Marriage under the Hindu system is by no means easy to describe as in actual fact it is. The definitions and classifications given in the legal textbooks or Scriptures of the Hindus are little better than abstractions—deductions from assumed premises of a theological kind, with only a slender tie to the actual life of Hindu societies. The difficulties of practice arise from the vast complexities and fluid conditions of the great masses of peoples and races, with divergent levels of culture and inconsistent ideas, that compose the aggregate which for convenience is distinguished from all others by the collective name of Hinduism. For Hinduism is, of course, in no real sense a church or creed. It has no definite tenets and no articles of dogma. The acceptance of a certain social system, centring upon the existence of hereditary priesthoods with divinely-given powers of interposition and interpretation, is its final criterion. This system and its practical consequences once accepted, the man is free to believe and follow what creeds or philosophies he may please.

Yet through it all there is a certain rather vague and elusive unity of idea, a spirit, one might say, that in various forms penetrates and transmutes the varying material of creed and caste, of blood and race with which it is presented. In essence this is the spirit which regards the whole world as an unreal dream, an illusory changing scene of transformations, stretched over the realities of a higher ultimate world of Divine unity. Laws and customs are based not on a reasoned pursuit of the good as existent in this life; but upon the means, magical or supernatural, of acquiring merit in a supposed ultimate universe of timeless and permanent reality reached after final severance from the circle of birth and death. It is a spirit diametrically opposed to that Greek thought which placed before man as his final and only aim happiness or the excellent performance of function in the world we know. Hardly less is it opposed to the Semitic creeds which project the purposes and rewards of virtue into a similar world of similar perceptions and individualities conceived as existent on a higher plane attainable after death. For the unifying spirit of Hinduism, so far as it can be grasped as in any way one, rejects the world altogether as a reality and places its virtues not in any reasoned balance of human rights and duties, but in the observance of rituals and austerities commended by the authority of a hierarchy.

Hence marriage also, as far as it approaches the ideal, is based upon considerations that are non-rational and belong rather to a mystical or supernatural way of regarding life. Marriage to the Hindu thinker and idealist has nothing to do, in its ultimate causes, with the preferences of one man or one woman, nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness in a palpitating finite and human life. He sees in it no free union of two human wills, joined for their own contentment in an isolated human relation. Rather it is the connection of two incarnations of the world spirit during an unreal moment of illusory existence. The proper husband and wife are recognized and selected by magical arts exercised under the authority of the Sacred Books by certain classes of the priesthood. They are joined under a right conjunction of the stars, interpreted by an hereditary expert in the magic art of astrology. Their marriage is sanctified by miraculous rites and blessed and transformed by the repetition of mysterious Sanskrit phrases. They enter their new state purified as by a consecration. In a word, they deal with a sacrament, not with a human contract. It is not the satisfaction of human feelings that is sought, but the fulfilment of a ritual duty to the family, in its relation to the Divine Spirit.

This view of marriage, as an ordained sacrament, is manifested throughout the actual ceremonies of the wedding, at least among the castes that claim the higher ritual ranks. The bride and bridegroom must belong to the same subdivision of the caste and yet must not be related by a common descent from the same mythical founder of the family. Before they can be betrothed, the horoscopes must be studied by an hereditary astrologer to see that the proposed union does not traverse any of the influences of the stars in their conjunctions. Nowadays it is true that horoscopes have fallen somewhat into neglect among the more “advanced.” These allege that the time is wrongly found on any horologe except the old-fashioned water-clock and they insinuate—what is no doubt often true—that the verdict of the astrologer depends upon his emoluments. Thus even the most advanced of Hindus, if they do without such advice, do so on the ostensible ground that horoscopes are incorrectly delivered, not that in themselves they are unreasonable. Again the marriage is made between children, so that desire or personal preference shall not disturb the ordinances of heaven. The ceremony can take place only in the auspicious months when the constellations of Jupiter and Venus are in conjunction with the sun. At the wedding symbolic presentments of the boy’s and girl’s ancestors make more clear the significance of the wedding, as a mere phase in a family existence, in which the individual is as nothing and the race is all. When the moment approaches, the bride and bridegroom sit, face to face or side by side before the objects of worship, their right hands joined, a strand of red cotton round their necks, a cloth drawn as a screen between their faces. The priests chant Sanskrit verses, while the astrologer consults the water-clock, which is needed to read the exact sacerdotal hour. Then when the moment has come and the cloth is drawn, the pair turn round the sacred sacrificial fire, and the seven steps are taken which make the marriage indissoluble and eternal. The bridegroom turns to his wife and utters the sacred verse, “Oh! bride! give your heart to my work, make your mind agreeable to mine. May the God Brahaspati make you pleasing to me.” Then for himself he swears not to transgress, whether for wealth or love. And then they go out and look upon the Polar Star, that star which guided the first Aryan wanderers across Asia.

