This site is full of FREE ebooks - Project Gutenberg Australia
Title: Mother India Author: Katherine Mayo * A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook * eBook No.: 0300811h.html Edition: 1 Language: English Character set encoding: Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit (html) Date first posted: May 2003 Date most recently updated: May 2003 Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular paper edition. Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this file. This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Title: Mother India Author: Katherine Mayo
Photo by M.
Moyca Newell THE UNTOUCHABLE "Just stood in the doorway."
(See page 163.)
AUTHOR OF "THE ISLES OF
FEAR"
NEW YORK
1937
To
THE PEOPLES OF
INDIA
AND TO
THAT INDIAN FIELD
LABORER
WHO ONCE, BY AN ACT
OF
HUMANITY,
SAVED
MY LIFE
"This is a sketch of the
ordinary course of manners, administration, and customs, so far as
appeared to me to be possible. ... A description cannot be so
complete but that some one may say that he has on one occasion seen
or learned something contrary to it; and consequently when such
chatterers talk, my [readers] will recognize that absolute
concordance is impossible of attainment."
The Remonstratie
of Francisco Pelsaert Being the Confidential Report of Francisco
Pelsaert, Agent of the Dutch East India Company, stationed in Agra
from 1620 to 1627. Lately printed in English, under title of
Jahangir's India.
Foreword
It would be a great
pleasure to thank, by name, the many persons, both Indian and
English, who have so courteously facilitated my access to
information, to records, and to those places and things that I
desired to see for myself. But the facts that it was impossible to
forecast the conclusions I should reach, and that for these
conclusions they are in no way responsible, make it improper to
embarrass them now by connecting them personally
therewith.
For this reason the
manuscript of this book has not been submitted to any member of the
Government of India, nor to any Briton or Indian connected with
official life. It has, however, been reviewed by certain public
health authorities of international eminence who are familiar with
the Indian field.
I may, on the other
hand, express my deep indebtedness to my two friends, Miss M. Moyca
Newell and Harry Hubert Field, the one for her constant and
invaluable collaboration, the other for a helpfulness, both in India
and here, beyond either limit or thanks.
K. M.
BEDFORD HILLS NEW
YORK
[ix]
Table of
Contents
Part I
CHAPTER
INTRODUCTION: THE BUS
TO MANDALAY 3
I. THE ARGUMENT
11
II. "SLAVE MENTALITY"
19
III. MARBLES AND TOPS
33
IV. EARLY TO MARRY AND
EARLY TO DIE 42
V. SPADES ARE SPADES
51
Part II
INTERLUDE: THE GRAND
TRUNK
ROAD 65
VI. THE EARTHLY GOD
68
VII. WAGES OF SIN
8I
VIII. MOTHER INDIA
90
IX. BEHIND THE VEIL
111
X. WOMAN THE SPINSTER
123
Part
III
INTERLUDE: THE BRAHMAN
145
XI. LESS THAN MEN
150
XII. BEHOLD, A LIGHT!
164
XIII. GIVE ME OFFICE OR
GIVE ME DEATH 178
XIV. WE BOTH MEANT WELL
189
XV. "WHY IS LIGHT
DENIED?" 199
XVI. A COUNSEL OF
PERFECTION 211
CONTENTS
Part
IV
CHAPTER
INTERLUDE: MR. GANDHI
221
XVII. THE SIN OF THE
SALVATION ARMY 223
XVIII. THE SACRED COW
235
XIX. THE QUALITY OF
MERCY 250
XX. IN THE HOUSE OF HER
FRIENDS 262
XXI. HOME OF STARK WANT
270
XXII. THE REFORMS
289
XXIII. PRINCES OF INDIA
306
Part
V
INTERLUDE: INTO THE
NORTH 321
XXIV. FIREBRANDS TO
STRAW 324
XXV. SONS OF THE PROPHET
339
XXVI. THE HOLY CITY
355
XXVII. THE WORLD-MENACE
366
XXVIII. "QUACKS WHOM WE
KNOW" 379
XXIX. PSYCHOLOGICAL
GLIMPSES THROUGH
THE ECONOMIC LENS
389
XXX. CONCLUSION 409
APPENDIX 411 INDEX 425
PART I
Introduction
THE BUS TO
MANDALAY
Calcutta, second largest
city in the British Empire, spread along the Ganges called Hooghly,
at the top of the Bay of Bengal. Calcutta, big, western, modern, with
public buildings, monuments, parks, gardens, hospitals, museums,
University, courts of law, hotels, offices, shops, all of which might
belong to a prosperous American city; and all backed by an Indian
town of temples, mosques, bazaars and intricate courtyards and alleys
that has somehow created itself despite the rectangular lines shown
on the map. In the courts and alleys and bazaars many little
bookstalls, where narrow-chested, near-sighted, anaemic young Bengali
students, in native dress, brood over piles of fly-blown Russian
pamphlets.
Rich Calcutta, wide-open
door to the traffic of the world and India, traffic of bullion, of
jute, of cotton --of all that India and the world want out of each
other's hands. Decorous, sophisticated Calcutta, where decorous and
sophisticated people of all creeds, all colors and all costumes go to
Government House Garden Parties, pleasantly to make their bows to
Their Excellencies, and pleasantly to talk good English while they
take their tea and ices and listen to the regimental band.
You cannot see the
street from Government House
MOTHER
INDIA
Gardens, for the walls
are high. But if you could, you would see it filled with
traffic--motor traffic, mostly--limousines, touring cars, taxis and
private machines. And rolling along among them now and again, a sort
of Fifth Avenue bus, bearing the big-lettered label, "Kali
Ghat."
This bus, if you happen
to notice it, proceeds along the parkside past the Empire Theater,
the various clubs, St. Paul's Cathedral, past the Bishop's House, the
General Hospital, the London Missionary Society's Institution, and
presently comes to a stop in a rather congested quarter, which is its
destination as advertised.
"Kali Ghat"--"place of
Kali"--is the root-word of the name Calcutta. Kali is a Hindu
goddess, wife of the great god Siva, whose attribute is destruction
and whose thirst is for blood and death-sacrifice. Her spiritual
domination of the world began about five thousand years ago, and
should last nearly four hundred and thirty-two thousand years to
come.
Kali has thousands of
temples in India, great and small. This of Calcutta is the private
property of a family of Brahmans who have owned it for some three
centuries. A round hundred of these, "all sons of one father," share
its possession today. And one of the hundred obligingly led me, with
a Brahman friend, through the precincts. Let him be called Mr.
Haldar, for that is the family's name.
But for his white
petticoat-drawers and his white toga, the usual Bengali costume, Mr.
Haldar might
THE BUS TO
MANDALAY
have been taken for a
well-groomed northern Italian gentleman. His English was polished and
his manner entirely agreeable.
Five hundred and ninety
acres, tax free, constitute the temple holding, he said. Pilgrims
from far and near, with whom the shrine is always crowded, make money
offerings. There are also priestly fees to collect. And the
innumerable booths that shoulder each other up and down the
approaches, booths where sweetmeats, holy images, marigold flowers,
amulets, and votive offerings are sold, bring in a sound
income.
Rapidly cleaving a way
through the coming and going mass of the devotees, Mr. Haldar leads
us to the temple proper. A high platform, roofed and pillared,
approached on three sides by tiers of steps of its own length and
width. At one end, a deep, semi-enclosed shrine in which, dimly
half-visible, looms the figure of the goddess. Black of face she is,
with a monstrous lolling tongue, dripping blood. Of her four hands,
one grasps a bleeding human head, one a knife, the third,
outstretched, cradles blood, the fourth, raised in menace, is empty.
In the shadows close about her feet stand the priests
ministrant.
On the long platform before
the deity, men and women prostrate themselves in vehement
supplication. Among them stroll lounging boys, sucking lollypops
fixed on sticks. Also, a white bull-calf wanders, while one reverend
graybeard in the midst of it all, squatting cross-legged on the
pavement before a great book, lifts up a droning voice.
MOTHER
INDIA
"He," said Mr. Haldar,
"is reading to the worshipers from our Hindu mythology. The history
of Kali."
Of a sudden, a piercing
outburst of shrill bleating. We turn the corner of the edifice to
reach the open courtyard at the end opposite the shrine. Here stand
two priests, one with a cutlass in his hand, the other holding a
young goat. The goat shrieks, for in the air is that smell that all
beasts fear. A crash of sound, as before the goddess drums thunder.
