Upon the unfruitful circlings of the Hindus breaks, once and again, a voice from the hardy North. Rarely, for the subject carries small interest therej yet, when it comes, weighted with rough acumen.
Nawab Sir Sahibzada Abdul Qaiyum is, as his name suggests, a Muhammadan. Speaking as of the distant North-West Frontier Province, he said:[l]
"I should like to say only a few words on the practical side of it. In my part of the country, we do not have early marriages. So the Bill is not likely to affect us very much...I should have thought...the proper remedy...fixing the age of marriage for a man at a certain point and for a woman at another point...[but] I do not think the country is prepared...Well, just consider: Who is going to be the prosecutor, who is going to be the investigator, who are going to be the witnesses, and who is going to enforce the verdict?...Then there is another difficulty...that you allow a young couple to be married and to live together and give them the opportunity of sharpening their sexual appetite and then prevent them by law from having their natural intercourse simply because they have not reached a certain age...Well, suppose this law is enacted, and the young couple are prevented from having intercourse, I should think that in the majority of cases you would thus be sending the young boy into the streets...but so long as you allow people to be married young, there is no sufficient reason why you should enact laws which may interfere with their private life."
[1. Legislative Assembly Debates, 1925, Vol. VI, pp. 571-2.]
The handling of child-wives, many finally affirm, must, regardless of legal enactment, continue to be guided by natural instincts under the husbands' sacred rights.
Throughout the Hindu argument, however, the general conviction appears that law-making for social advance, while entirely hopeless of enforcement, exerts an educational influence upon the community and is therefore to be regarded with satisfaction as a completed piece of work. "The people should be educated," the Indian public man declares. "They should follow the course that I hereby indicate." Having spoken, he washes his hands. His task is done.
The voice of Diwan Bahadur T. Rangachariar, the Madrassi Brahman Assemblyman before quoted, was one of the few raised in criticism of this characteristic viewpoint. Addressing a fellow Assemblyman, proponent of the reform amendment, he says:[2]
"May I ask my Honourable friend how many platforms he has addressed in this connection outside this hall? (A voice: "Never.") Has he ever summoned a meeting in his own province and addressed the people on the value of these reforms? Sir, it is easy to avail yourself of the position which you occupy here appealing to an audience where all are wedded to your views and to get them to aid in this legislation. But...it is not so easy a task to go to the country and convince your own countrymen and countrywomen."
[2. Ibid.. 1925, Vol. V, Part III, p. 2847.]
Thus throughout these councils, the weight of responsibility tosses back and forth, a beggar for lodgment. "It is only the Brahmans who marry their girls in infancy." Or, equally, "It is only the low castes that follow such practice"; and, "In any case the evils of early marriages are much exaggerated, interference is unwise, and volunteer social and religious reform associations may be trusted to protect young wives."
But, turning from the shifts and theories of politicians--from their vague affirmations of progress attained, to cold black and white--you are pulled up with a jerk. Says the latest Census of India:[3]
It can be assumed for all practical purposes that every woman is in the married state at or immediately after puberty and that cohabitation, therefore, begins in every case with puberty.
And the significance of the thing is further driven home by the estimate that in India each generation sees the death of 3,200,000 mothers in the agonies of childbirth[4]--a figure greater than that of the united death-roll of the British Empire, including India, France, Belgium, Italy and the United States, in the World War; and that the average physical rating of the population is at the bottom of the international list.
[3. Census of India, 1921, Appendix VII.]
[4. Legislative Assembly Debates, 1922, Vol. Ill, Part I, p. 88a]
To turn again to the Legislative Assembly: Once more, it is a man from the North who speaks--a gray-beard yeoman, tall, straight, lean and sinewy, hard as nails, a telling contrast to the Southerners around him who jeer as he talks--Sardar Bahadur Captain Hira Singh Brar, of the Punjab, old Sikh fighting man.[5]
I think, Sir, the real solution for preventing infant mortality lies in smacking the parent who produces such children, and more so, in slapping many of our friends who always oppose the raising of the age to produce healthy children..., Is it not a sin when they call a baby of nine or ten years or a boy of ten years husband and wife? It is a shame. (Voices: "No, no!")...a misfortune for this generation and for the future generation...Girls of nine or ten, babies themselves who ought to be playing with their dolls rather than becoming wives, are mothers of children. Boys who ought to be getting their lessons in school are rearing a large family of half a dozen boys and girls...I do not like to go into society. I feel ashamed, because there is no manhood, there is no womanhood. I should feel ashamed myself to go into society with a little girl of twelve years as my wife...We all talk, talk and talk a hundred and one things here, but what happens? All left in this House, all left on the platform and nothing carried to our homes, nothing happens...Healthy children are the foundation of a strong nation. Every one knows that the parents cannot produce healthy children. To be useful we must have long life which we cannot have if early marriage is not stopped. "Early to marry and early to die," is the motto of Indians.
[5. Ibid., 1925, Vol. V, Part III, pp. 2829-31.]
The frank give-and-takes of the Indian Legislature, between Indian and Indian, deal with facts. But it is instructive to observe the robes that those facts can wear when arrayed by a poet for foreign consideration. Rabindranath Tagore, in a recent essay on "The Indian Ideal of Marriage," explains child-marriage as a flower of the sublimated spirit, a conquest over sexuality and materialism won by exalted intellect for the eugenic uplift of the race. His explanation, however, logically implies the assumption, simply, that Indian women must be securely bound and delivered before their womanhood is upon them, if they are to be kept in hand. His words are:[6]
The "desire"...against which India's solution of the marriage problem declared war, is one of Nature's most powerful fighters; consequently, the question of how to overcome it was not an easy one. There is a particular age, said India, at which this attraction between the sexes reaches its height; so if marriage is to be regulated according to the social will [as distinguished from the choice of the individual concerned], it must be finished with before such age. Hence the Indian Custom of early marriage.
