The reverse of the picture shows the Hindu widow--the accursed. That so hideous a fate as widowhood should befall a woman can be but for one cause--the enormity of her sins in a former incarnation. From the moment of her husband's decease till the last hour of her own life, she must expiate those sins in shame and suffering and self-immolation, chained in every thought to the service of his soul. Be she a child of three, who knows nothing of the marriage that bound her, or be she a wife in fact, having lived with her husband, her case is the same. By his death she is revealed as a creature of innate guilt and evil portent, herself convinced, when she is old enough to think at all, of the justice of her fate. Miss Sorabji thus treats the subject:[l]
[1. Between the Twilights, pp. 144-6.]
The orthodox Hindu widow suffers her lot with the fierce enjoyment of martyrdom...but nothing can minimize the evils of that lot...That she accepts the fact makes it no less of a hardship. For some sin committed in a previous birth, the gods have deprived her of a husband. What is left to her now but to work out his "salvation" and by her prayers and penances to win him a better place in his next genesis?...For the mother-in-law, what also is left but the obligation to curse?...But for this luckless one, her son might still be in the land of the living. ...There is no determined animosity in the attitude. The person cursing is as much an instrument of Fate as the person cursed...[But] it is all very well to assert no personal animosity toward her whom you hold it a privilege to curse and to burden with every unpleasant duty imaginable. Your practise is apt to mislead.
The widow becomes the menial of every other person in the house of her late husband. All the hardest and ugliest tasks are hers, no comforts, no ease. She may take but one meal a day and that of the meanest. She must perform strict fasts. Her hair must be shaven off. She must take care to absent herself from any scene of ceremony or rejoicing, from a marriage, from a religious celebration, from the sight of an expectant mother or of any person whom the curse of her glance might harm. Those who speak to her may speak in terms of contempt and reproach; and she herself is the priestess of her own misery, for its due continuance is her one remaining merit.
The old French traveler, Bernier, states that the pains of widowhood were imposed "as an easy mode of keeping wives in subjection, of securing their attention in times of sickness, and of deterring them from administering poison to their husbands."[2]
[2. Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668, François Bernier, Oxford University Press, 1916, pp. 310-11.]
But once, however, did I hear this idea from a Hindu's lips. "We husbands so often make our wives unhappy," said this frank witness, "that we might well fear they would poison us. Therefore did our wise ancestors make the penalty of widowhood so frightful--in order that the woman may not be tempted."
In the female wards of prisons in many parts of India I have seen women under sentence for the murder of their husbands. These are perhaps rare mentalities, perhaps hysteria cases. More characteristic are the still-recurring instances of practical suttee, where the newly-widowed wife deliberately pours oil over her garments, sets them afire and burns to death, in a connived-at secrecy. She has seen the fate of other widows. She is about to become a drudge, a slave, starved, tyrannized over, abused--and this is the sacred way out--"following the divine law." Committing a pious and meritorious act, in spite of all foreign-made interdicts, she escapes a present hell and may hope for happier birth in her next incarnation.
Although demanded in the scripture already quoted, the practice of burning the widow upon the husband's funeral pyre is today unlawful. But it must be noted that this change represents an exceptional episode; it represents not a natural advance of public opinion, but one of the rare incursions of the British strong hand into the field of native religions. Suttee was forbidden by British Governors[3] some twenty-nine years before the actual taking over by the Crown of direct government. That advanced Indian, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, supported the act. But other influential Bengali gentlemen, vigorously opposing, did not hesitate to push their fight for the preservation of the practice even to the court of last resort--the Privy Council in London.
[3. Regulation XVII of 1829.]
Is it conceivable that, given opportunity, the submerged root of the matter might come again to life and light? In Mr. Gandhi's weekly[4] of November 11, 1926, a Hindu writer declares the impossibility of a widow's remarriage today, without the deathbed permission of the deceased husband. No devout husband will give such permission, the correspondent affirms, and adds: "He will rather fain agree to his wife's becoming sati [suttee] if she can."
[4. Young India.]
An inmate of her husband's home at the time of his death, the widow, although she has no legal claim for protection, may be retained there on the terms above described, or she may be turned adrift. Then she must live by charity--or by prostitution, into which she not seldom falls. And her dingy, ragged figure, her bristly, shaven head, even though its stubble be white over the haggard face of unhappy age, is often to be seen in temple crowds or in the streets of pilgrimage cities, where sometimes niggard piety doles her a handful of rice.
As to remarriage, that, in orthodox Hinduism, is impossible. Marriage is not a personal affair, but an eternal sacrament. And it must never be forgotten that the great majority of the Hindus are orthodox to the bone. Whether the widow be an infant and a stranger to the man whose death, she is told, was caused by her sins, or whether she be twenty and of his bed and board, orthodoxy forbids her remarriage. Of recent years, however, the gradual if unrecognized influence of western teaching has aroused a certain response. In different sections of India, several associations have sprung up, having the remarriage of virgin widows as one of their chief purported objects. The movement, however, is almost wholly restricted to the most advanced element of Hindu society, and its influence is, as yet, too fractional appreciably to affect statistics.
The observations on this point made by the Abbé Dubois a century since still, in general, hold good. He saw that the marriage of a small child to a man of sixty and the forbidding of her remarriage after his death must often throw the child, as a widow, into a dissolute life. Yet widow remarriage was unknown. Even were it permitted, says the Abbé, "the strange preference which Brahmins have for children of very tender years would make such a permission almost nominal in the case of their widows."[5]
[5. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, p. 212.]