The priest who holds the goat swings it up and drops it, stretched by
the legs, its screaming head held fast in a cleft post. The second
priest with a single blow of his cutlass decapitates the little
creature. The blood gushes forth on the pavement, the drums and the
gongs before the goddess burst out wildly. "Kali! Kali! Kali!" shout
all the priests and the suppliants together, some flinging themselves
face downward on the temple floor.
Meantime, and instantly,
a woman who waited behind the killers of the goat has rushed forward
and fallen on all fours to lap up the blood with her tongue --"in the
hope of having a child." And now a second woman, stooping, sops at
the blood with a cloth, and thrusts the cloth into her bosom, while
half a dozen sick, sore dogs, horribly misshapen by nameless
diseases, stick their hungry muzzles into the lengthening pool of
gore.
"In this manner we kill
here from one hundred and fifty to two hundred kids each day," says
Mr. Haldar with some pride. "The worshipers supply the
kids."
Now he leads us among
the chapels of minor deities
[6]
THE BUS TO
MANDALAY
--that of the little red
goddess of smallpox, side by side with her littler red twin who
dispenses chicken pox or not, according to humor; that of the
five-headed black cobra who wears a tiny figure of a priest beneath
his chin, to whom those make offerings who fear snakebite; that of
the red monkey-god, to whom wrestlers do homage before the bout; that
to which rich merchants and students of the University pray, before
confronting examinations or risking new ventures in trade; that of
"the Universal God," a mask, only, like an Alaskan totem. And then
the ever-present phallic emblem of Siva, Kali's husband. Before them
all, little offerings of marigold blossoms, or of red wads of
something in baskets trimmed with shells, both of which may be had at
the temple booths, at a price, together with sacred cakes made of the
dung of the temple bulls.
Mr. Haldar leads us
through a lane down which, neatly arranged in rows, sit scores of
more or less naked holy men and mendicants, mostly fat and hairy and
covered with ashes, begging. All are eager to be photographed.
Saddhus--reverend ascetics--spring up and pose. One, a madman,
flings himself at us, badly scaring a little girl who is being towed
past by a young man whose wrist is tied to her tiny one by the two
ends of a scarf. "Husband and new wife," says Mr. Haldar. "They come
to pray for a son."
We proceed to the temple
burning-ghat. A burning is in progress. In the midst of an open space
an oblong pit, dug in the ground. This is now half filled with sticks
of wood. On the ground, close by, lies a rather
MOTHER
INDIA
beautiful young Indian
woman, relaxed as though in a swoon. Her long black hair falls loose
around her, a few flowers among its meshes. Her forehead, her hands
and the soles of her feet are painted red, showing that she is
blessed among women, in that she is saved from widowhood--her husband
survives her. The relatives, two or three men and a ten-year-old boy,
standing near, seem uninterested. Crouching at a distance, one old
woman, keening. Five or six beggars like horse-flies nagging
about.
Now they take up the
body and lay it on the pile of wood in the pit. The woman's head
turns and one arm drops, as though she moved in her sleep. She died
only a few hours ago. They heap sticks of wood over her, tossing it
on until it rises high. Then the little boy, her son, walks seven
times around the pyre, carrying a torch. After that he throws the
torch into the wood, flames and smoke rush up, and the ceremony is
done.
"With a good fire
everything burns but the navel,'* explains Mr. Haldar. "That is
picked out of the ashes, by the temple attendants, and, with a gold
coin provided by the dead person's family, is rolled in a ball of
clay and flung into the Ganges. We shall now see the
Ganges."
Again he conducts us
through the crowds to a point below the temple, where runs a muddy
brook, shallow and filled with bathers. "This," says Mr. Haldar, "is
the most ancient remaining outlet of the Ganges. Therefore its
virtues are accounted great. Hundreds of thousands of sick persons
come here annually to
[8]
THE BUS TO
MANDALAY
bathe and be cured of
their sickness just as you see those doing now. Also, such as would
supplicate the goddess for other reasons bathe here first, to be
cleansed of their sins."
As the bathers finished
their ablutions, they drank of the water that lapped their knees.
Then most of them devoted a few moments to grubbing with their hands
in the bottom, bringing up handfuls of mud which they carefully
sorted over in their palms. "Those," said Mr. Haldar, "are looking
for the gold coins flung in from the burning-ghat. They
hope."
Meantime, up and down
the embankment, priests came and went, each leading three or four
kids, which they washed in the stream among the bathers and then
dragged back, screaming and struggling, toward the temple forecourt.
And men and women bearing water-jars, descending and ascending,
filled their jars in the stream and disappeared by the same
path.
"Each kid," continued
Mr. Haldar, "must be purified in the holy stream before it is slain.
As for the water-carriers, they bring the water as an offering. It is
poured over Kali's feet, and over the feet of the priests that stand
before her.'*
As Mr. Haldar took
leave of us, just at the rear of the outer temple wall, I noticed a
drain-hole about the size of a man's hand, piercing the wall at the
level of the ground. By this hole, on a little flat stone, lay a few
marigold flowers, a few rose-petals, a few pennies. As I looked,
suddenly out of the hole gushed a flow
[9]
MOTHER
INDIA
of dirty water, and a
woman, rushing up, thrust a cup under it and drank.
"That is our holy Ganges
water, rendered more holy by having flowed over the feet of Kali and
her priests. From the floor of the shrine it is carried here by this
ancient drain. It is found most excellent against dysentery and
enteric fever. The sick who have strength to move drink it here,
first having bathed in the Ganges. To those too ill to come, their
friends may carry it."
So we found our waiting
motor and rolled away, past the General Hospital, the Bishop's House,
the various Clubs, the Empire Theater, straight into the heart of
Calcutta in a few minutes' time.
"Why did you go to Kali
Ghat? That is not India. Only the lowesc and most ignorant of Indians
are Kali worshipers," said an English Theosophist, sadly, next
day.
I repeated the words to
one of the most learned and distinguished of Bengali Brahmans. His
comment was this:
"Your English friend is
wrong. It is true that in the lower castes the percentage of
worshipers of Kali is larger than the percentage of the worshipers of
Vishnu, perhaps because the latter demands some self-restraint, such
as abstinence from intoxicants. But hundreds of thousands of
Brahmans, everywhere, worship Kali, and the devotees at Kali Ghat
will include Hindus of all castes and conditions, among whom are
found some of the most highly educated and important personages of
this town and of India."
[10]
Chapter I
THE ARGUMENT
The area we know as
India is nearly half as large as the United States. Its population is
three times greater than ours. Its import and export trade--as yet
but the germ of the possible--amounted, in the year 1924-25, to about
two and a half billion dollars.1 And Bombay is but three
weeks' journey from New York.
Under present conditions
of human activity, whereby, whether we will or no, the roads that
join us to every part of the world continually shorten and multiply,
it would appear that some knowledge of main facts concerning so big
and today so near a neighbor should be a part of our intelligence and
our self-protection.
But what does the
average American actually know about India? That Mr. Gandhi lives
there; also tigers. His further ideas, if such he has, resolve
themselves into more or less hazy notions more or less unconsciously
absorbed from professional propagandists out of one camp or another;
from religious or mystical sources; or from tales and travel-books,
novels and verses, having India as their scene.
It was dissatisfaction
with this status that sent me to India, to see what a volunteer
unsubsidized, un-
1 Review
of the Trade of India In 1924-25, Department of Com-mercial
Intelligence and Statistics, Calcutta, 1926, p. 51.
[11]
MOTHER
INDIA
committed, and
unattached, could observe of common things in daily human
life.
Leaving untouched the
realms of religion, of politics, and of the arts, I would confine my
inquiry to such workaday ground as public health and its contributing
factors. I would try to determine, for example, what situation would
confront a public health official charged with the duty of stopping
an epidemic of cholera or of plague; what elements would work for and
against a campaign against hookworm; or what forces would help or
hinder a governmental effort to lower infant mortality, to better
living conditions, or to raise educational levels, supposing such
work to be required.
None of these points
could well be wrapped in "eastern mystery," and all concern the whole
family of nations in the same way that the sanitary practices of John
Smith of 23 Main Street concern Peter Jones at the other end of the
block.
Therefore, in early
October, 1925, I went to London, called at India Office, and, a
complete stranger, stated my plan.
"What would you like us
to do for you?" asked the gentlemen who received me.
"Nothing," I answered,
"except to believe what I say. A foreign stranger prying about India,
not studying ancient architecture, not seeking philosophers or poets,
not even hunting big game, and commissioned by no one, anywhere, may
seem a queer figure. Especially if that stranger develops an acute
tendency to
THE
ARGUMENT
ask questions. I should
like it to be accepted that I am neither an idle busybody nor a
political agent, but merely an ordinary American citizen seeking test
facts to lay before my own people."
