 
 should be supplied without charge, or that the Bible 
 lesson should not be given, and caprice, or a ground- 
 less, absurd rumour would indispose the ladies to 
 receive the visitor for a day, or a week, or a month, or 
 decline all future intercourse, without any reason 
 alleged, or a false one given ! Now it is far other- 
 wise. Eagerness to learn and a wider acquaintance 
 with Christian ladies and their aims have won for 
 them affection, confidence, and respect. Their visits 
 are often eagerly expected, alike for the instruction 
 and pleasure they afford ; and many men who care 
 little for the education of women encourage these 
 visits, when they perceive that women through them
 
 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 227 
 
 become brighter and happier, by having their attention 
 drawn from trifling and sordid affairs to things that 
 are alike interesting and elevating. Zenana ladies, 
 therefore, are in a much better position than formerly. 
 They can secure greater freedom of speech, give such 
 instruction as they think best, secure attention to 
 rules, usually make their visits bear a distinctly 
 ' Christian character, and secure payment for their 
 services — a condition to be steadily kept in view, for 
 mission work should ever, as a policy, move toward 
 self-support ; and woman's work, whilst apt to grow 
 in expenditure, is also apt to fail most in this 
 direction. 
 
 It is unnecessary to refer to the various forms 
 zenana instruction takes, for whilst education may 
 be given to the young, conversation may be more 
 interesting to others, and convey to them a great deal 
 of useful information relative to the great world which 
 lies outside their own most restricted sphere. It may 
 with advantage take the form of day schools, Sunday 
 schools, Bible readings, drawing-room meetings, work- 
 ing parties, social gatherings, gospel addresses, and 
 is most efficient when it takes these various forms. 
 Thus, the zenana visitor, be she an Englishwoman 
 or a native, may give instruction in half a dozen 
 houses in the course of a day, and have in each 
 several pupils, the various members of a multitudinous 
 family, who, though differing greatly in age, may be 
 of equal grade as learners. 
 
 The constantly increasing efficiency of zenana
 
 228 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 
 
 agency as a means of reaching the higher classes, 
 especially in towns, probably suggested that Bible 
 women would be a suitable agency for reaching the 
 far more numerous classes of the poor and low caste. 
 They themselves are usually Christian women of low 
 caste origin, with some knowledge of the Bible and of 
 Christian truth, and an adequateamount of intelligence, 
 zeal, and tact. Their primary duty is to visit the 
 houses or small groups of houses into which towns 
 and even villages are usually divided, to sell portions 
 of Scripture, read or narrate Bible incidents, explain 
 to the women the main features of the gospel, sing 
 hymns, and give instructive and interesting informa- 
 tion. To native women, ignorant, inquisitive, solitary, 
 imaginative, despised, and with abundant leisure, such 
 visits are most welcome, and afford fine opportunities 
 for telling of heavenly things. 
 
 These feminine colporteurs are usually employed 
 in the cities or villages adjoining ; but recently an 
 analogous, but more systematic method of evangeli- 
 zation has been tried in a few instances. 
 
 Two or more ladies with native assistants live in a 
 convenient village centre, and do what they can to 
 evangelize all places within their reach, by conversa- 
 tion, teaching, familiar gospel addresses, and living 
 out the Christian life by acts of unselfishness and 
 benevolence. Villages, not towns, are the great 
 feature of Indian social life, 1 and there are literally 
 
 1 At the last census, retains were received from 717,549 places, but 
 only 2085 of these ranked as towns, all the remainder being villages,
 
 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 229 
 
 tens of thousands of villages into which the gospel 
 has never been taken. Such missions are admirably 
 fitted to reach a large class hitherto untouched by 
 any Christian agency. But they require special 
 qualifications. Happily, English women are free to 
 travel all over India without fear of violence, though 
 not of fraud. They may go safely for hundreds of 
 miles by private conveyance without meeting a 
 European. They may live with none but native 
 servants near them, and meet with the utmost 
 courtesy, though it must be added that they will be 
 cheated in every business transaction, and all portable 
 property silently disappear, unless they are watchful 
 and know the ways of the people, but they themselves 
 will be treated with the utmost respect and even 
 politeness ! Cheating and overcharging Europeans 
 are in the eyes even of native servants looked on as 
 quite permissible, and they assume an air of wounded 
 innocence if called what they really are, but violence 
 and insult from them are almost unknown. 
 
 For women thus occupied, native women as servants 
 and assistants are necessary. So are courage, good 
 health, tact, a knowledge of the language and of 
 native customs, and much zeal and self-denial, other- 
 wise such work becomes expensive and degenerates 
 into routine. But given these, and it becomes angelic. 
 
 the urban population being 9/48 per cent., the rural 90"52. In 
 England 53 per cent, of the population reside in 182 towns of 20,000 
 and upward. In India there are 227 such towns, yet only 4-84 per 
 cent, of the population reside in them.
 
