Women Under Polygamy/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
THE WOMEN OF INDIA
Among the people of our Indian Empire exist all forms of the sex-relationship from polyandry to polygamy. For the student of marriage customs this is a great field for inquiry. India fascinates and bewilders.
In this vast peninsula, we rule over a population of over two-hundred-and-ninety-four millions; a people speaking more than one-hundred-and-forty languages, and adhering to differing traditions and practices. Seventy per cent. of the natives are followers of the Hindu religion. There are over sixty-two millions of Mohammedans; over nine millions Buddhists, mostly in Burma; and more than two millions professing the Christian creed. Besides these believers, there are thousands of Sikhs, Parsees, Jains, and small sects holding various tenets.
The popular faith of India is Hinduism, a creed of pantheism mingled with the worship of many deities. Dominating all other gods is the universal Brahman. The religion is almost incomprehensible to the Western mind. Its keynote is a philosophic pessimism. Life must be endured; existence is not a boon in itself. "In the union of soul and body lies the source of human misery."
In India there are some millions of widows of the Hindu faith, forbidden by religion to marry a second husband. There are one thousand men to about nine hundred women. Marriage is enjoined upon all adults except widows and religious celibates.
The ethics of Hinduism may perhaps be summed up in this passage from the sacred writings:—
"Joy, pleasure, nobility, enlightenment and happiness also, absence of stinginess, absence of fear, contentment, faith, forgiveness, courage, harmlessness, equability, truth, straightforwardness, absence of wrath, absence of calumniation, purity, dexterity, valour."
Parents and women are to be held in honour:—
"By honouring his father, his mother, and his teacher, all that ought to be done by man is accomplished; that is clearly the highest duty; every other act is a subordinate duty."
"Where women are honoured there the gods are pleased, but where they are not honoured, no sacred rite yields rewards."
"He only is a perfect man who consists of three persons united—his wife, himself, and his offspring."
"He who has unjustly forsaken his wife shall put on an ass's skin with the hair turned outside, and lay in seven houses, saying: 'Give alms to him who forsook his wife.' That shall be his livelihood for six months."
Miss Flora Annie Steel, who possesses an intimate knowledge of Indian life, has said that the average British view of the position of women under Hinduism is "simply appalling" for its ignorance. This author declares that she never knows whether "to laugh or cry at—let us say—a Zenana, meeting in some sleepy, self-satisfied, little English village, where a select company of British matrons and spinsters sit in judgment on polygamy with an inward reminiscence of Bluebeard, or shudder at suttee as if they could see no beauty in self-sacrifice."
In 1906, Margaret E. Noble, the Sister Nivedita, published a highly interesting book of intimate Hindu impressions entitled "The Web of Indian Life." The picture that she draws of the status of the Indian woman is fascinating, and, to Western minds, very astonishing. There is no doubt that the writer's lively prejudice has inspired her enthusiastic praise for everything Indian. She applauds the system of the sheltered life for women, and smiles at our English ideal of sex-equality.
Men walk alone in the streets of the cities of India. Notwithstanding, Miss Noble asserts that women have quite as much "equality" here as falls to the lot of the average single woman "living alone, or following professional careers, in the suburbs of London and other Western cities."
Self-effacement and utter unselfishness is the ideal of the devout Hindu wife and mother. Husbands and wives do not "address each other in the presence of others"; and "a wife may not name her husband, much less praise him." According to the Sister Nivedita, this reticence is based on a sense of what is called "good form" in England, and is no proof of a lack of respect for womanhood, marriage, and family life. The Indian wife adores her husband with "passionate reverence"; and in return her husband offers her boundless tenderness and protection. He was taught to honour and love his mother; he is equally reverential and affectionate towards his wife and the mother of his children. The wife is the happy, willing servitor, companion, and disciple of the husband. She kneels to him and touches his feet when he pleases her. It is not equality. "No," says Miss Noble. "But who talks of a vulgar equality, asks the Hindu wife, when she may have instead the unspeakable blessedness of offering worship?"