To such Indians as I
met, whether then or later, I made the same statement. In the period
that followed, the introductions that both gave me, coupled with the
untiring courtesy and helpfulness alike of Indians and of British,
official or private, all over India, made possible a survey more
thorough than could have been accomplished in five times the time
without such aid.
"But whatever you do, be
careful not to generalize," the British urged. "In this huge country
little or nothing is everywhere true. Madras and Peshawar, Bombay and
Calcutta--attribute the things of one of these to any one of the
others, and you are out of court."
Those journeys I made,
plus many another up and down and across the land. Everywhere I
talked with health officers, both Indian and British, of all degrees,
going out with them into their respective fields, city or rural, to
observe their tasks and their ways of handling them. I visited
hospitals of many sorts and localities, talked at length with the
doctors, and studied conditions and cases. I made long sorties in the
open country from the North-West Frontier to Madras, sometimes
accompanying a district commissioner on his tours of checkered duty,
sometimes "sitting in" at village councils of peasants, or at Indian
municipal board
MOTHER
INDIA
meetings, or at court
sessions with their luminous parade of life. I went with English
nurses into bazaars and courtyards and inner chambers and over city
roofs,, visiting where need called. I saw, as well, the homes of the
rich. I studied the handling of confinements, the care of children
and of the sick, the care and protection of food, and the values
placed upon cleanliness. I noted the personal habits of various
castes and grades, in travel or at home, in daily life. I visited
agricultural stations and cattle-farms, and looked into the general
management of cattle and crops. I investigated the animal sanctuaries
provided by Indian piety. I saw the schools, and discussed with
teachers and pupils their aims and experience. The sittings of the
various legislatures, all-India and provincial, repaid attendance by
the light they shed upon the mind-quality of the elements
represented. I sought and found private opportunity to question
eminent Indians --princes, politicians, administrators, religious
leaders; and the frankness of their talk, as to the mental and
physical status and conditions of the peoples of India, thrown out
upon the background of my personal observation, proved an asset of
the first value.
And just this excellent
Indian frankness finally led me to think that, after all, there are
perhaps certain points on which--south, north, east and west--you
can generalize about India. Still more: that you can
generalize about the only matters in which we of the busy West will,
to a man, see our own concern.
John Smith of 23 Main
Street may care little
[Hi
Photo by Harry
Hubert Field THE GOAT-SLAYERS Priests in Kali-ghat (Sec
page 6.)
THE
ARGUMENT
enough about the
ancestry of Peter Jones, and still less about his religion, his
philosophy, or his views on art. But if Peter cultivates habits of
living and ways of thinking that make him a physical menace not only
to himself and his family, but to all the rest of the block, then
practical John will want details.
"Why," ask modern Indian
thinkers, "why, after all the long years of British rule, are we
still marked among the peoples of the world for our ignorance, our
poverty, and our monstrous death rate? By what right are light and
bread and life denied?"
"What this country
suffers from is want of initiative, want of enterprise, and want of
hard, sustained work," mourns Sir Chimanlal Setalvad.2 "We
rightly charge the English rulers for our helplessness and lack of
initiative and originality," says Mr. Gandhi.3
Other public men demand:
"Why are our enthusiasms so sterile? Why are our mutual pledges, our
self-dedications to brotherhood and the cause of liberty so soon
spent and forgotten? Why is our manhood itself so brief? Why do we
tire so soon and die so young?" Only to answer themselves with the
cry: "Our spiritual part is wounded and bleeding. Our very souls are
poisoned by the shadow of the arrogant stranger, blotting out our
sun. Nothing can be done--nothing, anywhere, but to mount the
political platform and faithfully denounce our tyrant until he takes
his flight. When Britain has abdicated and gone, then, and
not
2
Legislative Assembly Debates, 1923, Vol. VI, No. 6, p.
396.
3 Young
India, March 25, 1926, p. 112. This is Mr. Gandhi's weekly
publication from which much hereinafter will be quoted.
[15]
MOTHER
INDIA
till then, free men
breathing free air, may we turn our minds to the lesser needs of our
dear Mother India."
Now it is precisely at
this point, and in a spirit of hearty sympathy with the suffering
peoples, that I venture my main generality. It is this:
The British
administration of India, be it good, bad, or indifferent, has nothing
whatever to do with the conditions above indicated. Inertia,
helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying
power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness
of life-vigor itself--all are traits that truly characterize the
Indian not only of today, but of long-past history. All, furthermore,
will continue to characterize him, in increasing degree, until he
admits their causes and with his own two hands uproots them. His soul
and body are indeed chained in slavery. But he himself wields and
hugs his chains and with violence defends them. No agency but a new
spirit within his own breast can set him free. And his arraignments
of outside elements, past, present, or to come, serve only to deceive
his own mind and to put off the day of his deliverance.
Take a girl child twelve
years old, a pitiful physical specimen in bone and blood, illiterate,
ignorant, without any sort of training in habits of health. Force
motherhood upon her at the earliest possible moment. Rear her
weakling son in intensive vicious practices that drain his small
vitality day by day. Give him no outlet in sports. Give him habits
that make him, by the time he is thirty years of age, a decrepit and
querulous old
[16]
THE ARGUMENT
wreck--and will you ask
what has sapped the energy of his manhood?
Take a huge population,
mainly rural, illiterate and loving its illiteracy. Try to give it
primary education without employing any of its women as
teachers--because if you do employ them you invite the ruin of each
woman that you so expose. Will you ask why that people's education
proceeds slowly?
Take bodies and minds
bred and built on the lines thus indicated. Will you ask why the
death rate is high and the people poor?
Whether British or
Russians or Japanese sit in the seat of the highest; whether the
native princes divide the land, reviving old days of princely
dominance; or whether some autonomy more complete than that now
existing be set up, the only power that can hasten the pace of Indian
development toward freedom, beyond the pace it is traveling today, is
the power of the men of India, wasting no more time in talk,
recriminations, and shiftings of blame, but facing and attacking,
with the best resolution they can muster, the task that awaits them
in their own bodies and souls.
This subject has not, I
believe, been presented in common print. The Indian does not confront
it in its entirety; he knows its component parts, but avoids the
embarrassment of assembling them or of drawing their essential
inferences. The traveler in India misses it, having no occasion to
delve below the picturesque surface into living things as they are.
The British official will especially avoid it--will deprecate its
handling by
MOTHER
INDIA
others. His own daily
labors, since the Reforms of 1919, hinge upon persuasion rather than
upon command; therefore his hopes of success, like his orders from
above, impose the policy of the gentle word. Outside agencies working
for the moral welfare of the Indian seem often to have adopted the
method of encouraging their beneficiary to dwell on his own merits
and to harp upon others' shortcomings, rather than to face his faults
and conquer them. And so, in the midst of an agreement of silence or
flattery, you find a sick man growing daily weaker, dying, body and
brain, of a disease that only himself can cure, and with no one,
anywhere, enough his friend to hold the mirror up and show him
plainly what is killing him.
In shouldering this task
myself, I am fully aware of the resentments I shall incur: of the
accusations of muck-raking; of injustice; of material-mindedness; of
lack of sympathy; of falsehood perhaps; perhaps of prurience. But the
fact of having seen conditions and their bearings, and of being in a
position to present them, would seem to deprive one of the right to
indulge a personal reluctance to incur consequences.
Here, in the beginning
of this book, therefore, stands the kernel of what seems to me the
most important factor in the life and future of one-eighth of the
human race. In the pages to come will be found an attempt to widen
the picture, stretching into other fields and touching upon other
aspects of Indian life. But in no field, in no aspect, can that life
escape the influences of its inception.
[18]
Chanter II
"SLAVE MENTALITY"
"Let us not put off
everything until Swaraj 1 is attained and thus put off
Swaraj itself," pleads Gandhi. "Swaraj can be had only by brave and
clean people." 2
But, in these days of
the former leader's waned influence, it is not for such teachings
that he gains ears. From every political platform stream flaming
protests of devotion to the death to Mother India; but India's
children fit no action to their words. Poor indeed she is, and
sick--ignorant and helpless. But, instead of flinging their strength
to her rescue, her ablest sons, as they themselves lament, spend
their time in quarrels together or else lie idly weeping over their
own futility.