 230 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 
 
 The lady missionary may gain access where no other 
 European can enter. She is the bearer of a Divine 
 and most gracious message to those who need it 
 sorely. She is welcomed as a woman by women, but 
 invested with strange power and charm, for she is 
 of foreign race, from a land of mysteries and marvels, 
 can read and write, and is free. She can fulfil her 
 beneficent mission by instruction, by conversation, by 
 inquiry, by words of consolation and hope, or by 
 ministering to the diseased and ill. 
 
 If she is interested in the strange mysteries of 
 native character and customs, she has the best of all 
 opportunities for such studies, and may have the 
 feminine, innocent pleasure of knowing that probably 
 she was the first European lady who spoke to 
 her dark sisters, and that her visit and her words 
 will be a subject of wonder and conversation for 
 many days. Not only in the village where she lives, 
 but in all others within reasonable distance, she may 
 gain more free access to all the people than any other 
 European, and a sweeter and holier influence. Miss 
 Tucker — A.L.O.E. of Batala — was a fine instance of 
 what may be done in this direction. 
 
 Medical Missions have in recent years much 
 increased in number and efficiency. Much was done 
 formerly in an unprofessional way by missionaries, to 
 relieve the sick. Then followed some slight training 
 for zenana and other teachers, and finally the desig- 
 nation of specially trained lady doctors to mission 
 stations, in charge of hospitals, or for itineration
 
 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 231 
 
 through country districts where their services were 
 most needed. 
 
 The application of medical and surgical skill as an 
 evangelizing agency must necessarily be restricted, but 
 is of great value. Credible report affirms that Hindu 
 women suffer much from general ill health and some 
 forms of disease, whilst native treatment is pretentious 
 and empirical. A skilled lady doctor is therefore the 
 most welcome of visitors alike to the purdah lady who 
 dreads to leave the seclusion of the zenana, and the 
 low-caste woman whose poverty, timidity, or illness is 
 a formidable obstacle to her going far for the advice 
 she so greatly needs. 
 
 The number of lady missionaries sent out who 
 have some surgical training is now considerable, and 
 in India such training is in a few instances given to 
 native women. 
 
 But the most important of all such agencies, alike 
 in skilful and various training and extent of operation 
 is the Countess of Dufferin's Fund. As the expres- 
 sion of British philanthropy, initiated and carried to 
 a splendid issue by the most illustrious lady in India, 
 with the generous aid of native princes of the highest 
 rank, it has been an object-lesson of the highest 
 value in humanity, benevolence, and mindfulness 
 of women, to the whole empire, whilst as a means 
 of relief from all forms of suffering and disease to 
 which women are liable its value cannot be described- 
 Happily, it is placed on a firm and permanent basis, 
 though needing, and worthy of, yet larger funds, so
 
 232 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 
 
 that it will in future years, as now, 'be like a well- 
 watered garden, and like a spring of water whose 
 waters fail not.' 
 
 The direct and indirect success of female missionary 
 agency has led to some useful, though subordinate, 
 forms of it, such as homes for native inquirers and 
 converts, and schools and homes of industry. 
 
 All converts, but especially women, are in most 
 difficult positions, and so often are missionaries. A 
 text of Scripture, a word spoken, an incident, a 
 report brought into a zenana by a school-boy of what 
 he hears at school, the visit of a Bible woman or 
 zenana lady, may awaken in a woman a yearning wish 
 to know more of God and of Jesus Christ whom He 
 hath sent. But how can she learn more ? She cannot 
 read or write. She cannot go to any Christian for 
 instruction, or invite any one to come to her. To do 
 this would awaken sleepless bigotry and watchfulness 
 to thwart her purpose, if she be a true woman. Or 
 a bad woman, for revenge, or through a family feud, 
 or to escape intolerable ill-treatment, or some mistaken 
 ideas of Christian liberty, may desire to profess the 
 Christian faith, and throw herself on the protection 
 of the mission. Her story may be plausible, but it 
 would be equally unwise to reject her at once or 
 baptize her. 
 
 It is advisable to shelter and protect such without 
 compromising either the woman or the missionary. 
 A house is therefore provided for such, where for a 
 few days or weeks their case may be inquired into,
 
 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 233 
 
 their purposes determined, and they be taught the 
 essential truths of the Gospel before baptism. 
 
 Then often comes the difficulty of providing for 
 such converts. Their own families usually cast them 
 off utterly. They are, it must be admitted, very 
 helpless and unfitted to fight the battle of life, and for 
 them to be supported by the mission is neither good 
 nor wise. And spheres of employment for such, and 
 indeed, for all women, are exceedingly limited. Hence 
 the importance of training them, if sufficiently gifted, 
 to be teachers ; if not, for some employment taught 
 in industrial schools. 
 