Do the men of India abuse this worship and the humility on the part of their wives? The author of "The Web of Indian Life" declares very insistently that they do not. A Hindu husband appears to be as admirable in the performance of all his conjugal obligations as his lovingly submissive spouse. Miss Noble reiterates again and again the blessedness of the Hindu woman's position in the home, until we are feign to believe that she is the happiest and most fortunate woman in the world.
Very little is said concerning polygamy. We read that a man may contract a second marriage if his wife remains sterile after the end of seven years, and that the first wife is by no means averse to this arrangement. Polygamy, according to Miss Noble, is rather rare in Hindu society. She has very little to say upon the question of the marriage of children to adult men.
"The courtesy of husbands to their wives is quite unfailing amongst Hindus," writes Miss Noble. "'Thou shalt not strike a woman even with a flower,' is the proverb. His wife's desire for companionship on a journey is the first claim on a man. And it is very touching to notice how, as years go on, he leans more and more to the habit of addressing her as 'O, thou mother of our son!' and presenting her to newcomers as 'my children's mother.' thus reflecting upon her his worship of motherhood."
The admiration, professed so sincerely by Miss Noble, for the marriage system of the Hindu religion is shared by an English lady known to me, who is the wife of a high-caste Hindu. She considers the unrest of the Western women who are battling so vigorously for rights, freedom, votes, and full equality with men, a tragic spectacle. English women seem to her to miss all that is best in life, all the precious things that lie within their grasp, in their eagerness to take a share in government. I cannot agree entirely with this lady. But there is a serene philosophy in her recommendation of "the sheltered life for women," which cannot be ignored.
In the West the sexes are at present torn almost to universal dissension with strife, distrust and recriminations. Apparently such antagonism is inconceivable to the mind of the loving, contented Hindu woman, who asks for nothing more than a perpetual deepening of her affection and solicitude for husband and children. She gains all by losing herself. It is nobler to serve than to lead, to heed than to teach, to obey than to command. Such is the highest ideal of the Eastern woman. "Vulgar equality" contrasted with this perfect happiness in the consciousness of the finer development of the emotions is a worthless toy. It is the woman's noblest part to give herself unselfishly and always, that her husband may love and praise her, and her children rise up and call her blessed among women.
Such self-abnegation is the keynote of Hindu feminism. How different from the cult of Western emancipation. And yet may not the West learn from the East, and the East from the West, in this vital question of the position of women? I speak as a whole-hearted supporter of the movement for the advancement of women in social life and politics.
"I desire not paradise itself if thou art not satisfied with me!" cries the divine Hindu spouse to her husband. "She is a true wife who gladdens her husband," says Raja Shekhara in the "Karpura Manjari."
I am indebted to Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy for an excellent statement of the status of the Hindu wife, in his pamphlet, "Sati: A Vindication of the Hindu Woman," printed in 1913. The writer quotes from the "Laws of Manu," the following explicit injunction upon women:—
"Though destitute of virtue, or seeking pleasure elsewhere, or devoid of good qualities, a husband must be constantly worshipped as a god by a faithful wife. … If a wife obeys her husband, she will for that reason alone be exalted in heaven."
"The production of children, the nurture of those born, and the daily life of men, of these matters woman is visibly the cause."
"She who controlling her thoughts, speech, and acts, violates not her duty to her lord, dwells with him after death in heaven, and in this world is called by the virtuous a faithful wife."
The enforcement of such reverence for husbands is quite foreign and contradictory to the conception of marriage among cultured women in the Western nations. It appears to cut at the very basis of sex-equality, and to undermine all our advanced principles of liberty for women, "freedom for wives to live their own lives," and the higher status of women generally. Dr. Coomaraswamy, anticipating this criticism, states shrewdly: "Let us at once acknowledge, with all competent observers, that the power of women over men is far greater in India than in any industrial state in the West."