Meantime the British
Government, in administering the affairs of India, would seem to have
reached a set rate of progress, which, if it be not seriously
interrupted, might fairly be forecast decade by decade. So many
schools constructed, so many hospitals; so many furlongs of highway
laid, so many bridges built; so many hundred miles of irrigation
canal dug; so many markets made available; so many thousand acres of
waste land brought under homestead cultivation; so many wells sunk;
so much rice and wheat and millet
1
Self-government.
2 Young
India, Nov. 19, 1925, p. 399.
[19]
MOTHER
INDIA
and cotton added to the
country's food and trade resources.
This pace of advance,
compared to the huge needs of the country, or compared to like
movements in the United States or in Canada, is slow. To hasten it
materially, one single element would suffice--the hearty,
hard-working and intelligent devotion to the practical job itself, of
the educated Indian. Today, however, few signs appear, among Indian
public men, of concern for the status of the masses, while they curse
the one power which, however little to their liking, is doing
practically all of whatever is done for the comfort of sad old Mother
India.
The population of all India is reckoned, in round numbers, to be 319,000,000.3 Setting aside Indian States ruled by Indian princes, that of British India is 247,000,000. Among these peoples live fewer than 200,000 Europeans, counting every man, woman and child in the land, from the Viceroy down to the haberdasher's baby. The British personnel of the Army, including all ranks, numbers fewer than 60,000 men. The British Civilian cadre, inclusive of the Civil Service, the medical men, the engineers, foresters, railway administrators, mint, assay, educational, agricultural and veterinary experts, etc., etc., totals 3,432 men. Of the Indian Police Service, the British membership approximates 4,000. This last figure excludes the subordinate and provincial services, in which the number of Europeans is, however, negligible.
3 The Indian
Year Book, Times Press, Bombay, 1926, p. 13.
[20]
Representing the British
man-power in India today,
you therefore have these
figures:
Army ................
60,000
Civil Services
.......... 3,432
Police ................
4,000
67,432
This is the entire local
strength of the body to whose oppressive presence the Indian
attributes what he himself describes as the "slave mentality" of
247,000,000 human beings.
But one must not
overlook the fact that, back of Britain's day, India was ever either
a chaos of small wars and brigandage, chief preying upon chief, and
all upon the people; or else she was the flaccid subject of a foreign
rule. If, once and again, a native king arose above the rest and
spread his sway, the reign of his house was short, and never covered
all of India. Again and again conquering forces came sweeping through
the mountain passes down out of Central Asia. And the ancient Hindu
stock, softly absorbing each recurrent blow, quivered--and lay
still.
Many a reason is
advanced to account for these things, as, the devitalizing character
of the Hindu religion, with its teachings of the nothingness of
things as they seem, of the infinitude of lives--dreams all--to
follow this present seeming. And this element, beyond doubt, plays
its part. But we, as "hard-headed Americans," may, for a beginning,
put such matters aside while we consider points on which we shall
admit less
[21]
MOTHER
INDIA
room for debate and
where we need no interpreter and no glossary.
The whole pyramid of the
Hindu's woes, material and spiritual--poverty, sickness, ignorance,
political minority, melancholy, ineffectiveness, not forgetting that
subconscious conviction of inferiority which he forever bares and
advertises by his gnawing and imaginative alertness for social
affronts--rests upon a rock-bottom physical base. This base is,
simply, his manner of getting into the world and his sex-life
thenceforward.
In the great orthodox
Hindu majority, the girl looks for motherhood nine months after
reaching puberty * --or anywhere between the ages of fourteen, and
eight The latter age is extreme, although in some sections not
exceptional; the former is well above the average. Because of her
years and upbringing and because countless generations behind her
have been bred even as she, she is frail of body. She is also
completely unlettered, her stock of knowledge comprising only the
ritual of worship of the household idols, the rites of placation of
the wrath of deities and evil spirits, and the detailed ceremony of
the service of her husband, who is ritualistically her personal
god.
As to the husband, he
may be a child scarcely older than herself or he may be a widower of
fifty, when first he requires of her his conjugal rights. In any
case, whether from immaturity or from exhaustion, he has small
vitality to transmit. * Cf. post., p. 44.
The little mother goes
through a destructive pregnancy, ending in a confinement whose
peculiar tortures will not be imagined unless in detail
explained.
The infant that survives
the birth-strain--a feeble creature at best, bankrupt in bone-stuff
and vitality, often venereally poisoned, always predisposed to any
malady that may be afloat--must look to his child-mother for care.
Ignorant of the laws of hygiene, guided only by the most primitive
superstitions, she has no helpers in her task other than the older
women of the household, whose knowledge, despite their years, is
little greater than hers. Because of her place in the social system,
child-bearing and matters of procreation are the woman's one interest
in life, her one subject of conversation, be her caste high or low.
Therefore, the child growing up in the home learns, from earliest
grasp of word and act, to dwell upon sex relations.
Siva, one of the
greatest of the Hindu deities, is represented, on highroad shrines,
in the temples, on the little altar of the home, or in personal
amulets, by the image of the male generative organ, in which shape he
receives the daily sacrifices of the devout. The followers of Vishnu,
multitudinous in the south, from their childhood wear painted upon
their foreheads the sign of the function of generation.5
And although it is accepted that the ancient inventors of these and
kindred emblems intended them as aids to the climbing of spiritual
heights, practice and extremely 5 Fanciful interpretations
of this symbol are sometimes given.
M
MOTHER
INDIA
detailed narratives of
the intimacies of the gods, preserved in the hymns of the fireside,
give them literal meaning and suggestive power, as well as religious
sanction in the common mind.6
"Fools," says a modern
teacher of the spiritual sense of the phallic cult, "do not
understand, and they never will, for they look at it only from the
physical side." 7
But, despite the scorn
of the sage, practical observation in India forces one to the
conclusion that a re- , ligion adapted to the wise alone leaves most
of the sheep unshepherded.
And, even though the
sex-symbols themselves were not present, there are the sculptures and
paintings on temple walls and temple chariots, on palace doors and
street-wall frescoes, realistically demonstrating every conceivable
aspect and humor of sex contact; there are the eternal songs on the
lips of the women of the household; there is, in brief, the
occupation and preoccupation of the whole human world within the
child's vision, to predispose thought.
It is true that, to
conform to the International Convention for the Suppression of the
Circulation of and Traffic in Obscene Publications, signed in Geneva
on September 12, 1923, the Indian Legislature duly amended the Indian
Penal Code and Code of Criminal Procedure; and that this amendment
duly prescribes
6 Hindu
Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Abbé J. A. Dubois, 1821.
Edited and corrected by H. K. Beauchamp. Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1924, pp. Hi-112, 628-31, etc.
7 Swarni
Vivekananda, in Bhakti Yoga. For a brief and liberal
discussion of the topic see Chapter XIII in The Heart of
Aryavarta, by the Earl of Ronaldshay, Constable & Co., Ltd.,
London, 1925,
[24]
"SLAVE
MENTALITY"
set penalties for
"whoever sells, lets to hire, distributes, publicly exhibits . . .
conveys ... or receives profit from any obscene object, book,
representation or figure." But its enactment unqualified, although
welcome to the Muhammadans, would have wrought havoc with the
religious belongings, the ancient traditions and customs and the
priestly prerogatives dear to the Hindu majority. Therefore the
Indian Legislature, preponderantly Hindu, saddled the amendment with
an exception, which reads:8
This section does not
extend to any book, pamphlet, writing, drawing or painting kept or
used bona fide for religious purposes or any representation
sculptured, engraved, painted or otherwise represented on or in any
temple, or on any car used for the conveyance of idols, or kept or
used for any religious purpose.
In many parts of the
country, north and south, the little boy, his mind so prepared, is
likely, if physically attractive, to be drafted for the satisfaction
of grown men, or to be regularly attached to a temple, in the
capacity of prostitute. Neither parent as a rule sees any harm in
this, but is, rather, flattered that the son has been found
pleasing.
This, also, is a matter
neither of rank nor of special ignorance. In fact, so far are they
from seeing good and evil as we see good and evil, that the mother,
high caste or low caste, will practice upon her children --the girl
"to make her sleep well," the boy "to make
8 Indian
Penal Code, Act No. VIII of 1925, Section 292.
[25]
MOTHER
INDIA
him manly," an abuse
which the boy, at least, is apt to continue daily for the rest of his
life.
This last point should
be noticed. Highest medical authority in widely scattered sections
attests that practically every child brought under observation, for
whatever reason, bears on its body the signs of this habit. Whatever
opinion may be held as to its physical effects during childhood, its
effect upon early thought-training cannot be overlooked. And, when
constantly practiced during mature life, its devastation of body and
nerves will scarcely be questioned.