 The systematic training of lady missionaries for 
 foreign service now engages much attention, yet not 
 as much as its importance demands. The medical 
 training of a few is complete, and in this direction the 
 Countess of Dufferin's Fund is of the highest value. 
 
 For purposes of educational training, great progress 
 has been made among native Christian and Eurasian 
 women. Thus should it be. They are there ; they 
 know the language ; they are familiar with the habits 
 of the people ; and as Christianity extends it is 
 inevitable that its propagation and every form of 
 ministry should pass more and more into their hands. 
 
 The number of societies and associations now 
 working for women, and their various auxiliary forms 
 of agency, need not be minutely described. In addi- 
 tion to some independent societies, such as the Zenana, 
 Bible, and Medical Mission, and Indian Female 
 Normal School and Instruction Society, founded in
 
 234 FORMS OF FEMALE AGENCY 
 
 1852, but since considerably extended in its range of 
 operations, most of the leading missionary societies 
 have now associations or auxiliaries specially for 
 Indian women. So it is with the great American 
 societies labouring in India, and to a less degree with 
 the German and other Continental societies. School 
 teaching, zenana visitation and instruction, medical 
 work, village evangelization, are the principal direc- 
 tions in which they act. What is now required is not 
 so much new methods of work, as a wise, economical, 
 earnest prosecution of those in use, and an extension 
 of them, for the agents bear but a most inadequate 
 proportion to the spheres already open. And these 
 spheres must widen and extend.
 
 ( 237 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS. 
 
 The deep-rooted and crushing nature of the evils 
 identified with the lot of women throughout India 
 should afford a sufficient motive for exertion on their 
 behalf. For these evils affect not a class, but more 
 or less all women. They press on them from the 
 cradle to the grave ; they affect not only the practical 
 life in all its details of tens of millions, but the lot 
 of all ; and some of the usages affecting their state 
 produce an aggregate amount of suffering it is 
 appalling to imagine. For instance, slavery is 
 more brutalizing than perpetual widowhood with its 
 associated customs, but the aggregate amount of 
 suffering and sorrow arising out of slavery in the 
 British Colonies or the United States did not, I 
 believe, equal that arising out of the latter custom 
 among the Hindus. A lack of information as to 
 the actual facts, or a want of imagination, or an 
 unwillingness to look the facts in the face, lest 
 our selfish quietness should be disturbed, hinders
 
 238 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 us from realizing the vast amount of physical 
 and mental suffering such a custom has produced, 
 year after year for centuries, on these patient, 
 unoffending millions ; but if in any measure it were 
 realized, it would move us to pity and indignation, 
 as no revelation of wrong and suffering has ever done. 
 
 And there are certain features of our enterprise 
 for the good of Hindu women that are most en- 
 couraging. Some, as freedom for all forms of 
 beneficent labour, have already been alluded to. It 
 is a remarkable feature of our rule that the Christian 
 evangelist is free to go anywhere, to declare all 
 Christian truth, and to use every form of agency 
 for the overthrow of evil customs. This, it may 
 be said, is but what we should expect from British 
 supremacy, but it should be remembered that nothing 
 like the same freedom of opinion and practice for 
 missionaries and their converts has ever been tolerated 
 in India before, or in any country not Christian and 
 Protestant. 
 
 And the latent intolerance, not of Mahomedans 
 only, but of Hindus, is seen in almost every instance 
 in which a Hindu of high caste, or a Mahomedan, 
 has the courage of his convictions, and becomes a 
 Christian. 
 
 Our opportunities for free and continuous effort 
 are unique, and should be used with corresponding 
 eagerness. God has set before us a wide and 
 open door, and great is our responsibility if we enter 
 not in.
 
 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 239 
 
 And there are encouragements to labour of a 
 different kind. 
 
 The better instincts of Hindu human nature are 
 on our side. The people are by no means blind to 
 the evils inherent in their own religious and social 
 system. Their great intellectual insight, their strong 
 affections and humane instincts, cause them to 
 respond to our ideas of right, justice, and humanity. 
 Therefore it has been easy for us — far more easy than 
 was anticipated — to suppress infanticide, suttee, and 
 the cruelty and obscenity often associated with 
 religious festivals. And so, when child marriage is 
 condemned, the age of consent raised, widow mar- 
 riage approved, the higher status of women, with 
 more freedom and courteous treatment, advocated, 
 it finds a ready response in the minds of great 
 numbers. 
 
 And opinion in favour of these reforms gathers 
 strength with advancing years. Prudence, indeed, 
 is required as well as wisdom, in the government of 
 a people so suspicious and sensitive ; but ours has 
 always had a large share of both, and therefore it 
 is that no Government enactment on social questions 
 has ever provoked formidable opposition or general 
 discontent. 
 
 Happily, our teaching on the subjects in question 
 is sustained by our example, in two ways. 
 