A marriage of this kind, so solemn and so sacramental, cannot in the lifetime of its partakers be severed or dissolved. Only the will of God, executed by the cold scythe of Death, can grant a divorce. Until death come, the pair is inevitably joined, to labour and pray together, and to engender and bear the children who in time shall release their parents’ souls from the purgatory of unfulfilled duties. The Hindu theory is a deduction from two principles, one, the unreality of individual appearance, the second, the unworthiness of sensuous illusion.

Marriage is a union of ephemeral beings for the sake of family and community, and for the attainment of a worshipful elevation over sense and the world of illusion. It is at once a consecration and an initiation. The absence of that strong sexual passion which we have clad in the jewelled veils of poetry and have baptized in the romantic waters of love is not to the Brahman eye an impediment or a disappointment. At the most the hope is for an ordered affection and a disciplined devotion.

But the facts of human nature cannot with impunity be ignored. Ideals based on a non-natural order of things may inspire noble poetry: but they must fail when they are applied to large bodies of men and women. Contracts founded upon causes and effects that are traced by reason can be applied without much hindrance and at any rate without hypocrisy by all those who can recognize facts. But there are few who are worthy of or can benefit by a sacrament. The Hindu spirit has created splendid images and has embodied in literature the characters of Sita and of Damyanti, the wife who is all devotion and sacrifice, nobly courageous, nobly patient. But, by its very distance from actuality, it leads in the practice of every day to great hypocrisy and unnecessary hardship. The danger has been foreseen by the lawgivers themselves: and they have not dared to apply their ideal, even in theory, to others than the highest castes of the hierarchy. For the warrior, the cultivator, and the menial classes they have allowed different practices and divergent ideals. Even in the practice of those Brahmans, to whom the system should apply in its entirety, considerable concessions have been authorized. In the unauthorized acts of every day life there are even greater deviations. In one sense, of course, it may be said that the theory of the highest Hinduism in regard to marriage is one and indivisible; but marriage is, after all, the concrete contact and companionship of a living, feeling man and woman, and the application of the theory an affair of national character. Race and climate and the influences of history have played their part in the Indian Continent at least as much as in other regions of equal area. Even in the priestly Brahman caste, the Brahman of the Deccan is as different from him of the PunjÁb as an Italian Marchese could be from a Prussian Graf. They come from different strains, they live in different surroundings: and the one bond is a common social system with some common ideals under which they have both obtained their power.

In general, it may be said that the ideal has been humanized and softened in all those parts of India in which Rajput or Mussulman influences have at any time been powerful. In such regions, in GujarÁt, for instance, or in KÁthiawÁd, the people have never taken kindly to the mere negation of desire. A certain practical genius has always turned their glance to the fruits of the earth and the pleasures of the senses. Commerce brought them wealth and the desire for comfort; from chivalry they learnt the lessons of gaiety and enjoyment. Among them beauty is esteemed and desired; pleasure sought or demanded. From a wife is expected charm and companionship, passion and pleasure. She is treated as a human being, with the ordinary human capacities and frailties; and she can exercise power and influence by her charms. She may be loved as a woman; and she is often the object of jealousy; but she is seldom deadened by that chilling respect which shrivels fresh desire.