Ancient Hindu religious
teachings are cited to prove that the marriage of the immature has
not original Scriptural sanction. Text is flung against text, in each
recurrence of the argument. Pundits radically disagree. But against
the fog evoked in their dispute stand sharp and clear the facts of
daily usage. Hindu custom demands that a man have a legitimate son at
the earliest possible moment--a son to perform the proper religious
ceremonies at and after the death of the father and to crack the
father's skull on the funeral pyre, according to his caste's ritual.
For this reason as well as from inclination, the beginning of the
average boy's sexual commerce barely awaits his ability. Neither
general habit nor public opinion confines that commerce to his wife
or wives.
Mr. Gandhi has recorded
that he lived with his wife, as such, when he was thirteen years old,
and adds that if he had not, unlike his brother in similar case, left
her presence for a certain period each day
"SLAVE
MENTALITY"
to go to school, he
"would either have fallen a prey to disease and premature death, or
have led [thenceforth] a burdensome existence."
9
Forced up by western
influences, the subject of child marriages has been much discussed of
latter years and a sentiment of uneasiness concerning it is
perceptibly rising in the Indian mind. But as yet this finds small
translation into act, and the orthodox Hindu majority fights in
strength on the side of the ancient practice.
Little in the popular
Hindu code suggests self-restraint in any direction, least of all in
sex relations. "My father," said a certain eminent Hindu barrister,
one of the best men in his province, "taught me wisely, in my
boyhood, how to avoid infection."
"Would it not have been
better," I asked, "had he taught you continence?"
"Ah--but we know that to
be impossible."
"No question of right or
wrong can be involved in any aspect of such matters," a famous Hindu
mystic, himself the venerated teacher of multitudes, explained to me.
"I forget the act the moment I have finished it. I merely do it not
to be unkind to my wife, who is less illumined than I. To do it or
not to do it, signifies nothing. Such things belong only to the world
of illusion."
After the rough outline
just given, small surprise will meet the statement that from one end
of the land to the other the average male Hindu of thirty
years,
9 Young
India, Jan. 7, 1926.
[27]
MOTHER INDIA
provided he has means to
command his pleasure, is an old man; and that from seven to eight out
of every ten such males between the ages of twenty-five and thirty
are impotent. These figures are not random, and are affected by
little save the proviso above given ; a cultivator of the
soil, because of his poverty and his life of wholesome physical
exertion during a part of the year, is less liable than the man of
means, or the city dweller. A sidelight will be found by a glance
down the advertisement space of Indian-owned newspapers. Magical
drugs and mechanical contrivances, whether "for princes and rich men
only," or the humbler and not less familiar "32 Pillars of Strength
to prop up your decaying body for One Rupee 10 only,"
crowd the columns and support the facts.
In the Punjab alone,
between December 29, 1922, and December 4, 1925, Government
prosecuted vernacular papers eleven separate times for carrying
ultra-indecent advertisements. In seven cases the publications were
Hindu, thrice Muhammadan, once Sikh. The fines imposed ranged from
twenty-five to two hundred rupees, in one case plus ninety days
rigorous imprisonment. And it should be duly noted that such
prosecutions are never undertaken save where the advertisement gives
the grossest physical details in plain and unmistakable
language.
Following the eleventh
prosecution, Government
10 The
market value of the rupee fluctuates with other international
exchanges. But for the purpose of this book, one rupee is taken to be
worth 33 1/3 cents, three rupees one dollar, United States
currency.
[28]
"SLAVE
MENTALITY"
sent out a note to the
press informing the editors of this last conviction with its
relatively high fine, and advising them to scrutinize advertisements
before publication. Upon this suggestion the editorial comment of the
Brahman Samachar11 emitted an informing
ray:
Government wants that
such advertisements should not be published and that the editors
should go through them before publishing them. It would have been
better if the Information Bureau had published the obscene
advertisement along with its report so that the subject matter and
the manner of writing of the advertisement would have become
known.
Mr. Gandhi in his
newspaper has, it is true, recorded his disapproving cognizance.
"Drugs and mechanical contrivances," he writes, "may keep the body in
a tolerable condition, but they sap the mind."
12
But a far more
characteristic general attitude was that evidenced in the recent
action of a Hindu of high position whereby, before giving his
daughter in marriage, he demanded from his would-be son-in-law a
British doctor's certificate attesting that he, the would-be
son-in-law, was venereally infected. The explanation is simple: a
barren wife casts embarrassment upon her parents; and barren
marriages, although commonly laid to the wife, are often due to the
husband's inability. The father in this case was merely taking
practical precaution. He did not want his daughter, through fault not
her own, to be either supplanted or
11 A Hindu
paper of Lahore, issue of Feb. 16, 1926. 12 Young
India, Sept. 2, 1926, p. 309.
MOTHER
INDIA
returned upon his hands.
And no reproach whatevei attaches to the infected condition. No
public opinion works on the other side.
In case, however, of the
continued failure of the wife--any wife--to give him a child, the
Hindu husband has a last recourse; he may send his wife on a
pilgrimage to a temple, bearing gifts. And, it is affirmed, some
castes habitually save time by doing this on the first night after
the marriage. At the temple by day, the woman must beseech the god
for a son, and at night she must sleep within the sacred precincts.
Morning come, she has a tale to tell the priest of what befell her
under the veil of darkness.
"Give praise, O daughter
of honor!" he replies. "It was the god!"
And so she returns to
her home.
If a child comes, and it
lives, a year later she re~ visits the temple, carrying, with other
gifts, the hair from her child's head.13
Visitors to the temples
today sometimes notice a tree whose boughs are hung with hundreds of
little packets bound in dingy rags; around the roots of that
tree lies a thick mat of short black locks of human hair. It is the
votive tree of the god. It declares his benefits. To maintain the
honor of the shrine, the priests of this attribute are carefully
chosen from stout new brethren.
Every one, seemingly,
understands all about it. The utmost piety, nevertheless, truly
imbues the suppliant's mind and contents the family.
13 Cf. Hindu
Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, pp. 593-4.
"SLAVE
MENTALITY"
As to the general
subject, enough has now, perhaps, been said to explain and to
substantiate the Hindu's bitter lament of his own "slave
mentality."
It may also suggest why
he develops no real or lasting leaders, and why such men as from time
to time aspire to that rank are able only for a brief interval ta
hold the flitting minds of their followers.
The Indian perceives,
to a certain degree, the condition; but he rarely goes all the way to
the bottom thereof. Nor does he recognize its full significance and
relate it to its consequences. "Why do our best men--those who should
lead us--die so young?" he repeats despondently, implying that the
only possible answer is: "Karma--Kismet--an enigmatic fate." "The
average life of our inhabitants is 23 years," says the Hindu Doctor
Hariprasad 14-and lays the blame to bad sanitation.
Another characteristic Indian view is expressed by Manilal C.
Parekh,15 treating with dismay of the inroads of
tuberculosis--an infection that finds ideal encouragement in the
unresisting bodies and depleting habits of the people:
One need not think just
now of the causes of this frightful increase. . . . The present
writer wishes Swaraj to come to India as early as possible in order
that the people of the land may be able to deal with this
tremendously big problem. . . .
Thus they still
contrive to shift the burden and avoid the fact.
14 Young
India, Nov. 5, 1925, p. 375. 15 Servants of
India, April 8, 1926, p. 124.
[31]
MOTHER
INDIA
Yet it was one of the
most distinguished of Indian medical men, a Bombay Brahman, physician
and pathologist, who gave me the following appraisal:
My people continually
miss the association of their mental and material poverty with their
physical extravagance. Yet our undeniable race deterioration, our
natural lack of power of concentration, of initiative and of
continuity of purpose cannot be dissociated from our expenditure of
all vital energy on the single line of sexual indulgence.
Once more, then, one is
driven to the original conclusion: Given men who enter the world
physical bankrupts out of bankrupt stock, rear them through childhood
in influences and practices that devour their vitality; launch them
at the dawn of maturity on an unrestrained outpouring of their whole
provision of creative energy in one single direction; find them, at
the age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of
manhood, broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients; and need
you, while this remains unchanged, seek for other reasons why they
are poor and sick and dying and why their hands are too weak, too
fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of Government?