 1. Family life in official circles was never so pure 
 as it is now. 
 
 2. There are now schools with scholars scattered
 
 2_p INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 over India. In a considerable number of these a 
 good English education, based on Christian principles, 
 is given, and in all of them, though no lessons on 
 woman's rights are directly taught, the general drift 
 of instruction and sentiment is in favour of change. 
 The simple fact that Government and missionaries 
 alike encourage the establishment of girls' schools 
 does this. In all these schools it is inevitable that 
 the burning questions relating to the difference 
 between Christian and Hindu customs regarding 
 the treatment of women should be raised, if not in 
 the schools, as an inevitable result of the instruction 
 there given. Next, indeed, to the great questions 
 of religion, these are the most considered; and whilst 
 it must be admitted that few Hindus fully recognize 
 the evils of their own system, and are prepared to 
 adopt anything like the English standard for the 
 status of women, there are hardly any who do not 
 admit the existence of great abuses and evils, and 
 advocate an advance at least in the English direction. 
 Greater freedom for women and a nearer approach 
 to equality with men, re-marriage, the evils of child 
 marriage, the advantages of female education and 
 kindred questions are all topics of general interest, 
 and all public and general opinion on the part of the 
 educated is far in advance of what it was a few years 
 ago. 
 
 And example encourages this advance. European 
 family life is rarer in India than is supposed; for, apart 
 from the far too great number of British soldiers, there
 
 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 241 
 
 are not 50,000 Europeans scattered over the empire. 
 But among these, and especially where missionaries 
 are stationed, the freedom, beauty, and pleasantness of 
 domestic life are usually seen. It is not obtrusive, for 
 the English are a race given to reserve, but natives 
 are observant, especially of usages different to their 
 own, and servants are numerous. It is observed, and 
 quietly talked of, that an English woman is free to 
 enter into every part of a house, to leave it, to ride, 
 or walk, or visit at pleasure ; that she freely receives 
 guests of both sexes, sits at the same table as her 
 husband ; speaks and acts with freedom, and as the 
 equal of men ; reads and writes, seems happy, and is 
 ever treated with respect and courtesy. That which 
 to us is a matter of course is to them an object-lesson 
 of deep significance ; and though inclined usually to 
 assume that the opinions and usages of other races do 
 not concern them, except as curious pieces of informa- 
 tion, yet the practical nature of all questions relating 
 to the status and treatment of women became so to 
 them, since the evils inherent in native society are 
 obvious to all the educated, and to women especially. 
 A new and happier world is opened when they 
 read and hear of Christian principles and English 
 usages. 
 
 It is a stimulus and incentive to all who aid in 
 female missions that, in spite of manifold difficulties 
 and intense prejudices, the work has so far advanced, 
 is now so popular and is in all its details progressive. 
 There have been, as we have shown, extraordinary 
 
 Q
 
 242 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 difficulties, and, as we shall show, there are details in 
 its prosecution that wear and worry all zealous and 
 active minds. But the greatest obstacles and the 
 most inveterate have been overcome. Government 
 has declared in favour of female education,, and has 
 established and encouraged the formation of thousands 
 of schools. Women are the equals of men in the eyes 
 of the law, and education not only does not injure 
 them or trouble family life, but it elevates the latter, 
 and brings to the former a new source of interest and 
 of happiness. 
 
 To us these are matters of course, so obviously just 
 and humane that some may deem it superfluous to 
 name them, but each in native estimation marks a 
 vast change, a great social revolution ; and now, after 
 centuries of systematic and heartless repression, during 
 which no effort for their relief in any one direction 
 was made, and half a century of patient labour, we 
 see the beginning of one of the greatest social changes 
 in public sentiment the world has ever witnessed. 
 Every European who can contrast the India of the 
 first half of the century with the India of to-day 
 must be astonished at the progress made. The 
 people themselves marvel at the change, though 
 they do not fully understand or appreciate its bene- 
 ficence ; and of all the indirect blessings missions 
 have conferred on heathen races — of which the world 
 takes small account — this is the greatest. We see 
 yet but the day of small things, for the men of 
 advanced views and the women taught and free,
 
 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 243 
 
 are a mere fraction of the population ; but advance 
 is now inevitable. 
 
 It is a remarkable feature of Puranic or popular 
 Hinduism that any intelligent person who once begins 
 to doubt its character and claims, can never find rest 
 and content in what he formerly accepted. He may 
 apparently remain the same, but intellectually he must 
 be a different person. Hinduism has no foundation 
 in reason or science or history. It cannot possibly 
 satisfy the inquiries and wants of an intelligent 
 seeking soul. This is mainly because it contradicts 
 the plain facts of physical science. In like manner, 
 but for a different reason, the customs affecting the 
 status of women cannot remain as they were. Intense 
 conservatism may lead the old and ignorant to 
 cling to the past, but all who become in any sense 
 educated or observant see the injustice and impolicy 
 of the old usages, and in their timidity may advocate 
 slow or partial reforms. They may plead for the 
 subordination of women to men, and for limitations on 
 their freedom, but that they should be taught to read 
 and write and have more freedom, and be treated with 
 more deference and respect are opinions now held 
 by all who claim to be educated and intelligent. It 
 is indeed astonishing how opinion on all such 
 questions has advanced in half a century, and with 
 accelerated speed and force. This is explained by a 
 feature of the Hindu character, their extreme 
 conservatism and timidity causing them to dread 
 and dislike chancre.
 
