Allan Octavian Hume, C.B./Appendix II
APPENDIX II
A LETTER TO MR. BEHRAMJI M. MALABARI,
ON THE SUBJECT OF HIS NOTES UPON INFANT MARRIAGES AND ENFORCED WIDOWHOOD AND GENERALLY ON THE PRESENT PROSPECTS AND METHODS OF NATIONAL PROGRESS.
(Reprinted from the "Indian Spectator" of February 1, 1885)
My dear Malabari — I have read with the most entire sympathy your cogent and eloquent Notes on the evils attendant on infant marriages and enforced widowhood. Privately, for years past, I have strenuously urged on Native friends the necessity of reform in these and other kindred social matters ; so that you must not attribute my long delay in answering your letter, enclosing these papers, to any want of interest in the painful subjects to which they relate. Most entirely do I agree with you, that much misery results from these customs ; that in the present day (whatever may have been the case in times long past), the evil generated by them far outweighs any good with which they can justly be credited — that yearly this disproportion will increase, and that their abolition is even now an object in every way worthy to be aimed at.
There is so little genuine unselfish enthusiasm in the world nowadays, that agreeing thus far with you, I have been unwilling to appear in any way to throw cold water on your zeal, by tendering only a qualified concurrence in your views. But since you continue to insist on a public confession of the faith that is in me, I must in justice to the great national cause, which we both aUke have at heart, say distinctly, what — rightly or wrongly — I really think about the matter.
In the first place I must say I think you somewhat exaggerate the evil results of these traditional institutions. I quite admit that there is full warrant for everything you advance — the terrible evils you refer to are real ; but they are not, to my idea, by any means so universal as the ordinary reader of your Notes would, I think, be led to infer. Moreover, though I admit that the evil does, on the whole, outweigh the good, it is not fair to our people to allow it to be supposed, that they are so hopelessly blind as to cling to institutions which are utterly and unmitigatedly bad. In the existing state of the Native social problem, no really impartial competent judge will, I believe, deny that in many cases these institutions even yet work fairly well. There are millions of cases in which early marriages are believed to be daily proving happy ones, and in which consummation having been deferred by the parents (and this, my friends say, is the usual case) till a reasonable age (I mean for Asiatic girls) the progeny are, so far as we can judge, perfectly healthy, physically and mentally.
A Native friend writes to me, '* The wife, transplanted to her husband's home at a tender age, forgets the ties that bound her to the parental hearth, and by the time she comes of age is perfectly naturalized in her adopted family ; and though she is allowed no wifely intercourse with her husband until she attains a fitting age, still the husband and wife have constant opportunities of assimilating each other's natures and growing, as it were, into one, so that when the real marriage takes place the love they feel for each other is not merely passion, but is mingled with far higher and purer feeUngs. Misfortunes cannot alienate our wives, they have no frowns for us, even though we commit the most heinous crimes or ill-treat or sin against themselves. Those ignorant of our inner life call this a vile subjugation and say that we have made our wives our slaves, but those who live amongst us know that it is the result of that deep-seated affection that springs from early association and reUgious (if you will, superstitious) teachings.
"Where will you find a wife so true and contented as a Hindu's ? Where more purity of thought or more religious fervour than in the Hindu women of respectable families ? Our men, alas ! may be materiahsts, atheists, immoral, base, but our women are goodness in human shape — and why ? because they have been shown an object on which to concentrate the entire love and veneration of their natures at a time when their pure hearts were un- sullied by any other impressions or ideas, and taught to look up to their husbands, whose faces they could only look oi( after many solemn ceremonies, as their guardians, protectors,' and gods."
Everything in this world has its darker and brighter sides and the blackest cloud has some silver lining ; and though my friend in his happy husbandhood (for his has been, I know, a happy infant marriage) generalizes too enthusiasti- cally from his own experience, still he has some foundation for his contention ; and infant marriage (though fraught with grievous misery in too many cases, though a custom marked for extinction and daily becoming more and of an ana- chronism and more and more of an evil, taking its results as a whole), has not yet become that unmitigated curse, unrelieved by redeeming features, which, forgive me if I say so, your vigorous onslaught would, it seems to me, lead the European reader to believe.