Chapter
III
MARBLES AND
TOPS
A study of the attitude
of the Government of India is to the subject of child-marriage shows
that, while steadily exercising persuasive pressure toward progress
and change, it has been dominated, always, by two general
principles--the first, to avoid as far as possible interference in
matters concerning the religion of the governed; the second, never to
sanction a law that cannot be enforced. To run counter to the
Indian's tenets as to religious duties, religious prohibitions, and
god-given rights has ever meant the eclipse of Indian reason in
madness, riot and blood. And to enforce a law whose keeping or
breaking must be a matter of domestic secrecy is, in such a country
as India at least, impossible.
Indian and English
authorities unite in the conviction that no law raising the marriage
age of girls would be today effectively accepted by the Hindu
peoples. The utmost to be hoped, in the present state of public
mentality, is, so these experienced men hold, a raising of the age of
consent within the marriage bonds. A step in this direction was
accomplished in 1891, when Government, backed by certain members of
the advanced section of the Indians, after a hot battle in
[33]
MOTHER
INDIA
which it was fiercely
accused by eminent orthodox Hindus of assailing the most sacred
foundations of the Hindu world, succeeded in raising that age from
ten years to twelve. In latter-day Legislative Assemblies the
struggle has been renewed, non-official Indian Assemblymen bringing
forward bills aiming at further advance only to see them, in one
stage or another, defeated by the strong orthodox maj
ority.
Upon such occasions, the
attitude of the Viceregal Government has consistently been one of
square approval of the main object in view, but of caution against
the passage of laws so much in advance of public opinion that their
existence can serve only to bring law itself into disrepute. This
course is the more obligatory because of the tendency of the Indian
public man to satisfy his sense of duty by the mere empty passing of
a law, without thought or intention or accepted responsibility as to
the carrying of his law into effect.
Not unnaturally,
Government's course pleases no one. From the one side rise
accusations of impious design against the sanctuaries of the faith;
from the other come charges as bitter but of an opposite
implication.
"What right have you to
separate man and wife?" cries an orthodox Brahman Assemblyman. "You
may lay your unholy hands on our ancient ideals and traditions, but
we will not follow you."1 Yet, with equal vehemence a
second member declares that "every Englishman in the Government of
India seems to be 1 Legislative Assembly Debates,
1925, Vol. V, Part III, p. 2890.
[34]
MARBLES AND
TOPS
throwing obstacles in
the way of other people going forward." 2
An examination of these
debates gives a fair general view of the state of public opinion on
the whole topic. Members seem well aware of conditions that obtain.
The divergence comes in the weight they assign to those
conditions.
Rai Bahadur Bakshi Sohan
Lal, member from Jul-lundur, when introducing a non-official
amendment to raise the age of consent within the marriage bond to
fourteen years, argued: 3
The very high rate of
fatality amongst the high classes in this country of newly-born
children and of young married wives is due to sexual intercourse and
pregnancy of the girl before she reaches the age of puberty or full
development of her physical organs. The result of such consummation
before bodily development not only weakens the health of the girl but
often produces children who are weak and sickly, and in a large
number of cases cannot resist any illness of an ordinary type, or any
inclemency of weather or climate. Thus some of them die immediately
after birth or during their infancy. If they live at all, they are
always in need of medical attendance, medical advice or medical
treatment, to linger on their lives; or in other words they are born
more to minister to the medical profession than themselves and their
families or their country. Neither can they be good soldiers nor good
civilians, neither good outdoor workers nor good indoor workers;
neither can they be fit to attack an enemy nor defend themselves
against attacks of an enemy, or against the raid
2Ibid.,
1925, Vol. VI, p. 557.
3 Ibid.,
1922, Vol. II, Part III, p. 2650,
[35]
MOTHER INDIA
of thieves or
dacoits.4 In a few words, his birth is very often the
cause of ruining the health, strength and prosperity of his parents
without resulting in a corresponding benefit to society. The husband,
in the majority of cases, . . . has to arrange for his re-marriage
several times during his life-time, on account of the successive
deaths of his young wives or on account of his wife bearing children
who are not long-lived.
Successive debates
expose the facts that few or none of the Indian parliamentarians
dispute the theoretical wisdom of postponing motherhood until the
maturity of the mother; but all agree that it is impossible to effect
such a result without prohibiting the marriage of girls of immature
age. Yet this they say, with one accord, cannot be done--and for
three reasons:
First, because immutable
custom forbids, premarital pubescence being generally considered,
among Hindus, a social if not a religious sin.5
Second, because the
father dare not keep his daughter at home lest she be damaged before
she is off his hands. And this especially in joint-family households,
where several men and boys--brothers, cousins, uncles --live under
the same roof.
Third, because the
parents dare not expose the girl, after her dawning puberty, to the
pressure of her own desire unsatisfied.
With these intimate
dangers in view a learned Brahman Assemblyman, Diwan Bahadur T.
Rangachariar, Member from Madras, spoke earnestly against the
un-
4 Gang
robbers.
5 See
Legislative Assembly Debates of 1925, March 23 and 24 in Vol.
V, Part III, and Sept. i, in Vol. VI.
[36]
MARBLES AND
TOPS
official bill of 1925
raising the age of consent within the marriage bonds to fourteen
years. Any pretense at enforcing such a law would, it was generally
conceded, demand the keeping of the wife away from her husband,
retaining her in her own father's zenana.6 Said the
Madrassi Assemblyman, warning, imploring: 7
Remember the position of
girls in our country between twelve and fourteen. Have we not got our
daughters in our house? Have we not got our sisters in our house?
Remember that, and remember your own neighbours. Remembering our
habits, remembering our usages, remembering the preco-ciousness of
our youth, remembering the condition of the climate, remembering the
conditions of the country, I ask you to give your weighty judgment to
this matter.
Another Brahman member
vehemently protests:8
The tradition of
womanhood in this country is unap-proached by the tradition of
womanhood in any other country. Our ideal of womanhood is this. Our
women regard their husbands--they have been taught from the moment
they were suckling their mothers' milk to regard their husbands as
their God on earth. . . . To the Brahman girl-wife the husband is a
greater, truer, dearer benefactor than all the social reformers
bundled together! . . . What right have you to interfere with this
ancient, noble tradition of ours regarding the sanctity of wedlock? .
. . What is the object of this legislation? Do you want to make the
women of India strong and their children stalwart? But remember that
in trying to do
6 Women's
quarters.
7
Legislative Assembly Debates, 1925, Vol. V, Part III,
p. 2884.
8
Ibid., p. 2890 et seq.
[37]
MOTHER
INDIA
that, you may otherwise
be doing a lot of evil, far worse than the evil you seek to remove.
... By all means take care of [the girl's] body; but fail not to
train her morals, to train her soul, so as to enable her to look upon
her husband as her God, which indeed is the case in India, among
Hindus at least. . . . Don't destroy I beg of you--don't ruin our
Hindu Homes.
To reasoning of this
sort another member--Mr. Shanmukhan Chetty, of Salem and
Coimbatore--hotly retorts:9
The fact that a
so-called marriage rite precedes the commission of a crime does not
and cannot justify that crime. I have no doubt that if you were to
ask a cannibal, he would plead his religion for the heinous act he
does.
And Dr. S. K. Datta,
Indian Christian representative from
Calcutta:10
If ever there was "a
man-made law," this compulsion of young girls to become mothers is
one of them.
The bill raising the age
of consent to fourteen was finally thrown out, buried under an
avalanche of popular disapproval. In the next Assembly Sir Alexander
Muddiman, leader of the Viceroy's Government, brought in an official
bill drafted with a view of breaking the impasse and securing
that degree of advance that would be conceded by the conservative
Indian element- This bill, fixing the woman's age of
consent
9
Legislative Assembly Debates, 1025, Vol. VI, p. 558.
10 Ibid., 1925, Vol. V, Part III, p.
2839.
[38]
MARBLES AND
TOPS
within and without the
marriage bond respectively at thirteen and fourteen years, was
enacted into law as Act XXIX of 1925.
The discussion that it
evoked on the floor of the Assembly gave still further light upon the
attitude of Indians.
Some speakers pointed to
the gradual growth of public opinion as expressed in caste, party and
association councils as the best hope of the future. These deprecated
legislation as both irritating and useless, calling attention to the
fact that the orthodox community, comprising as it does the great
majority of Hindus all over India, would regard legal abolition of
child-marriage as, literally, a summons to a holy war.
Similarly, any active
attempt to protect the child-wife during her infancy would, it was
shown, be held as an attack upon the sacred marital relation,
impossible to make effective and sure to let loose "bloodshed and
chaos."