In the arid, ascetic Deccan, on the other hand, the woman is more commonly disregarded. There she lives in an atmosphere where sensuousness is reproached, though it may be practised. A man indulges passion, if he do so at all, as a thing shameful in itself and abominable, with stealth and self-abasement, in the grossest and least urbane manner. If he yield to a sexual desire, it is without esteem or regard for the partner in his sin. Towards the wife of a consecrated marriage he preserves an attitude, which may be irreproachable, but must certainly be unflattering to her womanhood. In the light of religion, she may be regarded as a partner in a mystic union: but in the household she is often little better than a housekeeper, contemned, neglected, and never warmed by the glow of desire nor wooed with those attentions by which men seek to please. Between GujarÁt and the Deccan, it is again the contrast, only intensified, between France and England. On the one hand, power and pleasure and the charm of life—with perhaps jealousy and a certain sense of the possibilities of human frailty. On the other, coldness, a real contempt, and that callous reliance on an unswerving chastity, which some have been pleased to call respect—and which is so annoying even to the plainest woman.

Religion again effects a distinction. Those who adhere to the worship of Shiva, the God of Destruction, the Lord of Death, the Master of Ascetics, are apt to turn from the goods of this life to a final absorption in an abstract oneness. But in Krishna, the very human incarnation of God the Preserver, the inhabitants of the richer and more fertile tracts of the continent have found a congenial saviour. From the devotees of his creed he demands only love, a constant and all-absorbing offering of the heart: and he bestows upon them in return the free ease of the world through which they are passing on the way to the love-laden groves of Paradise. While the followers of the theology that centres upon Shankar see the universe as one, an abstract God-in-himself, indivisible, unchanging, a pure spirit that alone is and has being, and define the aim of life as, after reiterated births into further action, the final liberation from the senses by absorption into this infinite and unqualified spirit, the worshippers of Krishna adopt a teaching which admits an eternal dualism. Force and nature, spirit and matter, are to them an everlasting pair, which can never be finally united. So they tend readily to a view of life in which man and the Deity, as he can know Him, are circumscribed by nature, and in which man can find salvation in the love of all things. And in the love of all things, if there be inward grace, the enjoyment of the nature that God has granted to the world must be allowable. Freedom is attained when the enjoyment is unconditioned and the soul is wholly united to the spirit of all nature. It is only the conditions of life, and the need for transcending the wants of the world in order to reach that grace in which God is directly felt, which can impose restrictions and prohibitions. So, naturally enough, the disciple of the gracious, kind, and loving Krishna is more likely to demand love from the companion of life than the ascetic votary of Shiva. The practical meaning of marriage is again very different in the warrior caste, now represented by the Rajput clans. Comparatively recent invaders of mixed Scythian and Turkish or Hunnish tribes, they almost alone in India have become what in Europe is meant by a gentry or an aristocracy. Feudal in their concept of the state, cavaliers and men-at-arms, seeking in war a profession, in the acquisition of landed estates their fulfilment, and in sport their relaxation, they have brought to the brown monotony of India the splendour of gallantry, chivalry, and romance. Exempted even by priestly ordinance from the oppressive asceticism that is in general obligatory to the Hindu mind, they have formed for themselves a code of honour coloured by the legitimate hopes and enjoyments of a warrior clan. In the traditions of their caste they still preserve the memory of the bride’s choosing. The suitors sat assembled, each in his own place, in the palace hall, with sword and shield to his hand. The curtain was uplifted and the bride stepped round the hall, a garland of flowers on her arm. Then when she reached the man whom she chose to be her own prince and beloved husband, she slipped the garland on his neck. Thus they became man and wife, and no one could deny their will. That time is long since gone, and no bride has now such a choosing. Yet to this day the heroines of all Indian plays and the great women of Indian poetry are all of the Rajput class. Marriage is with them even now a practice adapted to the aristocratic temper partly from the earlier Brahman books and partly from the traditions of Central Asia, tinged also by the fashions set by Mussulman emperors in the Courts at Delhi. Polygamy is recognized as lawful and is practised by the Ruling Chiefs and the richer of their cadets. The maid-servant may be the concubine of her master and the dancing girl who enlivens the Courts is often in private a mistress. But great is the power of the wife behind the curtain, deep and warm-blooded the love she hopes to win, great also her valorous devotion. And through the whole fabric runs a woof as of old, half-faded brocade, a thread of chivalry and pure reverence and protective delight. A strand of silk at the wrist may make the Rajput gentleman at any moment the knight-errant of a lady whom he shall never see, and for whom his honour shall yet be as a brother’s.