Do you remember " Uncle Tom's Cabin " ? There was not one incident recorded in that novel, in connection with the grievous iniquities of slavery, for which actual warrant did not exist, and yet the general result was to produce a grossly exaggerated picture of the working of the system. Many look upon that highly coloured narrative as the first seed of the subsequent emancipation of the slaves ; person- ally, I credit it mainly with the perfectly needless slaughter of about half a million of persons. It took hold on the mind of the nation. It grievously angered the Southerners, many of them the kindest and best of masters, beloved beyond measure by then- so-called slaves, who, seeing themselves and their institutions wantonly maligned, became all the more resolutely determined to oppose any reform (prior to this numbers of the Southerners were themselves con- sidering how emancipation could be gradually brought about). It grievously inflamed the righteous indignation of the New Englanders, and a certain better-minded section of the other northern States — and it led to John Brown and his marching soul and all the ^'battle, murder, and sudden death " that followed. You will be told that the North and South fought over the tariff, and so a large section of the northern States unquestionably did, but these would never have ventured to provoke or accept (for this is a moot point) a civil war, but for the enthusiasm of the honest anti- slavery party. But for " Uncle Tom's Cabin," I fully believe that slavery would have been abolished before now, and without any civil war.
But works of fiction attacking social evils always, it may be said, exaggerate the case, and Charles Reade and Charles Dickens will be pointed to as having equally picked out individual instances of wrong and so presented them as to make them appear the necessary and inevitable results of systems which, as a matter of fact, by no means invariably led to such serious consequences.
But even if such exaggeration be permissible in works of fiction, and if this high colouring does really do good in the long run (which is at least an arguable point) by attracting and concentrating attention, it certainly does not do this, in my opinion, in the case of grave prosaic State papers, like yours, and rightly or wrongly, my experience and inquiries lead me to believe that in your righteous indignation against wrong and desire to get rid of what is evil, you have depicted that evil in blacker colours than the facts of the case, taken as a whole, really warrant.
As regards the question of enforced widowhood I have in limine a somewhat similar objection to take. It is productive of great evils, much unhappiness, much demoralization. It is a custom against which common-sense, and all the best instincts of our nature write, as in the case of slavery, the verdict delenda est But with all that, it does not, taking the country as a whole, produce so much evil as might be theoretically inferred. It is bad enough doubtless, but it is not that gigantic cancer at the heart's core of society, that tremendous and cruel evil, the eradication of which is essential as the first step to national regeneration, that the casual reader unacquainted with the intricacies of social life in the East, might well conceive it to be from your eloquent and earnest denunciations.
But besides this I have another difficulty. I must divide widows into titular or virgin widows, and real widows. As to the former I have satisfied myself by a careful study of all the authentic and authoritative texts produced on both sides, that there is nothing in the Shastras to prevent their re- marriage ; and there being positively no good that can be even alleged as resulting from enforcing their continued widowhood, while very grave evils unquestionably flow there- from, I have no hesitation in earnestly pressing and entreating every good Hindu, who loves his family, his fellows or his country, to combine to make re- marriages in such cases customary and thus, as it were, legislate for themselves on this matter.
For the re-marriage of fully married or real widows, I cannot say as much. I entertain no doubt that according to the Shastras, the re-marriage of such involved a loss of caste. I regret that this should be so, but I believe it to be the case, and being so, I could press no Hindu brother, who con- scientiously accepts these ancient writings, not merely as the teachings of eminently pious men (and therefore necessarily imperfect, suited only to the time in which they were written and open to correction in the light of a more advanced civilization), but as the immutable commands of the Almighty — I could, I say, ask no such Hindu to do violence to his conscience by transgressing what he believes to be the laws of God, even were the evils resulting from this enforced widowhood tenfold what they are. Such I would only pray by sympathy and watchful care, by tenderness and love, to mitigate so far as may be the lonely lot of the poor women that they are compelled by religious convictions thus to isolate, and by educating all their women, and elevating their mental and moral status, to minimize the inevitable evils, resulting from this enforced, and in the cases of young women, unnatural widowhood. As for those fellows, whose whole lives, redolent of fraud, falsehood, greed or gluttony, show plainly how little they regard the Shastras, and who yet seize upon texts, out of sacred writings (every other command of which they dis- regard when it suits their own purposes) to justify the retention, as ill-used household drudges or unacknowledged concubines, of the poor women entrusted to their care, they are hypocrites whom I hope all brother Hindus, orthodox and unorthodox, will combine to reward as they merit.
No ! let the real believer, who lives honestly and truly by his Shastras, still keep his widowed daughter or daughter-in- law, unmarried according to his creed — in such a house, no harm will come to her. It may seem hard upon the poor girl — but in a truly pious household trials are but the seeds of future glories. But let the hypocrite who, whenever he seeks the gratification of his own vices or passions, disregards the sacred commands he pretends to accept, though making a great show of reverencing them when it suits his purpose, remember, that call it by what name men will, there is a retribution for all wrong and that he shall surely himself suffer for all the suffering he causes, and for all the sin and sorrow this may evolve.