 244 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 On all practical questions a long leavening process 
 must precede any open and avowed change. It is 
 very rare for any one to act on his own personal con- 
 victions ; each one waits for his neighbour. They 
 hold back from taking the hazardous leap, as a flock 
 of sheep, until one bolder or rasher than the rest 
 rushes forward, and then all follow. It is therefore 
 a remarkable feature of native society that after long 
 delay, and almost sullen, passive resistance, one evil 
 after another has given way, never more to be defended 
 or practised. And on other questions opinion is year 
 by year becoming more general and advanced. It is 
 a signal proof of social progress and of Christian 
 triumph over difficulties that some of us can look 
 back to the time when it was difficult to find spheres 
 for lady missionaries, however zealous and gifted, 
 and now it is difficult to find in sufficient numbers 
 women well qualified for the varied spheres open 
 for them. 
 
 Work among the women of India appeals most 
 strongly and tenderly to the love, compassion, and 
 zeal of all Christian women. There is nowhere in all 
 the world so prodigious a number of human beings 
 so enthralled, so suffering, and so helpless. And year 
 by year their prison doors are being opened, and they 
 made more accessible to every form of beneficent 
 endeavour. This should animate our Christian zeal, 
 and all the resources and agencies required for a work 
 so stupendous, varied, and hopeful should be readily 
 supplied. But we should work wisely as well as
 
 246 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 zealously ; the quality and qualifications even much 
 more than the number of our missionaries need to be 
 considered. No woman should enter the missionary 
 sphere who is not prepared to endure hardness as a 
 good soldier of Jesus Christ. The timid, the indolent, 
 the selfish, the unsympathetic, had best refrain from 
 a service which may give them employment, but in 
 which they will find little gladness, and gain no great 
 success ; for the Indian climate is most exhausting, 
 much of the work is monotonous, and not a few 
 women visited and taught are hopelessly dull, super- 
 stitious, indolent, and degraded. But there is another 
 side which appeals strongly to all of true missionary 
 spirit. The work is now so varied that Christian 
 women may find in it an ample sphere, if the requisite 
 skill, tact, judgment, sympathy, and zeal are possessed. 
 For some, such work has intense fascination, and for 
 others a divine joy. Surely it is such service as angels 
 would delight in. Even for the study of human 
 nature and the manners and customs of a remarkable 
 people, some forms of women's work offer unusual 
 opportunities. 
 
 And the low estate of women in all the aspects of 
 life offers a great stimulus to exertion on their behalf, 
 because whatever is done is greatly needed to be done, 
 and tells distinctly toward their relief and elevation. 
 English women, though ignorant and unhappy, yet 
 know so much, and have so many sources of comfort 
 that, except in extreme cases, it is difficult, and only 
 by a slow process, that their knowledge can be
 
 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 247 
 
 increased or their character elevated. On the other 
 hand, every lesson taught to Hindu women is a 
 distinct advance in their education ; every visit is an 
 event looked forward to with interest, remembered 
 with pleasure ; and every lesson taught conveys new 
 and important information affecting this life, or may 
 be a revelation of hope and salvation for the life 
 to come. 
 
 There is a feature of this Indian work most 
 interesting and encouraging that the writer has 
 never seen noticed. It is this. Not only does the 
 position of Indian women give them an attractive 
 conception of all the qualities in Christ and Chris- 
 tianity which make for their relief and elevation, 
 but Hindu human nature is profoundly religious and 
 responsive to the genius and spirit of the Gospel. 
 
 Human nature is everywhere depraved, but, however 
 varied, none are beyond the divine, renovating power 
 of Christian truth when applied to the heart and life 
 by the Spirit of God. It is the ' power of God unto 
 salvation ' for all. But as there are degrees of 
 intellectual power, of moral integrity, of refinement 
 and devoutness among persons, so are there among 
 races. No race is more naturally devout and refined, 
 a refinement that is sympathetic with the character- 
 istics of patience, gentleness, and submission, than 
 the Hindus. No people pray more, worship more, 
 talk more of religion. They have a sympathy with 
 religion in its general features, and a susceptibility 
 for devotion that is very impressive.
 
 248 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 I cannot but think that in India there is more of 
 the good ground, and less of the stony, into which 
 the good seed of the kingdom may fall than in other 
 lands — in our own, for instance — and that when 
 superstition is weakened, and the Gospel more 
 generally preached and better understood, it will be 
 more generally welcomed than elsewhere, take more 
 complete possession of the whole personality, and 
 develop types of saintliness which for beauty, 
 heavenliness, and completeness, especially among 
 women, now we seldom see. For has not the 
 word saintly and the quality it indicates become 
 strangely infrequent with us? 
 