This power of the Hindu women is exerted not, as in Europe, by the young and attractive, but by mothers, grandmothers and widows. Manu declares: "The mother exceedeth a thousand fathers in the right to reverence, and in the function of teacher." "I cannot emphasize too strongly," says the writer of the pamphlet, "the fact of this influence of mothers in India, not merely over children and in household matters, but over grown-up men, to whom their word is law. One might almost say that the Native States are ruled by the queen-mothers from behind the purdah."
Wherever we find goddesses in a religion, there certainly exists a higher measure of esteem for women than among the faiths honouring only male deities. Half the Hindus revere Shakti, the female symbol of deity, and they address their god as She. Shiva is a personification of the male, Uma of the female. This goddess, says Dr. Coomaraswamy, is "the ideal Hindu wife, and the first Sati, and shy beyond words; she is Shiva's humblest servant, desiring no good in heaven or earth beyond his welfare. She is in truth an image of Indian woman."
The practice of Suttee, or Sati, has puzzled and shocked the British rulers of India. We cannot understand the Hindu woman's attitude to love and marriage without a careful examination of the origin and meaning of this custom.
When Bramah died, one of his devoted wives sacrificed herself that she might join him in heaven. Voluntarily and gladly she went to the burning pyre. This example was adopted by devout widows. Seven hundred have immolated themselves by burning, in one year, in Bengal alone.[1] They died calmly, even happily, showing extraordinary fortitude. Young wives of less than twenty years of age have relinquished life, and bade farewell to their cherished children and dearest relatives, in obedience to the overwhelming impulse of self-destruction as a noble and pious act of devotion to a husband.
English law-makers saw in this practice only the survival of "barbarism." They missed the symbolic meaning, the deep, passionate joy of the sacrifice, and the expression of a love stronger than death. Suttee was forbidden by a law of 1829; but the deep-rooted custom was not entirely abolished. The highest form of human self-sacrifice, as it is described by Sir Alfred C. Lyall, was the last custom to disappear in parts of India.
It has been supposed, quite incorrectly, that men imposed Sati upon women. The rite was introduced entirely by widows of devout faith and strong conjugal affection. Dr. Coomaraswamy traces the custom back to more than a thousand years before the Christian era, and quotes, from an old Persian author, the story of a Hindu girl who gave herself to the flames on the very day of the death of her betrothed.
Sir Frederick Halliday recounted how a widow, desiring to die by the Sati sacrifice, demonstrated to him her indifference to the agony of burning. She held her finger in a lamp "until it was burnt and twisted like a quill pen held in the flame of a candle." Sir F. Halliday, having witnessed this woman's marvellous power of endurance, felt bound to accord his permission to the petitioner to join the spirit of her dead husband.
Hinduism is the dynamic that shapes the emotion and the thought of these most feminine of women. Their crown is Love. They give life and joy.
"Conjunction with me renders life long;
[2]I give youth when I enter upon amorousness."
Buddhism, the other great ancient creed of India, has, in many of its doctrines and parables, a close similarity to the teaching of Christianity. It teaches self-renunciation, a tranquillity of the spirit, toleration, forgiveness and chastity. Gautama counsels filial respect and the love of wife and child. He insists upon self-restraint and purity:—[3]
"Let the wise man avoid an unchaste life as a burning heap of coals; not being able to live a life of chastity, let him not transgress with another man's wife."
Ananda, a disciple, asks Gautama how he is to conduct himself in regard to women.
"Do not see them," is the reply.
"But if we should see them, what are we to do?"
"Abstain from speech."
"But if they should speak to us, lord, what are we to do?"
"Keep wide awake."
The Indian followers of the teaching of Zoroaster, or Zara-thustra, form a highly intellectual cult. This is the most rational of all the religions of our Indian Empire; for it is almost free from myths concerning miracles, and its ethics are singularly comprehensive and liberal.
Among the Parsees, the modern exponents of the Zoroastrian philosophy, murder, infanticide, adultery—committed by men as well as women—lying, slander, theft and perjury are condemned positively. Kindness to animals is expressly inculcated. In this faith we shall look for an ideal of equality between the sexes. And not in vain; the Parsee moral writings teach plainly that the woman is the equal of the man. The higher education of women is encouraged, and there are women doctors in the community.[4] Among Parsee women are the most zealous advocates of social and educational reforms among their sex.