Rai Sahib M. Harbilas
Sarda, of Ajmer-Merwara maintained, it is true, that
11
where a social custom or
a religious rite outrages our sense of humanity or inflicts injustice
on a helpless class of people, the Legislature has a right to step
in. Marrying a girl of three or four years and allowing sexual
intercourse with a girl of nine or ten years outrages the sense of
humanity anywhere,
But Pundit Madan Mohan
Malaviya, of Allahabad, thought differently,
saying:12
11
Ibid., 1925, Vol. VI, p. 561. 12 Ibid., pp.
573-4-
[39]
MOTHER
INDIA
I have to face the stern
realities of the situation, realities which include a general
permission or rather a widespread practice of having marriages
performed before twelve and consequently of the impossibility of
preventing a married couple from meeting. ... I submit that it is
perhaps best that we should reconcile ourselves to leave the law as
it is in the case of married people for the present, and to trust to
the progress of education and to social reform to raise the age of
consummation of marriage to the proper level. ... I am sure, Sir,
that a great deal of advance has been made in this matter. In many
provinces among the higher classes the marriageable age has been
rising. ... It is the poorer classes who unfortunately are the
greatest victims in this matter. Early marriages take place among the
poorer classes in a larger measure than among the higher
classes.
And Mr. Amar Nath Dutt,
of Burdwan, combated the action proposed, thus:
13
We have no right to
thrust our advanced views upon our less advanced countrymen. . . .
Our villages are tern with factions. If the age of consent is raised
to 13, rightly or wrongly we will find that there will be
inquisitions by the police at the instance of members of an opposite
faction in the village and people will be put to disgrace and
trouble. ... I would ask [Government] ... to withdraw the Bill at
once. Coming as I do, Sir, from Bengal, I know what is the opinion of
the majority of the people there.
Mr. M. K. Acharya, of
South Arcot, also strongly adverse to change, declared that
14
13
Legislative Assembly Debates, 1925, Vol. VI, pp. 558-9.
14 Ibid., p. 551.
[40]
MARBLES AND
TOPS
. . . what is sought to
be done is to make that an offence which is not an offence now, to
make that a crime which is not at present a crime, and which we are
unable to regard as a crime, whatever may be the feelings of some few
people to the contrary.
To which the same
speaker added, a few moments later:15
There is very little
opinion of any respectable body of men in India which wants this
reform very urgently. It may come, and there is no harm in it, in its
own course. Really this is . . . merely to give Honourable Members
some legislative marbles and tops to play with during the time that
we happen to be in Simla.16
15 Ibid,
p. SS6.
16 Simla is the
summer seat of the Central Government.
Chapter
IV
EARLY TO MARRY AND EARLY TO
DIE
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
1 Legislative
Assembly Debates, 1925, Vol. VI, pp. 571-2.
[42]
EARLY TO MARRY AND EARLY
TO DIE
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.
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:z
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
2 Ibid..
1925, Vol. V, Part III, p. 2847.
[43]
MOTHER
INDIA
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.
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
[44]
EARLY TO MARRY AND EARLY TO
DIE
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 lbid.,
1925, Vol. V, Part III, pp. 2829-31.
MOTHER
INDIA
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.
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 Ori-
6 The
Book of Marriage, Keyserling, Harcourt, Brace & Co., New
York, 1926, p. lia.
EARLY TO MARRY AND
EARLY TO DIE
ental'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
[47]
MOTHER
INDIA
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
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
work8 and in the too-reticent books9 of Miss
Amy Wilson-Carmichael.
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 mar-
7 Cf. The
Golden Bough, J. G. Frazer, Macmillan & Co., London, 1914.
Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Vol. I, pp. 61-5.
8 In
Dohnavur, Tinnevelly District, South India.
9 Lotus
Buds, Things As They Are, etc., Morgan & Scott,
London,
[48]
EARLY TO MARRY AND EARLY
TO DIE
riage 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.
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.
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: "
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
10
Legislative Assembly Debates, 1923, Vol. Ill, Part IV, pp.
2807-81
11 Ibid.,
pp. 2826-7.
[49]
MOTHER
INDIA
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?
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.
13 A Hindu
title, inferior to Maharaja.
[50]
Chapter V
SPADES ARE
SPADES
To visualize the effects
of child-marriage as outlined by the legislators just quoted, one of
the most direct means that the foreigner in India can take is to
visit women's hospitals. This I have done from the Punjab to Bombay,
from Madras to the United Provinces. This a man can scarcely do, for
the reason that, doctor or not, he will rarely be admitted to the
sight of a woman patient.
In one of the cities of
the northeast is a little purdah1 hospital of great
popularity among Indian women. The timid creatures who crowd it are
often making thereby their first excursion outside the walls of their
own homes, nor would they have ventured now save for the pain that
drove them. Muhammadans always, Hindus often, arrive in purdah
conveyances--hidden in curtained carriages, or in little close-draped
boxes barely high enough to hold their crouching bodies, swinging on
a pole between bearers like bales of goods. Government clerks' wives
they are, wives of officials or of professional men, rich women
sometimes, sometimes poor, women of high caste, women of low
caste--too desperate, all, for the help they are dying
1 The seclusion
of women as in a harem.
[51]
MOTHER
INDIA
for, to set up against
themselves their cherished bars of religious hatreds and caste
repulsions.
The hospital consists of
a series of little one-story bungalows, partly in wards, partly in
single rooms. At the start, years ago, it was slow business getting
the women to come; the first season producing a total of nine
midwifery cases. But now every bed is full, even the verandas are
crowded with cots, and women by scores, for whom there is no space,
are pleading for admission.
Walking down the aisles
you see, against the white plane of the pillows, dark faces of the
non-Aryan stock, lighter faces of Brahmans, fine-cut faces of the
northern Persian-Muhammadan strain, coarse faces of the South, all
alike looking out from behind a common veil of helplessness and pain.
Most of the work, here, is gynecological. Most of the women are very
young. Almost all are venereally affected.
Some come because they
are childless, begging for either medicine or an operation to give
them the one thing that buys an Indian wife a place in the sun.
"Among such," says the British surgeon-superintendent, "we
continually find that the patient has had one child, often dead, and
that then she has been infected with gonorrhea, which has utterly
destroyed the pelvic organs. The number of young girls that come
here, so destroyed in their first years of married life, is
appalling. Ninety per cent, of the pelvic inflammation is of
gonorrheal origin.
"Here," she continues,
as we stop at the bedside of
[53]
SPADES ARE
SPADES
a young girl who looks
up at us with the eyes of a hungry animal, "here is a new patient.
She has had several children, all still-born. This time, because her
husband will no longer keep her unless she bears him a living child,
she has come to us for confinement. As usual, it is a venereal case.
But I hope we can help her."
"And what about this
one?" I ask, pausing by another cot in inward revolt against the
death-stricken look on the young face before us.
"That," answers the
doctor, "is the wife of a Hindu official. He brought her to us three
days ago, in the very onset of her second confinement, because, by
the first, she had failed to give him a living child. Also she is
suffering from heart-disease, asthma and a broken leg! I had to set
her leg and confine her at practically one and the same time. It was
a forceps case. Dead twins. She, too, is an internal wreck, from
infection, and can never give birth again. But that she does not yet
know; I think it would kill her if she heard it now.
"Her age? Thirteen and a
few months."
"Now what can be wrong
here?" I inquire, catching the smile of a wan-faced child whose
bird's-claw hands are clasped around a paper toy.
"Ah!" says the doctor,
"this one was a pupil in a Government primary school, a merry wee
thing, and so bright that she had just won a prize for scholarship.
During the holiday five months ago her brother sent her home to the
man to whom they had married her.
[53]
MOTHER
INDIA
That man is fifty years
old. From their point of view he is a Hindu gentleman beyond
reproach. From our point of view he is a beast. . . . What happened,
this mite was too terrified to tell. For weeks she grew worse and
worse. At last she went completely off her head. Then her sister, an
old patient of ours, stole her away and dragged her here.
"I have never seen a
creature so fouled. Her internal wounds were alive with maggots. For
days after she got here, she lay speechless on her bed. Not a sound
did she utter--only stared, with half blank, half terror-stricken
eyes. Then one day it chanced that a child with a fractured arm was
brought in and put in a bed near hers. And I, going through the ward,
began playing with that child. This little one, watching, evidently
began to think that here, perhaps, we were not all cruel monsters.
Next day as I passed, she smiled. The day after that she put her arms
around my neck, in a sort of maudlin fashion. That was the turning
point in her mind. Now her mental balance is mending, though her body
is still sick. Her memory, fortunately, has not recovered the
immediate past. She lies there with her toys, wondering at them,
feebly playing with them, or with her big eyes following our
movements about the room. She is pitifully content.