 There is even a higher aspect of this work. It 
 is most Christ-like. It is not presumptuous to 
 assume that, if the Saviour were now to minister 
 to mankind, He would turn most pityingly to the 
 women of India as the class most in need of His 
 compassion and help, and — I venture to say — most 
 responsive to His mission. The poor, the abject, 
 the ignorant, the neglected, the sorrowful, were those 
 He most pitied and helped when He walked in 
 Galilee. And women had the truest perception of 
 the grace and beauty of His nature, and turned 
 most responsively toward Him. They most felt 
 their need of such a Friend and Deliverer ; He could 
 do most for them, therefore they loved the most. 
 He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, and 
 therefore now His love and pity go out unceasingly 
 toward the multitudinous women of the East, so
 
 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 249 
 
 much in need of His aid. For is not His divine 
 mission especially adapted to such ? He says so. 
 ' The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me, because 
 the Lord hath anointed Me to preach good tidings 
 unto the meek ; He hath sent Me to bind up the 
 brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, 
 and the opening of the prison to them that are bound ; 
 to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and 
 the day of vengeance of our God ; to comfort all that 
 mourn ; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to 
 give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for 
 mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of 
 heaviness ; that they might be called trees of 
 righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might 
 be glorified.' 
 
 It is not surprising that Hindu women listen with 
 ever rapt attention to the story of His life and 
 death ; love most the hymns which describe what 
 He said and did ; and so often say, ' Your Shastras 
 must have been written by women ; they speak so 
 tenderly of us.' 
 
 There is a misconception relating to the extent and 
 need of women's work it is important to correct. 
 When ladies hear that there are at least 760 foreign 
 and European female missionaries with 3500 native 
 Christian women engaged in school, zenana, town 
 and village evangelization, and that Hindu opinion 
 on all social subjects is changing greatly for the 
 better, they are apt to assume that sufficient is 
 being done, and that progress is far greater than it
 
 250 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 
 
 really is ; they forget the law of proportions ; they 
 observe what has been done ; they overlook what 
 remains to be done, and they can have no concep- 
 tion of the profound and inveterate torpor pervading 
 the East. Usages and customs, even the face of 
 nature and the appearances of human life, hardly 
 change with the centuries. It is a vast lotus land, 
 where things seem to live in dreamy lethargy from 
 which they have no desire to awaken. Tennyson's 
 Lotus Eaters express the sentiment of the entire 
 East. 
 
 ' Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast, 
 
 And in a little while our lips are dumb. 
 Let us alone. What is it that will last ? 
 
 All things are taken from us, and become 
 Portions and parcels of the dreadful past. 
 
 Let us alone. What pleasure can we have 
 To war with evil ? Is there any peace 
 
 In ever climbing up the climbing wave? 
 All things have rest and ripen toward the grave 
 
 In silence ; ripen, fall, and cease : 
 Give us long rest or death, dark death or dreamful ease.' 
 
 The great mass of the people desire no change, 
 wish to be let alone, dislike our restless energy, and 
 look on us as a painful, mysterious dispensation 
 of Providence that they must endure, but cannot 
 comprehend. 
 
 But whilst we rejoice in what has been accomplished, 
 and see in it the presage of coming triumphs, it is 
 important to realize that far more remains to be done 
 than has yet been accomplished. Think of the vast
 
 INDUCEMENTS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS 251 
 
 extent of country that needs to be reached — an area 
 equal to at least twelve Englands ; of the dead weight 
 of torpor, ignorance, prejudice, suspicion, we have 
 to contend with ; the tens of millions of women 
 who need to be reached, educated, comforted, and 
 elevated. All Protestant societies unite in sending 
 but one foreign and Eurasian lady missionary to 
 about each 190,000 of these. Probably not one 
 zenana in a hundred has ever been entered by a 
 missionary lady, or half the 715,500 villages of the 
 empire been visited by any Christian woman, or half 
 the entire population had the Gospel message even 
 once presented to them. ' There is much land yet to 
 be possessed.' ' The harvest truly is plenteous, but 
 the labourers are few ; pray ye therefore the Lord 
 of the harvest, that He send forth labourers into His 
 harvest.' 
 
 ' Our sword has swept o'er India, there remains 
 A nobler conquest far — 
 The mind's ethereal war, 
 That but subdues to civilize its plains. 
 
 Let us pay back the past the debt we owe ; 
 
 Let us around dispense 
 
 Light, hope, intelligence, 
 Till blessings track our steps where'er we go. 
 
 O England ! thine be the deliverer's meed ; 
 
 Be thy great empire known 
 
 By hearts made all thine own, 
 By thy free laws and thy immortal creed.'
 