But to the Rajput lady of a ruling house there is one special terror. If death puts his finger on her husband, her life is too often overwhelmed to an extent unnecessary and cruel. For herself remarriage is forbidden: and a love-affair is often requited with secret poison by her husband’s successors. For there are many who still hold that the family honour can be stained indelibly by a woman’s lightness. Then in her husband’s place may sit on the throne a rival’s son, who from childhood has had his ears filled with bitterness. Her jointure may be insufficient; even an administration is only too often unsympathetic or unduly sparing of money; or the successor may by force or intrigue attenuate the estate that was bequeathed. She finds interest no doubt in the management of the lands that form her jointure, but her seclusion places her largely in the hands of interested advisers. As a rule, the downfall is more lamentable even than that of the Dowager in Europe, except perhaps in Royal families. Suicide (Sati) on the funeral pyre was in the past almost a release for the Rajput widow. Among the smaller Rajput yeomanry, the case is better. Remarriage is not unseldom allowed. At the worst, the wife has had no rival and her own child succeeds; while, failing children, she finds with her relatives the respect and kindness to women which is general in this caste of manly gentlemen.

Another group consists of the lower, but thoroughly Hinduized, working castes. These run from the very low untouchable castes who are the usual domestics of the European officer to the skilled artisan and the cultivator. Their matrimonial regulations are a compromise (like most compromises hardly “working”) between Brahman theory, economic necessity, and obsolete primitive custom. They are influenced vaguely by the usual ideals. Widow remarriage is however tolerated and commonly practised, though somewhat looked down upon in the popular regard. When the parties to the association are working men and women, miserably poor for the most part, illiterate and unprogressive, it follows naturally that the action of the system is conditioned mainly by economics. Toil and labour, in field or factory or shop, is the part of both, and the woman’s household work and the assistance of the growing children are incentives to and conditions of the marriage. They have no leisure for the finer sensibilities and, like the poor in all countries, must have an eye ever open to the needs of food and nutrition. Without much education and with little capacity for refined emotion, it is not unnatural if there is sometimes disunion, and if they seldom attain the heights. The husband in his cups may occasionally beat his wife, or may have to sit with bowed head before the storm of her boisterous abuse. Yet they compare favourably with similar classes in other countries; and at the worst they shame the terrors of European slums, the brutal wife-kickers and procurers who lurk in the blind alleys of industrial life. It is true indeed that the rapid growth of industrial labour in India also has adversely affected the marriages of that class and that only too often an unhappy union ends in elopement or prostitution. Generally, however, it may be said that the Hindu husband even in this class seldom descends to the grossness and cruelty so often found in the lower quarters of European cities: while the wife forms and maintains a higher standard of womanly conduct and devotion. An easier toleration marks their conjugal relations and the Hindu character at its worst is commonly free from the extremer modes of brutality.

Among the aboriginal tribes, the Bhils for instance, marriage is still in a very fluid condition. The actual form that in practice it takes depends inevitably on the extent to which the tribe has succumbed to Hindu or rather Brahman influence. As it becomes subjected to that influence, and as in consequence it aims at raising its rank within the Hindu social system by the aping of higher castes, so it the more readily adopts the worst accretions to Hindu matrimony, child-marriage, for instance, and large dowries. But in general it may be said that marriage among such tribes is a free association between youthful adults, promulgated by certain payments of money or service to the bride’s parents and relieved, if barren or unhappy, by an almost unrestricted right of divorce. Pre-nuptial chastity is hardly looked for, and neither man nor girl is much blamed for an early slip. After marriage chastity is the usual rule. The attitude is in practice not very dissimilar from the reasonable and natural outlook of the Scottish peasant; and, as in Scotland, the net result is a state of general happiness, easy and equal companionship, and very remarkable mutual trust. The woman has much weight in affairs and not unfrequently holds the purse. As in the country districts of Scotland, prostitution is unknown, and the cruel ruin of a woman who has loved too soon is practically unheard of. Widows of course remarry, and there is much homely love between husband and wife and parents and children.