"Meantime her husband is
suing her to recover his marital rights and force her back into his
possession. She is not yet thirteen years old."
Such instances of mental
derangement are common enough. Where should child-fabric, even though
its
[54]
SPADES ARE
SPADES
inheritance had been the
best instead of the weakest, find strength to withstand the strain?
The case last cited was of well-to-do, educated, city-dwelling stock.
But it differed in no essential from that of a younger child whom I
saw in a village some three hundred miles distant. Married as a baby,
sent to her husband at ten, the shock of incessant use was too much
for her brain. It went. After that, beat her as he would, all that
she could do was to crouch in the corner, a little twisted heap,
panting. Not worth the keep. And so at last, in despair and rage over
his bad bargain, he slung her small body over his shoulder, carried
her out to the edge of the jungle, cast her in among the scrub
thicket, and left her there to die.
This she must have done,
but that an Indian witness to the deed carried the tale to an English
lady who herself went out into the jungle, found the child, and
brought her in. Her mind, they said, was slow in emerging from its
stupor. But under the influence of peace and gentleness and the
handling proper to a child, she began at last to blossom into normal
intelligence. When I first saw her, a year and four months after her
abandonment, she was racing about a pleasant old garden, romping with
other happy little children, and contentedly hugging a doll. Her
English protectors will keep her as long as they can. After that,
what?
Except well to the
north, the general condition thus indicated is found in most sections
of India. Bombay Presidency has an outstanding number of educated
and
[55]
MOTHER
INDIA
progressive women, but
the status of the vast majority in that province, as in the rest,
would more fairly be inferred from the other extreme--from, for
example, the wife whom I saw, mother at nine and a half, by Caesarean
operation, of a boy weighing one and three-quarter pounds.
Strike off across the
peninsula, a thousand miles east of Bombay, and you have the same
story. "What can be hoped from these infant wives?" says the
superintendent of a hospital here--a most competent and devoted
British lady doctor. "Their whole small stock of vitality is
exhausted in the first pregnancy. Thence they go on, repeating the
strain with no chance whatever of building up strength to give to the
children that come so fast. A five-pound baby is large. In the
neighborhood of four is the usual weight. Many are born dead 3 and
all, because of their low vitality, are predisposed to any and every
infection that may come along. My patients, here, are largely the
wives of University students. Practically every one is venereally
infected. When I first came out to India, I tried going to the
parents of each such case to tell them of their daughter's state, in
the hope that they would act in her behalf. But when I found that
they had known the husband's diseased condition before giving their
daughter in marriage, and could still see neither shame nor harm
therein, I gave up the attempt. They do not look on it as an
inconvenience, nor will they give weight to the fact that they are
passing on a vile thing to the children.
[56]
SPADES ARE
SPADES
"Now my question is,
whether, in view of the chronic inadequacy of our hospital funds, I
am right in giving the cure to these patients. It costs about twenty
rupees ($6.66), and the woman is reinfected the day she returns to
her own home. I could do so many other things with those precious
twenty rupees! And yet--"
Again, in the great
Madras Presidency, east or west, the tale is no better. "For the vast
majority of women here," says a widely experienced surgeon, "marriage
is a physical tragedy. The girl may bring to birth one or two sound
children, but is by that time herself ruined and crippled, either
from infection or cruel handling. In the thousands of gynecological
cases that I have treated and am still treating, I have never found
one woman who had not some form of venereal disease."
In other provinces of
India, other medical men and women, European and western-educated
Indian alike, gave me ample corroborative statements as to the
effects of child motherhood. On the mother's part, increased
predisposition to tuberculosis; displacement of organs; softening of
immature bones, due to weight on spine and pelvis, presently causing
disastrous obstructions to birth; hysteria and pathological mental
derangements; stunting of mental and physical growth. "A very small
percentage of Indian women seem to me to be well and strong," adds a
woman physician of wide present-day Indian experience. "This state I
believe to be accounted for by a morbid and unawakened mentality, by
venereal infection, and by sexual ex-
[57]
MOTHER
INDIA
haustion. They commonly
experience marital use two and three times a day."
Thirty-six years ago,
when the Age of Consent bill was being argued in the Indian
Legislature, all the women doctors then working in India united to
lay before the Viceroy a memorial and petition for the relief of
those to whose help their own lives were dedicated. Affirming that
they instanced only ordinary cases--cases taken from the common
personal practice of one or another of their own number--they give as
follows the conditions in which certain patients first came into
their hands: 2
A.--Aged 9. Day after
marriage. Left femur dislocated, pelvis crushed out of shape. Flesh
hanging in shreds.
B.--Aged 10. Unable to
stand, bleeding profusely, flesh much lacerated.
C.--Aged 9. So
completely ravished as to be almost beyond surgical repair. Her
husband had two other living wives and spoke very fine
English.
I.--Aged_ about 7.
Living with husband. Died in great agony after three days.
M.--Aged about 10.
Crawled to hospital on her hands and knees. Has never been able to
stand erect since her marriage,
The original list is
longer than here given. It will be found in the appendix of this
book.3
This was in 1891. In
1922, the subject being again before the Indian Legislature, this
same petition of the
2
Legislative Assembly Debates, 1922, Vol III, Part I, pp.
881-3, and
Appendix, p. 919.
3 See Appendix L
[58]
SPADES ARE
SPADES
women surgeons was once
more brought forward as equally applicable after the lapse of
years. No one disputed, no one can yet dispute, its continued force.
The Englishman who now introduced it into the debate could not bring
himself to read its text aloud. But, referring to the bill raising
the Age of Consent then under discussion, he concluded his speech
thus:
A number of persons . .
. have said that this Bill is likely to give rise to agitation. No
one dislikes agitation more than I do. I am sick of agitation. But
when, Sir, it is a case of the lives of women and children, I can
only say, in the words of the Duke of Wellington: "Agitate and be
damned!"
In a recent issue of his
weekly paper, Young India 4 Mr. Gandhi printed an
article over his own name entitled "Curse of Child Marriage." Said
Mr. Gandhi:
It is sapping the
vitality of thousands of our promising boys and girls on whom the
future of our society entirely rests.
It is bringing into
existence every year thousands of weaklings--both boys and girls--who
are born of immature parenthood.
It is a very fruitful
source of appalling child-mortality and still-births that now prevail
in our society.
It is a very important
cause of the gradual and steady decline of Hindu society in point of
(i) numbers, (2) physical strength and courage, and (3)
morality.
Not less interesting
than the article itself is the reply that it quickly elicits from an
Indian correspondent
4 Young
India, August 26, 1926, p. 302.
[59]
MOTHER
INDIA
whom Mr. Gandhi himself
vouches for as "a man occupying a high position in society." This
correspondent writes:5
I am very much pained
to read your article on "Curse of Child Marriage." . . .
I fail to understand why
you could not take a charitable view of those whose opinion differs
from you. ... I think it improper to say that those who insist on
child marriage are "steeped in vice." . . .
The practice of early
marriage is not confined to any province or class of society, but is
practically a universal custom in India. . . .
The chief objection to
early marriage is that it weakens the health of the girl and her
children. But this objection is not very convincing for the following
reasons. The age of marriage is now rising among the Hindus, but the
race is becoming weaker. Fifty or a hundred years ago the men and
women were generally stronger, healthier and more long-lived than
now. But early marriage was then more in vogue. . . . From these
facts it appears probable that early marriage does not cause as much
physical deterioration as some people believe. . . .
The type of logic
employed in the paragraph last quoted is so essentially Indian that
its character should not be passed by without particular note. The
writer sees no connection between the practice of the grandparents
and the condition of the grandchildren, even though he sets both down
in black and white on the paper before him.
s Young
India, Sept. 9, 1926, p. 318.
[60]
SPADES ARE
SPADES
A voice in the
wilderness, Mr. Gandhi continues the attack, printing still further
correspondence drawn forth by his original article. He gives the
letter of a Bengali Hindu lady, who writes:6
I don't know how to
thank you for your speaking on behalf of the poor girl-wives of our
Hindu society. . . . Our women always bear their burden of sorrow, in
silence, with meekness. They have no power left in them to fight
against any evil whatever.
To this Mr. Gandhi rejoins by adducing from his own knowledge instances in support, such as that of a sixty-year-old educationalist, who, without loss of public respect, has taken home a wife of nine years. But he ends on a rare new note, arraigning India's western-taught women who spend