 INDEX 
 
 Abu Bekr on women, 51 
 Albuquerque on suttee, 112 
 Arab opinion of women, 5° 
 Arguna, 34 
 Arthur, Dr. William, on position 
 
 of women, 43 
 Aswins, the, 33 
 
 Banerjea, Rev. K. M., on edu- 
 cation, 207 
 Baradam on male offspring, 104 
 Barnes, Mr., on marriage, 90 
 B.izaar day schools, 191, 223 
 Bethune, Hon. D., on education, 
 
 210 
 Bhima, story of, 32 
 Bible-women, 219, 228 
 Bird, Miss, 214 
 Birth customs, 77 
 Bishop, Mrs. 1., on degradation 
 
 of women, 152 
 Boarding-schools, 225 
 Boys, position of, at birth, 77 
 Brahmin marriages, evils of, 86 
 Brahmin opposition to schools, 
 
 205 
 Bramhotura on male offspring, 104 
 British and Foreign School 
 
 Society, 200 
 Buhler, G., on Code of Manu, 21 
 
 Calcutta Female Juvenile 
 
 Society, 198 
 Calcutta Missionary Conference, 
 
 213 
 
 Calcutta School Society, 199 
 Carey, Dr., on suttee, U3 
 Casi Candam quoted, 41 
 Caste ideas, 170 
 Catechism on women, 49 
 Church Missionary Society and 
 
 schools, 201 
 Cocoanut palm, the, 4S 
 Code of Manu, 17; quotations 
 
 from, 21 
 Colebroke on suttee, 120 
 Converts, position of, 232 
 Cook, Miss, on education, 200 
 Cooking, 63 
 Custom, power of, 73 
 
 Dalhous.e, Lord, on female 
 
 education, 216 
 Damayanti, story of, 32 
 D.iy schools, 224 
 Despotism, female, 65 
 Dharma on marriage, 90 
 Diodorus Siculus on suttee, 113 
 Distrust, 169 
 Draupadi, 34 
 Dress of women, 61
 
 154 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Duff, Dr., on education, 198, 207 
 Dufferin, Countess of, Fund of, 31 
 Duncan, Mr., on infanticide, 98 
 Dutt, Mr., on position of women, 
 
 44 
 Dwellings, 53 
 
 Education, advance of, 194. 
 
 Education, female, 66 
 
 Elder brother, right of the, 34 
 
 Elphinstone on Code of Manu, 19 
 
 Encouragements, 237 
 
 English supremacy in India, 179 
 
 Family life, 55 
 
 Features of women, 60 
 
 Female education, history of, 
 
 189 ; census of, 217 
 Fordyce, Rev. J., on education, 
 
 209 
 
 Gentoo Code, the, 37 ; extracts 
 
 from, 39 
 Ghatuks, 88 
 
 Gimi, Mr. D. E., on women, 72 
 Girls, position of, 77 
 Greenfield, Miss, on infanticide, 
 
 no 
 
 Halhed, N. B., on Gentoo 
 
 Code, 38 
 Ilaruta on suttee, 119 
 Hindu nature religious, 247 
 Hitopodesh, quoted, 41 
 Homes, 64 
 
 Houses, description of, 54 
 Hunter, Sir W. W., on marriage, 
 
 85 
 
 Husbands, conduct of, 57 
 
 Indian Female Normal School 
 
 Society, 233 
 Infanticide, causes of, 96, 103 ; 
 
 modes of, 101 ; suppression of, 
 
 108 
 
 Jewish opinion of women, 51 
 
 Kakmarkar, Mrs. Dr., on status 
 
 of wives, 148 
 Khonds, infanticide among, 96 
 
 Ladies Society for Female Edu- 
 cation, 203 
 Lady missionaries, 222 
 Lloyd, H., on child life, 79 
 London Missionary .Society and 
 schools, 199 
 
 Mahabharat, the, 31 
 Mahomed on women, 51 
 Mahomedanism, influence of, 173 
 Maimonides on women, 51 
 Maine, Sir H., on suttee, 121 
 Manu, Code of, 17 ; quotations 
 
 from, 21 
 Marriage, 84 ; census of, 85, 
 
 126 ; inducements for, 93 
 Matchmakers, 88 
 Medical Missions, 230 
 Mission World, The, quoted, 72 
 Missionary Reincw on widow 
 
 marriage, 142 
 Money spent on marriages, 151 
 Monogamy, 31 
 
 Moral evils of child marriage, 146 
 Mudra Rakhasa on women, 47 
 Mullens, Mrs., 214 
 