Another system still survives among the inhabitants of the southern coast lands where the Arabian Sea beats against the palm groves of Malabar. Here the tribes of the Nairs, formerly warlike and still brave, headed by the ruling house of Travancore, maintain a marriage system that dates from the earlier Dravidian culture which preceded the Aryan invasions. Both among the Nairs—the noble class—and among the priests, the Nambutiri Brahmans, an ecclesiastical and land-owning aristocracy of peculiar sanctity, the customs of matriarchy prevail in various degrees. Among the Nairs, for several centuries, the law was of polyandry, pure and simple, the wife having several husbands according to her own good pleasure. In late years the actual habit of polyandry is to all intents defunct and only in very few cases, if at all, could a Nair lady be found who consorts with more than one husband. But succession is still traced through the female line and a boy succeeds to his mother’s brother, not to his father. And in other subtler ways the effects of polyandry are still manifest. Perhaps the most curious survival is that the religious ceremonial of marriage—an expensive and public rite—is performed at an early age with a man, with whom the girl has no other connection than formal participation in this ineffective sacrament. Much later comes what, in the European sense, would be called the real marriage, with the husband whom she is to cherish. This is a contract, entered into freely by both parties, dissoluble at will. One of the elements of its popularity and success is in this very freedom which has given the Nair ladies a position enjoyed by few other Indian women. An attempt absurdly made to limit this freedom by legislation, which gave an option to the parties by an act of registration to introduce the usual disabilities of a rigid matrimony, has proved an utter failure. An accompaniment of the polyandrous or matriarchal system, which still prevails, is that husband and wife do not live together. The Nair house is the abode of a whole large family, based upon joint descent from a common female ancestor. In the house or family mansion the apartments of the women are together and are entirely separate from that part of the house in which the men live. In this house the husband has no part or share; but he comes to visit his wife in her apartment just as she goes occasionally to visit him in the similar household in which, by his descent on the mother’s side, he has a right to live. On the freedom of choice exercised by a Nair lady in her mating there is little restriction, save only the one that she must not choose a man of lower station.

The Nambutiri Brahmans, on the other hand, though they live among the Nair tribes and are their priests, have gone no further than a compromise between this system and the arrangements usually prevalent among Brahmans. The results, like those of most compromises, have been disastrous. Only the eldest son of a family marries. The rest, when study of Scripture and the practice of ascetic simplicity prove unsatisfying, seek consolation in indiscriminate seduction. The immediate results of a theory so unnatural are polygamy, burdensome dowries, marriages for wealth alone, and the seclusion and bondage of women. In spite of the simplicity and candour of these Brahmans—qualities which make them personally loveable even to those who deplore their influence—their community has been gravely injured by such marriages. Only the simplicity of their desires and the earnest conservatism of their faith have made them tolerate a system so unnatural and injurious. They bow with pious resignation to the will of God, by which they mean the results of their own human folly.

Bitter must the contrast be to the secluded and austere Nambutiri ladies when they see their Nair neighbours at the annual winter festival which commemorates the death of KÁmdev, the Hindu God of Love. Long before daybreak, every Nair girl of any position is out of bed and goes with her girl friends to the nearest tank. Plunging into the water together, they sing in unison the song which is sacred to the God of human hearts. As they sing, they beat the water, with the left hand held immediately under the surface and the right brought down upon it in a sloping stroke, splashing and sounding deep. Stanza after stanza, song after song they sing till the first light of dawn peeps over the cocoa-nut palms. Then they go back to their homes to dress in their best and enjoy their holy day. They darken their eyelids with collyrium and make their lips red with betel leaf. In the gardens they play on swings with their friends. Then they sit down in merriment and enjoyment to the noon-day meal of arrowroot and molasses with ripe yellow plantains and green cocoa-nuts. Afterwards they again sing and dance, while all good husbands on this day of days visit their wives in their family mansions and make themselves pleasant to the ladies of the family and bring little presents and friendly good wishes.