[6. The Book of Marriage, Keyserling, Harcourt, Brace & Co., New York, 1926, p. lia.]
In other words, a woman must be married before she knows she is one.
Such matter as this, coming as it does from one of the most widely known of modern Indian writers, may serve to suggest that we of the "material-minded West" shall be misled if we too quickly accept the Oriental's phrases as making literal pictures of the daily human life of which he seems to speak.
All thus far written here concerns the fate of children within the marriage bond. The general subject of prostitution in India need not enter the field of this book; but certain special aspects thereof may be cited because of the compass bearings that they afford.
In some parts of the country, more particularly in the Presidency of Madras and in Orissa, a custom obtains among the Hindus whereby the parents, to persuade some favor from the gods, may vow their next born child, if it be a girl, to the gods. Or, a particularly lovely child, for one reason or another held superfluous in her natural surroundings, is presented to the temple. The little creature, accordingly, is delivered to the temple women, her predecessors along the route, for teaching in dancing and singing. Often by the age of five, when she is considered most desirable, she becomes the priests' own prostitute.
If she survives to later years she serves as a dancer and singer before the shrine in the daily temple worship; and in the houses around the temple she is held always ready, at a price, for the use of men pilgrims during their devotional sojourns in the temple precincts. She now goes beautifully attired, often loaded with the jewels of the gods, and leads an active life until her charms fade. Then, stamped with the mark of the god under whose aegis she has lived, she is turned out upon the public, with a small allowance and with the acknowledged right to a beggar's livelihood. Her parents, who may be well-to-do persons of good rank and caste, have lost no face at all by the manner of their disposal of her. Their proceeding, it is held, was entirely reputable. And she and her like form a sort of caste of their own, are called devadassis, or "prostitutes of the gods," and are a recognized essential of temple equipment.[7]
[7. Cf. The Golden Bough, J. G. Frazer, Macmillan & Co., London, 1914. Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Vol. I, pp. 61-5.]
Now, if it were asked how a responsible Government permits this custom to continue in the land, the answer is not far to seek. The custom, like its background of public sentiment, is deep-rooted in the far past of an ultra-conservative and passionately religiose people. Any one curious as to the fierceness with which it would be defended by the people, both openly and covertly, and in the name of religion, against any frontal attack, will find answer in the extraordinary work[8] and in the too-reticent books[9] of Miss Amy Wilson-Carmichael.
[8. In Dohnavur, Tinnevelly District, South India.]
[9. Lotus Buds, Things As They Are, etc., Morgan & Scott, London.]
A province could be roused to madness by the forcible withdrawal of girl-children from the gods.
"You cannot hustle the East." But the underground workings of western standards and western contacts, and the steady, quiet teachings of the British official through the years have done more, perhaps, toward ultimate change than any coercion could have effected.
Thus, when one measure came before the Legislative Assembly to raise the age of consent outside the marriage bond it was vigorously resisted by that conspicuous member, the then Rao Bahadur T. Rangachariar. His argument was, that such a step would work great hardships to the temple prostitutes.
And why?
Because, as he explained, the daughters of the deva-dassis cannot be married to caste husbands; so,[10]
as these girls cannot find wedlock, the mothers arrange with a certain class of Zemindars--big landlords--that they should be taken into alliance with the Zemindar.
[10. Legislative Assembly Debates, 1923, Vol. Ill, Part IV, pp. 2807-81]
And the sympathetic legislator goes on in warning that if the girl's age is raised, no zemindar will desire her, with the result that a good bargain is lost and the child is planted on her poor mother's hands.[11]
[11. Ibid., pp. 2826-7.]
But the interesting point in the debate is not the eminent Brahman's voicing of the mass-sentiment of his people, but the opposition that his words call forth from the seats around him, which are almost at one in their disapproval of an argument that, a generation earlier, would have met another reception.
Then followed the member from Orissa, Mr. Misra, with his views on devadassis or ordinary dassis or prostitutes:[12]
[12. Footnote not provided. (Ebook editor)]
They have existed from time immemorial...They are regarded as a necessity even for marriage and other parties, and for singing songs in invocation of God...Much has been said about girls being disposed of to Zemindars and Rajas.[13]...Zemindars never get any girls from procurers. What happens is this. When Zemindars or Rajas marry, their wives or Ranis bring with them some girls as maid servants...Such a thing as procuring of girls does not exist and no gentleman, whether he be a Zemindar or a Raja or an ordinary man, would ever adopt such a nefarious means to procure girls...Why should we think so much about these people [minor girls] who are able to take care of themselves?
[13. A Hindu title, inferior to Maharaja.]
Mr. Misra's speech, although it dealt with simple facts, evoked another manifestation of western influence, in that it definitely jarred upon many of his co-legislators. However true, they did not want it spread in the record. Cries of "Withdraw!" repeatedly interrupted him, and the words of other speakers gave ample proof of stirrings, intellectually, at least, of a new perception in the land.
To translate intellectual perception into concrete act requires yet another subversive mental process, in a people whose religion teaches that freedom from all action is the crown of perfect attainment.