In the second place, besides holding that obnoxious as are the customs against which you take arms, you have somewhat exaggerated the magnitude and universality of the evils to which they give rise, I cannot but fear that your method of thus attacking particular branches of a larger question, as if they could be successfully isolated and dealt with as distinct entities, is calculated to mislead the public, to confuse their conceptions of proportion, to entail loss of power and intensify, what seems to me at this present moment to be, the most serious obstacle to real National progress.
I do not ignore the fact that in our practical work we may and often must, adopt the moral of the fagot fable and proceed to break the sticks one by one, but we must all, from the outset, realize the entire fagot and set before us as our ultimate aim and end, not the fracture of the one stick but the destruction of the entire bundle.
But to me it seems that you put forward these two unquestionably desirable reforms as if they were the most momentous questions of the day, and as if on them hinged the national regeneration, whereas they are mere fractional parts which can never be successfully manipulated by themselves, and which even if they could be so treated, would not, independently of progress in other directions, produce any very marked results upon the country as a whole.
The tendency of your Notes must be, I fear, to give all your readers a somewhat exaggerated and disproportioned idea of the importance of these matters, themselves only branches of the larger question of raising the status of our women generally, itself again only one of many essential factors in National progress.
Moreover, pressing these isolated points so strongly, as if they were obligatory and stood by themselves, and not as mere optional sections of a general enterprise, has certainly temporarily alienated some who would cordially have cooperated in many other sections. Now we cannot afford to alienate a single possible coadjutor, and it is only by starting on a platform co-extensive with the aspirations of the country that we can hope to secure the co-operation of even the majority of that powerful (though numerically small) body of earnest workers who have learnt to look in one direction or another, outside the sordid veil of "self" that still darkens the perceptions of their brethren.
The earnest and unselfish labourers for Progress in this country constitute but an infinitesimal fraction of the population, a fraction that becomes absolutely inappreciable if further subdivided. If, then, any real results are to be achieved, it can only be by linking together all those who love the light and would fain push the darkness farther back, in a common effort against a common evil.
Doubtless, division of labour is the seed of Progress, and throughout the universe specialization goes hand in hand with development. We may expect different minds to devote themselves more especially to different sections of the work, but they must be taken up as integral parts of the whole, subordinate portions of the common enterprise in which all are interested.
As it is, in consequence of the all-pervading spirit of division of labour, the minds of our reformers are, as a rule, too exclusively turned to individual abuses and too little in sympathy with the aspirations of fellow-workers struggling against other forms of wrong ; and our first aim should be to infuse a spirit of catholicity into the entire body of those willing to labour, in any direction, for the common weal.
It is essential, I think, that we should all try to realize that closely interwoven in humanity as are the physical, intellectual and psychical factors, progress in any direction, to be real or permanent, postulates a corresponding progress in other directions — that though we may and must most specially devote our energies to overcoming the particular adversary that circumstances have most immediately opposed to us, we each form but one unit in a force contending against a common foe, whose defeat will depend as much on the success of each of our fellow-soldiers as on our own. In the hour of battle it signifies nothing whether a man is in the light or grenadier company, the whole regiment must advance — the individual can do little ; it matters not whether one is in the cavalry, artillery, infantry, pioneers or what not, the success of each is the success of all, the defeat of any an additional obstacle to the triumph of the rest.
At present the greatest impediment to all progress here appears to me to consist in a general failure to realize the essential unity of the cause of reform. You find earnest men whose eyes appear to be closed to everything but the material wants of the people, and to whom the poverty of our population appears to be the one sole evil against which it is necessary to concentrate all efforts. You find equally devoted enthusiasts who see in the ignorance of the masses the source of all their sufferings and in their intellectual elevation a panacea for all woes. You find men of the purest and highest aspirations, careless to a great extent of both the material and mental wants of the nation, making their sole aim either its moral development or religious culture. There are some of your social reformers who hold that India is to be saved by the abolition or modification of some evil or obsolete custom or habit, and nailing this flag t( their own masts are willing to see the rest of the fleet sink only their ships forge somewhat ahead. And last but n( least, you have the strong practical men, who Gallio-lik< care for none of these things but place all their hopes on th< realization of their aspirations for the political enfranchisement" of their countrymen.