This system, strange though it appears to those who are familiar only with Jewish and Teutonic customs, has been particularly successful in securing the ends of every marriage—comfort, free development, and the worthy upbringing of healthy children. In no class in India is education better appreciated and more widely shared by the sexes. Every Nair girl is sent to the village school, her education as much a matter of course as her brothers’; while there are many who have matriculated at the Madras University. At the same time, by the universal admission of those who know them, there are few women in India who have greater charm or exercise as valuable an influence on the manners and morals of society.

Marriage in Hindu India is, therefore, very various both in practice and in theory according to the locality and the race or caste. But regarded as a whole it presents, one may say, some common characteristics. It is invariably a religious rite, sanctioned by magical ceremony, really sacramental. Only in castes which allow a widow to remarry is the second union divested of most of this supernatural sanction, to become almost a free contract. Again marriages are in general arranged by the parents or relations—with the advice of priests and astrologers—while the husband and wife are still children, either in real childhood or shortly after their puberty. Further, in all the higher castes, and in lower castes as they assume or usurp a higher position, widows are forbidden a further marriage. Normally the idea of marriage in the classes in which Brahman influence is most firm is accompanied by a certain ascetic thought, which holds sensuousness and enjoyment to be something debasing and earth-bound. The world of action being illusory and unreal, and each action entailing its answering reaction, deliverance from illusive appearances and absorption into the one final reality can be gained only by passive withdrawal from activity. But all action springs from desire: and the strongest and most attractive of desires is love. Hence in marriage there should be no overpowering desires, none of those impulses of emotion which keep the man bound during thousands of incarnations to the idly-turning wheel of illusion. Only as a deliverance from conflicting desire and as the means of continuing family life is marriage in itself to be valued. Its happiness and fruition are to be sought not in the tumults of passion but in the calm and ordered affection of a disciplined and worshipful pair. From the husband protection and self-restraint are due; from the wife to the lord, whom heaven has given her, unflinching devotion, constant respect and obedience, unwavering chastity.

But in some castes and places the ideal has been altered largely by feudalism and chivalry, by luxury and an appreciation of human happiness, and by the influences of a kindly humanizing belief. There we find love welcomed and pursued, and the beauteous wife elevated like a substantiation of that Krishna-spirit in which man attains on earth to the love which is unending.

In general, Hindu marriage does undoubtedly, to a marked extent, reach very closely to the purposes which it seeks. In general, it produces a very real, if somewhat colourless, affection, an affection maintained by common interests and the great bond of constant association. The defects which it has are in the main the excrescences of a religious system, such as are apt to grow wherever reason is displaced by theological or supernatural commandment. When rationalism grows strong enough to question the authority of priestly ordinance and tradition, it will be possible without any very serious effort to prune them safely from the sturdy trunk of Hindu life.

Child-marriage is, of course, that one of all its features which has been most violently attacked. But it may be doubted whether those who have attacked it have always had a clear understanding of its significance. Real child-marriage—the wedding of children who have not yet reached puberty—is after all nothing more than an indefeasible betrothal. And in itself it is a logical and natural deduction from a theory which postulates the selection of the bridal pair by supernatural agency, working either through the divinations of an astrologer or through the parents’ careful affection. Any element of personal choice and free-will would be repugnant to the underlying thoughts and must to a large extent be subversive of the social and moral superstructure. Free-choice could be introduced generally only by a substitution for Brahman regulation of something quite other—as the warrior castes, for instance, extorted for themselves from a submissive hierarchy a different scale of moral values. Moreover, in practice child-marriage has some clear advantages. For it allows the wedded pair to be brought up together, as children only, in their parents’ houses, till in time they become habituated to each other’s company and affection, while gradually they come to know and learn their place in those large households to which their future lives belong. The Hindu married couple can live in no independent isolation like the European. Rather they will be but one unit of a great family household managed on behalf of all by its eldest members. The real marriage, the consummation of their growth to man and woman, comes much later, after many years perhaps, when the parents at last give their consent to the grown student and the healthy maiden who helps daily in the household tasks. Rather it is not the child-marriage that is so much to be deprecated as the marriage that succeeds, as in some castes it does, too quickly upon puberty. For, by an unhappy ignorance, puberty is in India only too often thought, as it was thought in the Europe of the Renaissance, to be maturity; and the marriage thus concluded is at once made real.

