Hindu woman

“ It is hard to convey the idea, state the fact as one may, but the Hindu woman acknowledges no claims save those of religion. No social, no communal claims. Her worship of the Gods, of her husband, her children, they are all the same, part of her religion, and they make her life.
Even the ordinary business of the day, bathing, dressing, eating, is a religious act.... To cook her husband’s food an orthodox Hindu wears a special silk garment: the only gardening she ever attempts is to water and tend the sacred basil (Tulsi) . ”

“ These are some of the stock illustrations of the model wife used everywhere and at all times in India. And they have had an extensive and wonderful influence in the molding of wifely ideals.
It is, as we see, a glorification of devotion, faithfulness, constancy—traits that have always beautified the character of the Hindu woman. It is true that, apart from her husband and from the kitchen, woman has had few ideals urged upon her in that great country. Her ambitions have not crossed the doorsteps of her house and home. She is measured entirely by her relation to her husband or children. ”

“ Nothing can be done in this case.
"There is no god or goddess to love a Hindu woman. Whatever offerings we make her, the goddess of small-pox smites us, and then the men say the women have not offered enough, and are angry." This was the reply of a Punjabi woman, who spoke for her friends and neighbours.
One Bengali woman told a missionary of the death of a precious baby boy. ”

“ The Hindu religion has always stood for the absolute equality of woman with man. In matters religious as well as secular the Hindu woman has been considered the equal of man before the law since the origin of the Hindu nation. The admission of women into American universities began only in recent times, while her partial equality in the sight of law, not yet quite complete, is less than twenty years old. But in India women have enjoyed such rights and many more since the beginning of its recorded history. ”

“ Hinduism has never looked with kindness or consideration upon women. It seems to have been its settled policy to treat them with contempt and unkindness. The consequence is that the girl babe is never welcome in the Hindu family. And from the cradle to the grave woman has no independence or right within the pale of this faith. During childhood she is in bondage to her father, during her marriage she must give implicit obedience to her husband, and as a widow she remains the ward of her sons.
Look at the disabilities under which the Hindu woman labours to-day. ”

“ The time is past when all the knowledge the Hindu woman possessed consisted in the art of being graceful and the science of etiquette of their social world. Today the Hindu woman's mind is cultivated to a remarkable degree. Your son's wife was a highly educated girl. Her father and mother were of the Brahmin faith, but Father Leclerc had the joy of converting them to our own religion. Unfortunately, when a Hindu is converted to our religion [Pg 228] he loses his caste, his rank, his standing in social life. ”

“ Hinduism leaves her no opportunity, in this human existence, for liberty and independence.
Hindu ideas of womanhood have always been low and unworthy. Rather than being considered a help-mate to man, she has ever been regarded as his tempter and seducer. The proverbs of India are full of these base insinuations concerning womanhood. "What is the chief gate to hell? Woman." This is only one of a host of common sayings which brand the womanhood of India with shame. ”

“ It is impossible for a Westerner to realize how much of the life of the Hindu, in the home and in society, is circumscribed by superstitions and directed by omens only. In the case of a man setting out upon a journey forty-three different things [252] may happen which prognosticate good, and thirty-four which forebode evil. In household matters, the eye of the Hindu man, and very specially of the Hindu woman, is ever open to any one of a thousand indications that may reveal the will of the god or the demon as to conduct on the occasion. ”

“ Quite likely, when the unwise caller departs, the mother 101will make a lamp of kneaded rice flour and fill it with oil or clarified butter, which, when lighted and passed round the baby’s head, will remove the dreaded evil.
The Hindu woman’s life is ruled by omens to a far greater extent than is the life of the woman of the Western world. ”

“ The most sacred prayers are said in the morning before partaking of food, and it is the husband, the head of the house, who is supposed to say the prayers for all 93beneath his roof-tree. “No sacrifice is allowed to women apart from their husbands, no religious rite, no fasting; as far as a wife honours her lord, so far is she exalted in heaven,” says the laws of Manu, yet the instinct of religion is strong in the Hindu woman, as it is in women all over the world, and they do perform a worship. ”

“ It is natural to inquire whether this characteristic of the Hindu pantheon is not a reflection of the Hindu mind as to the influence of woman, and as to the belief of man in the evil character of that influence. As is the place and power of woman among the men so is the character and place of the goddesses in the pantheon of that people. ”

“ For example, while Christianity has raised woman to a position of respect and honor, and made her influence felt as something sacred and potential in the family and in all society, Hinduism has brought her down even from the place which she occupied among the primitive Aryans, to an ever-deepening degradation. It has made her life a burden and a curse. Pundita Ramabai, in her plea for high-caste Hindu women, quotes a prayer of a child widow in which she asks, "O Father of the world, hast Thou not created us? or has perchance some other God made us? Dost Thou only care for men? ”

“ Every other Indian tongue equally abounds in proverbial expressions which brand a woman as one of the greatest evils of the land. Sanskrit writers have exhausted vituperative language in describing woman. They represent her as “wily, hypocritical, lying, deceptive, artful, fickle, freakish, vindictive, vicious, lazy, vain, dissolute, hard-hearted, sinful, petty-minded, jealous, addicted to simulation and dissimulation. She is worse than the worst of animals, more poisonous than the poison of vipers.”
These proverbs do not necessarily reveal the depravity of the Hindu woman ”

“ INDIAN SOCIAL LIFE There is no woman in the world who is so bound down by custom, so tied to the wheel of conventionality, as is the Indian woman, both Hindu and Mohammedan. In the olden times the ancient law-makers realized the danger menacing a people surrounded by an inferior race, as were the natives of India compared to their Aryan invaders, and instituted that remarkable social system that peculiarly affects the women of the country, and is the cause of many of the evils that has made her life one not to be envied—caste. ”