And one cannot forget, in estimating the effect of the young widow on the social structure of which she is a part, that, in her infancy, she lived in the same atmosphere of sexual stimulus that surrounded the boy child, her brother. If a girl child so reared in thought and so sharpened in desire be barred from lawful satisfaction of desire, is it strange if the desire prove stronger with her than the social law? Her family, the family of the dead husband, will, for their credit's sake, restrain her if they can. And often, perhaps most often, she needs no restraint save her own spirit of sacrifice. But the opposite example is frequently commented upon by Indian speakers. Lala Lajpat Rai, Swarajist politician, laments:[6]
[6. Presidential Speech delivered before the Hindu Mahasabha Conference, in Bombay, December, 1925.]
The condition of child-widows is indescribable. God may bless those who are opposed to their remarriage, but their superstition introduces so many abuses and brings about so much moral and physical misery as to cripple society as a whole and handicap it in the struggle for life.
Mr. Gandhi acquiescently cites another Indian writer on child marriage and enforced child widowhood, thus: "It is bringing into existence thousands of girl-widows every year who in their turn are a source of corruption and dangerous infection to society."[7]
[7. Young India, Aug. 26, 1926, p. 302.]
Talk there is, resolutions passed, in caste and association conventions, as to changing these things of oppression and of scornings. But a virgin widow's remarriage is still a headline event, even to the reform newspapers, while the remarriage of a Hindu widowed wife is still held to be inconceivable.
And here, curiously enough, the very influence that on the one hand most strongly operates to rescue the woman, on the other more widely enslaves her. While British practice and western education tend, at the top of the ladder, to breed discontent with ancient darkness, British public works, British sanitation and agricultural development, steadily raising the economic condition of the lower classes, as steadily breed aspirants to greater social prestige. Thus the census of 1921 finds restriction in widow remarriage definitely increasing in those low ranks of the social scale that, by their own code, have no such inhibition. Hindu caste rank is entirely independent of worldly wealth; but the first move of the man of little place, suddenly awakening to a new prosperity, security, and peace, is to mimic the manners of those to whom he has looked up. He becomes a social climber, not less in India than in the United States, and assumes the shackles of the elect.
Mr. Mukerjea of Baroda, an Indian official observer, thus writes of attempts to break down the custom of obligatory widowhood:[8]
[8. Census of India, 1921, Vol. I, Chapter VII, paragraph 134.]
All such efforts will be powerless as long as authoritative Hindu opinion continues to regard the prohibition of widow remarriage as a badge of respectability. Amongst the lower Hindu castes, the socially affluent sections are discountenancing the practice of widow remarriage as actively as any Brahman.
It was a distinguished Bengali, the Pundit Iswar Chunder Vidyasagar, who, among Indians, started the movement for remarriage of virgin widows and supported Government in the enactment of a law legalizing such remarriages. But over him and the fruit of his work another eminent Indian thus laments:[9]
[9. A Nation in the Making. Sir Surendranath Banerjea, Oxford University Press, 1925, pp. 8-9]
I well remember the stir and agitation which the movement produced and how orthodox Hindus were up in arms against it...The champion of the Hindu widows died a disappointed man, like so many of those who were in advance of their age, leaving his message unfulfilled...The progress which the movement has made since his death in 1891 has been slow. A new generation has sprung up, but he has found no successor. The mantle of Elijah has not fallen upon Elisha. The lot of the Hindu widow today remains very much the same that it was fifty years ago. There are few to wipe her tears and to remove the enforced widowhood that is her lot. The group of sentimental sympathisers have perhaps increased--shouting at public meetings on the Vidyasagar anniversary day, but leaving unredeemed the message of the great champion of the Hindu widow.
Mr. Gandhi, always true to his light, himself has said:[10]
[8. Census of India, 1921, Vol. I, Chapter VII, paragraph 134.]
To force widowhood upon little girls is a brutal crime for which we Hindus are daily paying dearly...There is no warrant in any shastra[11] for such widowhood. Voluntary widowhood consciously adopted by a woman who has felt the affection of a partner adds grace and dignity to life, sanctifies the home and uplifts religion itself. Widowhood imposed by religion or custom is an unbearable yoke and defiles the home by secret vice and degrades religion. And does not the Hindu widowhood stink in one's nostrils when one thinks of old and diseased men over fifty taking or rather purchasing girl wives, sometimes one on top of another?
[11. Hindu book of sacred institutes.]
But this, again, is a personal opinion, rather than a public force. "We want no more of Gandhi's doctrines," one conspicuous Indian politician told me 5 "Gandhi is a deluded man."
That distinguished Indian, Sir Ganga Ram, C.I.E., C.V.O., with some help from Government has built and endowed a fine home and school for Hindu widows in the city of Lahore. This establishment, in 1926, had over forty inmates. In Bombay Presidency are five Government-aided institutes for widows and deserted wives, run by philanthropic Indian gentlemen. Other such institutions may exist; but, if they do, their existence has escaped the official recorders. I myself saw, in the pilgrim city of Nawadwip, in Bengal, a refuge for widows maintained by local subscription and pilgrims' gifts. It was fourteen years old and had eight inmates--the extent, it appeared, of its intention and capacity.
The number of widows in India is, according to the latest published official computation, 26,834,838.[12]
[12. Statistical Abstract for British India, 1914-15 to 1923-24, Gov eminent of India Publication, 1925, p. 20.]