What we want, it seems to me, at the present time most of all, is that all these good labourers should understand that they are comrades in one cause, that their aims, though diverse, are not only not antagonistic, but are inextricably interlinked parts of one whole — that if you could multiply tenfold every peasant's means you would serve the country's interests but little did you not simultaneously elevate the mental and moral faculties, so as to secure a wise, prudent, and good use of the money, root out old customs involving its rapid dissipation, and confer such a political status as would enable the owners to preserve and protect their newly found wealth — that no great development of brain power is possible on empty stomachs and where men's whole energies have to be devoted to simply satisfying the cravings of these, and that even if possible it would become a positive evil if unaccompanied by moral or spiritual evolution, and by means for gratifying the necessarily resulting political aspirations — that moral culture is best fostered, mankind being what it is, by removing from men's paths those terrible temptations to evil engendered by poverty, hunger, and natural envy of those more fortunate, and that the hope of attaining to the exercise of political functions is often one of the strongest incitements to a higher morality — that the extinction of a few evil customs will avail little without a thorough recast of the social framework, a thing only possible as the result of a general advance along all the other lines, physical, intel- lectual, psychical and political — and that lastly, nations in the long run always get precisely as good a Government as they deserve, and that no nominal political enfranchisement will in practice prove more than a change of evils unless such an advance has simultaneously or antecedently been made along all these other lines as shall render the country qualified to assimilate its improved political status.
Now, whether rightly or wrongly, it seems to me that a sporadic crusade such as the one you have now undertaken — not to capture the Holy Land, but merely to destroy one little stronghold of the infidels therein — is an utter waste of power, in so much that even if crowned with momentary success, it could have no permanent result while the hills that command it and its water-supply are still in the hands of the enemy. It would be like our capture of the Redan before the Mamelon was in our allies' hands.
And I think further that such isolated crusades have a distinct tendency to intensify that sectarianism in Reform which, as I have already said, seems to me the chief obstacle to progress. And when you threaten, as you often do, to abandon all other work and devote for the rest of your life your great abilities and energies, your fearless honesty and fiery enthusiasm, to these two comparatively minor matters, you seem to me, I confess, like a man who should concentrate all his attention and efforts upon a single plank in the bottom of his ship, leaving all the rest to wind and wave, to rock and rot, as Chance may will it.
No doubt specialization goes hand in hand with develop- ment ; but national reform here is still in the amoebic stage, and no such specialization as this would imply is as yet practicable. We all remember the statesman who was said to have given to a Party the talents designed to serve man- kind. Would you, following this erring example, give to two minor questions those powers designed to serve the national cause as a whole ? Believe me, it would be not only to inflict on your country an irreparable loss — for there is no other single man whose services she could less easily spare — but it would be a sin against your own soul, like his who hid his talent in the napkin.
One single example will bring home to any thinking mind the extent to which the country suffers, by 'this premature speciaHzation, and by the absence of co-operation and sympathy, and the lack of unity of purpose, amongst even true would-be reformers, working in different, and even in the same directions. In this age of materialism, when ex- isting faiths. Eastern and Western, seem alike losing all vital hold upon the hearts of their votaries, when the glamour of this material world seems to blind mankind to the ex- istence of other states, of which this present life is but an infinitesimal fragment — when *' eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die," seems almost the only living creed — there is no one more important question than that of the moral and spiritual culture of the nation. Morality is the sole rock upon which national prosperity can be securely based — all other foundations are but as shifting sands. The old safeguards of national morality here are crumbling into ruin. To teach men once more the beauty and happiness of pure lives and pure thoughts is perhaps the greatest requisite of all if that national regeneration, for which we all sigh, is ever to be more than a dream. Throughout the length and breadth of the land are scat- tered, thinly it is true, men, the salt of the earth, Hindus, Christians, Mohammedans and votaries of other innumerable sects — men to whom pure lives and lofty aspirations are as the air to us grosser mortals ; who give their time and hearts, and would gladly give their lives, to leading other souls along the holy paths that they have trodden to find peace — men who have really one common object, the moral exaltation of their fellows — men who if they could only widen their sympathies and lovingly band themselves in united action with all those fellow-labourers whose real aim, like their own, is the purification of mankind, would in twenty years raise the whole tone of national thought — but who, working on, each in his sectarian groove, not only without aiding, not only without sympathy for, but too often in positive hostility towards those whom they should hail as comrades and brothers, live and die leaving scarcely a foot-print on the soul-sands of the age.
Who can reckon the incalculable loss that the country sustains by this persistent antagonism of forces, which com- bined, would transform the nation in a single generation ? Let us, who labour on a humbler plane, beware how we allow ourselves to drift into analogous dissociation, and pinning our faiths on no one particular reform, no one special panacea, even if we have not ourselves the oppor- tunity of working in all directions, at least aid, sympathize, and co-operate with all who, in any form and in any direction, labour in singleness of heart for the common weal.