In fact, in both cases what is needed is a little more scientific knowledge and the embodiment of the knowledge in the Penal Code. Cases occur only too frequently of the martyrdom of young brides, not so much from cruelty, or even from uncontrolled passion, as from sheer ignorance of scientific fact. It has become a superstition, supported of course by the usual authority, that puberty means maturity, not merely for love—which would be sufficiently misleading—but even for child-bearing. Here it is that rational education must enter the field. In a country in which knowledge is luckily not accounted shameful, it is easy for education to explain that puberty is only the beginning of a new period, and that love’s first blossoms must not be followed by too early fruit.

In this respect the practice of Hindu marriage unhappily does show a fault of the most serious and terrible kind. If education has still much to do, the state of the law most certainly requires improvement. It is sometimes said that the Penal Law of India at present does not give adequate protection to girls who, for various reasons, are unmarried. But silence is usually kept about the far more serious fact that it provides practically no protection to the married girl. In her case the age of consent has actually been fixed at twelve; and no child of more than twelve can claim protection from the law against the brutality of the man to whom she has been married. Obviously the limit of age for the protection of girls should be the same in all cases, whether she be married or unmarried, whether she be the victim of the man to whom she has been joined beside the sacred fire or of one who owes her no special duty. It is the most obvious confusion of thought which fails to see that the offence, if it is one, is exactly the same, whether or not a mystical ritual has been first observed. The thug was no better than a common strangler because he first prayed to Bhavani before he murdered. The offence is the same in all cases; the punishment should, if anything, be more severe to the man who is peculiarly bound in duty and in honour to cherish the woman he has made his wife. The State is now prepared to protect against perversion a class of women who, on an outside estimate, do not exceed one-hundredth of the population and who ex hypothesi are of a position and character somewhat less than reputable. But the State denies its protection to the other ninety-nine women of each hundred, the mothers of the country, the honoured helpmates of its households.

The harshness is made the greater by vices which, though forbidden, have in practice become common. The sale of daughters is an offence against which the sacred writings of the Hindus strongly and consistently inveigh. Yet in only too many cases parents do little else than sell their girls in marriage to the highest bidder. The sums of money which they demand and which they use, not for the daughter’s benefit, but for their own, are so large that they are forced to accept a suitor of sufficient substance without regard to fitness or religious sanction. Of the higher classes many nowadays revolt against such conduct, which they recognize to be wicked and despicable. But in the lower castes it is still general. The inner motive of such actions is, of course, the ignorance, quite as much as the selfishness, of the father. Too ignorant to comprehend that a human soul is an end in itself and that a daughter is also a free human being, he looks on her with besotted eye as a mere instrument of his own betterment. Hand in hand with this evil, and dependent from it, is the terrible practice of giving young brides to elderly husbands. In no other country could the results be more disastrous or the girl-wife more unhappy. Vallabh, the GujarÁti poet, has expressed that wretchedness in a beautiful song, which has had some influence in abating this social evil. From it the following lines are quoted, addressed to the Goddess Mother:—

But as long as society tolerates the acceptance of money by a bride’s father, so long will there be parents to be tempted by gold to sanction their children’s ruin. And even then there will persist a deeper reason. For girls are all early married and widows may not marry a second time. So, even against his will, an elderly man is forced, if he wishes to have the legitimate and socially-sanctioned companionship of a woman, to seek in marriage one of the young girls who alone are in India available for a suitor.