 Nala, story of, 32 
 
 Napier, Sir Charles, story of, 44 
 
 Native Female School in Calcutta, 
 
 210 
 Nit Shaster on women, 46 
 Nilhi Valaccam quoted, 42 
 Normal School for Training 
 
 Christian Female Teachers, 
 
 212 
 
 Occupations of women, 61 
 Omar on women, 51 
 Ornaments, 61 
 
 Panda va brothers, the, 34 
 Parlyamarlyi, quoted, 42
 
 INDEX 
 
 255 
 
 Peggs, James, on suttee, 116 
 Physical evils of child marriage, 
 
 144 
 Polyandry, 31 
 Polygamy, 31 
 Pottinger, Sir H., on infanticide, 
 
 101 
 Prize-book, quoted, 48 
 Proverbs about women quoted, 
 
 46 
 Punchayat, the, 127 
 Turanas, the, 29 ; extracts from, 40 
 Purdah ladies, 68 
 Puriar Minas, infanticide among, 
 
 100 
 Putt, 136 
 
 Raja Pandu, 34 
 
 Rajkumars, infanticide among, 98 
 
 Rajputs, infanticide among, 98 ; 
 
 causes of, 106 ; suttee, 107 
 Ram, story of, 33 
 Ramabai Sarasati, Pundita, on 
 
 position of women, 42 
 Ramayan, the, 31 
 Rand, 137 
 
 Rao, B. R. R., on homes, 64 
 Read and write, women able to, 
 
 66 
 Rig Veda, allusions to women, 33 
 Rugnathdas, Mr., story of, 140 
 
 Sale, Mrs., 214 
 
 Sanscrit catechism on women, 49 
 
 Sati, 137 
 
 Schools, formation of, 190 
 
 Scottish Ladies Association for 
 
 the Advancement of Female 
 
 Education, 206 
 Scriptures, Hindu, 29 
 Seal, M. L., offer of, 141 
 Seclusion, Female, 158 
 Sex at birth, opinions of, 77 
 Sinlhamani, quoted, 42 
 Sita, story of, 33 
 Smith, Dr. G., on English 
 
 influence in India, 183 
 
 Smith, Dr. T., on education, 208 
 Society, ancient Hindu, 29 
 Society for the Promotion of 
 
 Female Education in the East, 
 
 212 
 Strabo on suttee, 113 
 Suspicion, 169 
 Suttee, Rajput, 107 ; history of, 
 
 III ; statistics of, 114 
 Swayamvara, the, 32 
 
 Tahli, the, 128 
 Talmud on women, 51 
 Teignmouth, Lord, on infanticide, 
 
 97 
 Tennyson, quoted, 250 
 Tracey, Mrs., 214 
 Transmigration, 130 
 Travelling, women, 5S 
 Tyer, Justice M., on marriage, 90 
 
 Ungera on suttee, 118 
 Unwin, Mr., on infanticide, 109 
 
 Valluvar, story of, 50 
 Yasugi, stury of, 50 
 Vedic period, women in, 30 
 Villages, life in, 228 
 Visits, 63 
 Vyasa, 34 
 
 Walker, Col., on infanticide, 9S 
 
 Widow marriage, 127 
 
 Widows, statistics of, 125 ; rights 
 
 of, 122, 128 ; position of, 128 
 Wilkinson, Mr., on infanticide, 
 
 99 
 
 Williams, Sir M. M., on Code of 
 Manu, 18; on homes, 64; on 
 widows, 137; on education, 
 201 
 
 Wilson, Dr., on position of 
 women, 35 
 
 Wilson, Mrs., on schools, 192 , 
 205 
 
 Wives, conduct of, 57
 
 - 5 6 
 
 INDEX 
 
 
 Women, Code of Manu on, 20 ; in 
 Vedic period, 30 ; Ramayan and 
 Mahabharat on, 31 ; the Svvay- 
 amvara, 32 ; in Rig Veda, 33 ; 
 Dr. Wilson on position of, 35 ; 
 Gentoo Code on, 37 ; Puratias 
 on, 40 ; Dr. Wm. Arthur on, 
 43 ; Mr. Dutt on, 44 ; Nit 
 Shaster on, 46 ; proverbs on, 
 46 ; prize-book on, 48 ; Sanscrit 
 catechism on, 49 ; Arab opinion 
 of, 53; Mahomedan, 51; Abu 
 Kekr on, 51 ; Omar on, 51 ; 
 Maimonides on, 51 ; Jewish 
 opinion of, 51 ; Talmud on, 51 ; 
 family life, 57 ; description of, 
 
 60; occupations of, 61; des- 
 potism, 65 ; education, 66 ; 
 purdah ladies, 68 ; dark side of 
 zenana life, 71 ; position at 
 birth, 77 ; marriage, 84 ; 
 widows, 125 ; evils of their 
 status, 143 ; seclusion of, 158 ; 
 sufferings of, 159 ; mission 
 work appeals to, 244 
 
 YUDHISTHIRA, 34 
 
 Zenana Bible and Medical 
 
 Mission, 233 
 Zenana, the, description of, 5S 
 Zenanas, work in, 226 
 
 THE END. 
 
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