WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
meal. She is encompassed by pious ceremony and ritual; and respect and even honour are accorded to her. But she must not be profaned by the touch of a man-surgeon, though her life is in peril. These anomalies in the treatment of Hindu women appear highly singular to Western people, who tend to outgrow their traditions more easily than the Orientals. Modern science, with its hostility to belief in fables, superstitions, and magic, is not in harmony with the credulous, imaginative Hindu outlook and veneration for old customs.
The position of widows is as unfortunate as that of childless women, or the mothers of girls. There are millions of widows in India, many of them young, and well constituted for re-marriage and the functions of motherhood. Hinduism forbids the second union, though the law is being modified. A girl widowed at eighteen must remain celibate for the rest of her life. Judged from a racial hygienic standpoint alone, this restriction is injurious. The enforcement of widowhood for the whole of the puerperal life of a wife, whose husband has died while she was barely a woman, is, in both an individual and social sense, open to numerous objections.
Miss Noble might contend that the widow is perfectly resigned to her celibacy; that she is more than content in her loneliness. She is "a sacred mystery."
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