The time has not yet come when any of us, few as we are, can rightly take up a single branch of one of many questions and devote to that our entire thoughts and time, careless of all else. Your pet subjects are but side branches of the great question of elevating the status of our women, and cannot, it seems to me, be dissociated, theoretically or practically, from that. The majority of the opposition with which your proposals have been met in certain Native tircles has had its origin in the conviction that our women nd girls are not yet sufficiently educated to enable any great change in the social customs which regulate their lives to be safely made, at present.
To me personally, the promotion of female education (using the word in its broadest sense) as necessarily antece- dent to the thorough eradication of the grievous evils you so forcibly depict, appears a more important and imme- diately pressing question than those selected by you.
I cannot plead guilty to being a benevolent let-alonist. I desire to press forward along all the lines, but I am averse to spasmodic onslaughts in isolated directions and I believe that for our entire v^^ork, and a fortiori for each fragmentary portion thereof, festina lente is the true motto.
Having alluded to female education, pardon me if before closing I say a few words on a subject too generally over- looked, viz., the intimate connection that exists between the elevation of the status of our women, and that political enfran- chisement for which alone so many of our ablest co-workers think it worth while to labour ; it will illustrate my previous contention as to the essential one-ness of the cause of national reform. I will not argue with my Native friends, who twit me with Divorce Courts and Hill-station scandals, whether our modern so-called education does render European women as a whole less liable to fall. I will not argue with them as to whether, taking households by the million, there is more chastity in the East or the West. Thank God, I have known of thousands of pure households in both — and everywhere so long as this race of man exists, there will be weak women whom no education can touch, and wicked men, and whether there be more of these in this or that nation no mortal man is really qualified to judge ; and this moreover is wholly beyond the present question, since all will admit that a properly educated woman, whose mental and moral faculties have been thoroughly developed, must necessarily be less liable to err than one who remains uneducated. I by no means set up the average education of European girls as all that could be desired — all I ask for is a really good education for all Indian girls, and if the European system is defective let us improve upon it and adopt a more perfect one.
But what I do desire to make plain is that without the proper education of our females, without their elevation to their natural and rightful position, no great and permanent political progress can be hoped for. It is by such education alone that the national intellect can be completed and the East put in a position to compete fairly with the West.
As in the individual there are two brains whose harmonious co-operation is essential to the best mental work, so in the nation are there two intellects, the male and the/ female, whose equipoised interaction is indispensable to the evolution of a wise national conduct.
The male intellect, however cultivated, still remains imperfect until supplemented by that of the educated woman. Mill's essay on Liberty — his grandest work — owes its perfection, I firmly believe, as asserted by its author, to his long discussions of the subject with a highly educated lady. A nation whose women are uneducated, let its men have all possible culture, still goes into the world's battle with only one arm.
The superiority of Western over Eastern nations (and in many matters this is beyond dispute) is mainly due to the fact that in the former both the female and the male mind are brought to bear upon all great pubhc questions. Ladies, it is true, do not as yet sit in the House of Commons, but there is not a vote taken in that House on any important national question which has not been fully as much influenced by the female as by the male minds of the educated classes.
In a despotically governed country where the Sovereign associates with himself one or more highly intellectual, if perhaps only self-educated women, the evil of the general mental degradation of the females of the country may not so distinctly and directly react on the public policy ; but where Iby the spread of liberal institutions the popular voice •becomes, as it is even here becoming day by day, a more Lnd more powerful factor in the direction of public affairs the community which retains its women uneducated and deliberately deprives itself of their intellectual co-operation, can never hope to compete successfully with others in which public policy is the joint product of the cultivated male and female mind.
Political reformers of all shades of opinion should never forget that unless the elevation of the female element in the nation proceeds pari passu with their work, all their labour for the political enfranchisement of the country will prove vain ; and in so far as the two customs against which you righteously inveigh tend inter alia to depress that element, all are bound to sympathize with and support you in your proposed reforms : not overrating their importance, not pressing them too furiously before their time is ripe, but accepting them as two, amongst several, reforms by which our women must be raised to their rightful status, before India, whether still affiliated to England or not, can become either truly prosperous or truly free.
In conclusion I must apologize for the length of this rambling letter r.nd even more so for presuming thus to differ in some degree from one so much better entitled to speak with authority than myself. But you insisted on having my thoughts on the subject, and right or wrong, in all their natural ruggedness, you have them now.
Yours sincerely,
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