“ As for India, that every Hindu girl at fourteen must be either a wife or a widow is a common saying, and readers of "Kim" and "The Naulahka" will recall the ancient and persistent belief that the wife who is not also a mother of sons is a woman of ill-omen. ”

“ For instance, when he so eloquently and beautifully portrayed the Hindu idea of womanhood as the divine motherhood ideal, to be forever reverenced, even worshipped with a devotion of loyalty such as the most woman-respecting unselfish and truest of American sons, husbands and fathers cannot even conceive of, one would have liked to know what the reply would have been to the query as to how far this beautiful theory is exemplified in practice in the majority of Hindu homes, which hold wives, mothers, daughters and sisters. ”

“ They do not mix with the Javanese, but live in specified houses some distance from them, in even greater filth, as is natural in a race forced to give its attentions to ceremonials and superstitions rather than to personal cleanliness. A Hindu woman cannot be used as a house-servant, not merely because of her personal habits, but because she will not touch beef or cow-grease and has many other troublesome heathenish notions. ”

“ In the cities and among the modernized people of India this state does not hold such sorrow for women as in the villages and country districts, where the people have not come into contact with Western civilization. In these purely Hindu towns, where all social life is controlled by custom and the influences of superstition and 150religion, when the woman can no longer wear the red mark of wifehood upon her forehead, her case is pitiable. ”

“ Chief among the abuses of Hinduism to be attacked has been the traditional attitude toward woman. Child marriage and compulsory widowhood are condemned by every social reformer up and down the length of India. The battle is fought not only for women, but by them also. Agitation for the suffrage has been carried on in India's chief cities. In Poona not long since the educated women of the city, Hindu, Muhammadan, and Christian, joined in a procession with banners, demanding compulsory education for girls. ”

“ It should be set down to the credit of the Code of Manu that with all its relentless cruelty toward woman it nowhere gives countenance to the atrocious custom of widow-burning which soon afterward became an important factor in the Hindu system and desolated the homes of India for more than two thousand years. ”

“ At the present time only one woman in two hundred can read and write in that land of progress. The remarkable thing is, not that so many are illiterate, but that even a few have been taught at all, in view of the attitude of the Hindu mind towards her. ”

“ They have held their dignity with a poise which does the female sex a great credit.
Does Hindu religion sanction, then, the bondage of woman, and is wife-beating permitted in Indian society? Is the Hindu wife considered merely as an instrument of pleasure, and is her whole ambition in life to be a passive and obedient servant of the husband?
The maxims which guide the conduct of Hindu society were laid down by the great Law-giver Manu, in the year 200 B. C. He says:
[Pg 34]
“Where female relations live in grief, the family soon perishes ”

“ No disgrace and misfortune can befall a woman, according to Hindu ideas, equal to that of spending her whole life in maidenhood. This, of course, is connected with the idea that she has no social status or religious destiny apart from man. Hence it is that a host of loving parents, who are unable to find a suitable match for their daughters, rather than leave them unmarried, stupidly join them in wedlock to professional bridegrooms. There is, in Bengal, today, a division of the Brahman caste whose men are professional purveyors to this silly but prevalent superstition. ”

“ I never myself met with a heathen -woman who could read, and in thai district in the South where I laboured, and where I was well acquainted with the condition of the people, no woman, I suppose, had learned to read from the beginning of the world, till Christ ianity was introduced, and our Christian schools established. The consequence of this ignorance is, that Hindu women are exceedingly superstitious and exceedingly silly ; but instead of the men being ashamed of this silliness, they think it the normal condition of the female mind. ”

“ Thus, to give instances, the Hindus think that if a man lies full length inside a bed, he is lying as if on a bier and will consequently soon be dead on a real bier; hence beds should be made so that one’s feet project uncomfortably over the end. By a similar reasoning he must not lie with his feet to the south because corpses are laid in this direction. A Hindu married woman always wears glass bangles as a sign of her state, and a widow may not wear them. A married woman must therefore never let her arms be without bangles or it is an omen that she will become a widow. ”

“ Since the time of the Mohammedan conquest, and probably long before, the higher class of women have mostly led a life of seclusion. This is preëminently true of the northern parts of the country where Mohammedan influence was strongest and the Hindu had carefully to protect his wife and daughters from the coarse Mussulman. In South India this seclusion is very rare and observed only among the most aristocratic. The common woman of India finds ample freedom of intercourse in her town and village, and figures conspicuously at the great religious festivals of her land. ”

“ Many of the pilgrims travel hundreds of miles to the appointed spot, and meet there others who have done the same; and the occasion is often taken advantage of by a Hindu father, to arrange that which is ever uppermost in his thoughts, namely, the marriage of his daughters. Although it is nowhere so stated in the Hindu Scriptures, it is a popular belief that a woman cannot obtain salvation unless she has been married. ”

“ He is never mentioned by name by the Hindu wife. ↑ The Hindu conceives the Divine Power, in its dual aspect of destruction and beneficence, as feminine, as the mother,—and woman in turn is looked upon as an embodiment of this power. ”

“ Such was the imperishable story of her suffering life! If you can remember her whom you have regarded as a sinful woman and take her name once every morning, it will redeem you from many of your sins.' [3]
↑ Round, earthen pot. ↑ According to Hindu custom, bangles are a sign that their wearer is not a widow, and an iron bangle and the vermilion mark are signs that their wearer is a married woman. ↑ A Hindu believes that the repetition of the name of a holy person has the effect of purification and the power of lessening the burden of one's sins. ”