The prohibition of widow remarriage has also been bitterly attacked, often by those Indians who, from education or environment, have been affected by rationalism, sometimes by those who find a false pride in the imitation of foreign custom. But the prohibition is not of course universal. Those castes which have not yet set up a claim to the higher ceremonial purities, are free to compound with human desires by a second marriage, devoid of sacramental significance. It is in the higher classes that the woman may have to pay for the pride of caste by her individual austerities. Yet against the prohibition of widow remarriage may be set the terrific wastage in Europe of chaste and unmarried women. It has not at least entailed upon Indian society that narrowing and unnatural education which Europe has seen itself forced to accept, with all its consequent evils, and which is perhaps inevitable if chastity is to be required as their highest and sometimes their only virtue from women who are in every case condemned to a lengthy and, in a vast number of unhappy cases, to a life-long celibacy. In India a woman is at least allowed to know and to be natural; for an early marriage gives her in her ripening maturity the fitting fulfilment of her womanhood. And, even at the worst conjunction of destiny, the ideal of devotion crystallized in an unbroken widowhood is, in itself, no ignoble aspiration. The unflinching veneration that a son gives to his widowed mother is in India no small recompense for her sacrifice to a sacred duty. Widowhood is recognized by all as a state—divinely imposed—of austerity and atonement. But it has its own quiet rewards in the family home, with its sense of duty done, like a nun’s or a Sister of Mercy’s. It is harsh in those castes, which have merely adopted a custom, when the inspiring ideal is not felt living in their hearts, deep and intense. And it is also harsh in those cases where the original thought has been warped by an exaggerated deduction or where punishment is too rigorously exacted for illicit infringement of the rule. At least in the case of the child-widow, betrothed indeed by a sacrament, but never really wedded, some speedy relaxation of the rule appears desirable: and it is probable that, with the decay of faith and with the new scepticism about blessings conveyed by an astrologer’s predictions, some such amendment will soon ensue.

A deeper objection to the Hindu system is one which has been seldom, if ever, expressed. Racially, the absence of that natural selection which expresses itself in sexual desire, cannot but be detrimental. It is perhaps vain to expect a vigorous childhood to be born from unions in which healthy desire is replaced by the coldness of duty or by an instinct that has not been transfigured by personal attraction and selection. The difficulty is inherent in a system which bases its selection upon the supernatural and rejects the natural call of spirit to spirit and sense to sense. And yet it must be confessed, not without shame, that a careful selection by parents, if it could be trusted to be rational and disinterested, might be no more injurious than the restricted and illusory choice, too often made in ignorance, which so far seems to be the only substitute that civilization has learnt to provide. In general, it may be said that the Hindu rules of marriage are, in the ordinary sense of happiness, as conducive to the happiness of the spouses as the fast transforming systems of modern Europe, and that their happiness is less self-centred and more altruistic. Romantic love is, after all, most commonly, even in Europe, the short-lived flower of life in one sex and one class. Marriage must everywhere be in practice limited and artificially restricted. Economic conditions are very near the base of most marriages; and even in the richer classes must be a main constituent of the bride’s decision. Moreover, for the lasting purposes of marriage, affection is no bad substitute for love—affection and the sense of destined consecration. It may at least be asserted that, in general, among the upper castes of India the mingled feeling of duty and devotion is as strong as, and perhaps more stable than, in the corresponding sections of English society. In many places, however, and in many castes, the soft bloom of companionship and emotion is bruised by the brutality of a first union with a partner before unknown and undesired. Nor can it be denied that the gnostic asceticism, to which Indian idealism has so often condescended, has killed, where it could, that joy in a free humanity which alone can invest marriage with the flaming beauty of love. When the value of love is considered as an inspiration to art and chivalry and, indeed, to every creative activity, then the loss, thus self-inflicted, will appear in all its gravity. It may well be that the deathly slumber of the arts in modern India is to no small extent due to spiritual conditions which exclude and condemn the love which is profane, and is therefore alive and immortal.

A MAHAR WOMAN