The marriage customs of the Nairs of Malabar are especially interesting, as they afford an example of the persistence of the Maternal Family. Elie Reclus gives us an excellent study of these people in his "Primitive Folk." He describes the Nairs as tall, handsome, vigorous men of olive skin; they are splendid warriors, and athletes. The women are as lissome and fine-featured as the men. They have very long dark hair, which they dress with much care. Their manners are amiable.
In this community we have a curious instance of polyandry and polygamy side by side. An opulent Nair is usually a polygamist; the artisans and the poor generally are polyandrists. The same system prevails in Ceylon. Among the Nairs two or three brothers marry one woman. Their sisters marry, but live afterwards as "free lances." The whole system of the sex relationship is extremely complicated; but it is a pregnant fact that the mother is strictly the head of the family.
A son living with his mother desires to possess a home of his own. As the chief of his house, he takes his sister, who is superior to his wife in domestic control. Love between the sexes is a passing matter; love between brother and sister is a deeper and enduring emotion.
Reclus states that the Brahmins tried to suppress the marriage custom of the Nairs. Nowadays the Kouline Brahmins perform for the Nair women an amorous rite, their services being in great request among the maidens of low caste. In other parts of India the priest is solicited for this consecration, notably in Burma. By this means, according to Reclus, the Brahmins hold religious sway over the Nairs, who refuse, however, to accept their political rule.
"Proud and haughty warrior though he be, the Nair cheerfully obeys his mother, assisted by his uncle, and seconded by his eldest sister; the trio manage the common property, and he who participates in it renders them an account of his exploits and achievements."[5]
The Todas of the Neilgherries practise a mixed polyandry and polygamy. "Each wife had several husbands, all brothers, and each husband several wives, all sisters. Later, three men made shift with two girls, or five with three." Polyandry appears to be waning rapidly among the Todas, and Reclus says that every well-to-do man in the tribe desires a wife of his own.
Among the Rajputs women have a notably high status. This fine race descends from early immigrants; the men are very vigorous and hardy, with handsome features, and the women are equally strong and physically beautiful.
Love among the Rajputs is an emotional and romantic passion. There is a tradition of chivalry, and men often engage in combats for the winning of brides. Masculine devotion to women is very deep and tender, and women are esteemed as almost divine.
The marriage ceremonies are simple and charming. The bride weaves garlands of flowers, which she hangs around the bridegroom's neck. Among the Rajputs there are marked traces of the matriarchal system. Marriage is in no sense oppressive to women, and true sex-equality seems to exist. No husband ever conducts a business or domestic affair without seeking the counsels and proposals of his wife. Undoubtedly, where men and women work side by side in common avocations, there is a high regard for the intelligence and judgment of women, as well as conjugal equality.
A testimony as to the power of the mothers in India is given by Father Elwin,[6] a missionary. He says that mothers of families direct the religious beliefs of their children, and rule in all matters over even their grown-up sons.
If the condition of the wife under Hinduism is inferior to that of married women under Christianity, which has been questioned by some English writers, her status as a mother is one of supreme authority. Throughout the Indian Empire, the mother is the practical, actual head of the family.
- ↑ Hadyn "Dictionary of Dates," 5th ed. Dr. Coomaraswamy states that perhaps a thousand widows in all have committed Sati.
- ↑
"Woman is man's better half,
From woman springs the liberator."
Woman is man's bosom friend,
Woman is redemption's source,
Old Hindu Poem. - ↑ Buddhism favoured monogamy and chastity. "The percentage of illegitimate births is low in those countries where the influence of Buddhism has been greatest, and its canonical literature is chaste throughout."—T. W. Rhys David. Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. III., "Chastity."
- ↑ See "A Modern Zoroastrian," Samuel Laing.
- ↑ "Primitive Folk."
- ↑ "Fifty-four Years in Poona City."