HINDU CHILD WIVES

Hokitika Guardian, 23 May 1929, Page 8

HINDU CHILD WIVES

slaves of the cods. Miss Mayo’s ruthless indictment of certain niiidu institutions in lieu •JioUier india” has won her worn! lame. The grave cliarges made m it nave not been answered and are not a.panic of being answered, because mey rest on undisputed evidence. In mis volume she repeats them and emphases them in tne form of twelve siiori s.ories, though before each story is an assurance that it is an episode lake'll I rum real life, only the names ~cmg altered. Tier purpose, she says, is to bring home io the West “exactly what it means, worked out in flesh and blood, to no in Hindu India a child-wife, a Temple prostitute, a Suttee, a chi dwnlow, an untouchable, or a Sacred Cow.” Tlie ghastliness of the picture! is in large part due to the 'influence ol the Hindu religion. As Bishop Whitehead writes in a letter to Miss Mayo: Jt is this religious.,sanction that has made the efforts, often the splendid and courageous efforts, of Indian social and reformers so ineffective. . . .

Try to imagine what London would be like if in St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminister Ahhey, and other leading churches large estab ishmeiits ol prostitutes had been kept for centuries past for (lie use of the clergy and worshippers. What chance would ’reformers have of raising or even maintaining the .standard of s'xual morality Yet that would he parallel to the state of affairs actually, existing ir South Africa.

Gj,,.<X>,ojo untouchables. Nothing more hideous can he conceived than the practice of marrying children or even babies to grown men \wlneh is denounced by Indian reformers and the Arya Sarnay), ant. nothing is more cerium than the rueiiii decadence which must follow upon it. The one ready cheerful episode in the tioox ci/iic-eriis a child who escaped tc a .Moslem mosque and there lounu safety in the higher and nobler morality of the Mohammedan raitn. It is Aliss Mayo’s firm conviction that were British authority withdrawn the fighting races (who are largely Moslems; would make very short work o. the more decadent types among the Hindus. On the plight of the Untouchables l Hie Indian "outcastes,” some sixty million in number) Aliss Mayo throws a. startling light. Thu young British consulting surgeon of a big municipal hospital is brought in one of her stories into contact with a group of these unhappy people: ’ “You are dirty—beastly dirty,” lie said. . . . “At least you could wash.” “Alay it please the Sahib, wo have no well.’’ ' ; “Then bring water from the wells ol the village beyond.” “Nay, those are tne wells of the caste lobe. If we approached their wells, tneroby polluting them, they would punish us bitterly. And we, soulguilty, were eternally accursed.” “Dig wells for yourselves, then.” “Nay, also. For ,we may neither own land nor control, it.”“How then, do you get water?” “From lmidhulcs and marshes, when such be. Otherwise bur women walk, half a day’s journey to the waterstation of the railroad and there await ilie coming of .the train. For the engiiieinen arc Muslims, and when they (111 their engine’s need will also mercifully fill our women’s jars. It will he fieen, when Sir John Sim ;n’s Commission reports, whether these poor creatures are to be abaniln’ed tu the tender mercy of their exploiters and oppressors. COWS LIVE: CHILDREN' DIE.

To one of her stories Miss Alayo prefixes witJi caustic irony a quotation from Gandhi, to the effect that Hindu ism’s “worship of the cow is, in my opinion, its unique contribution to the evolution of humauitarism”; and si lows the appalling misery which animals suffer in tint land of cruelty. She sums up the position thus: One hundred and forty-seven million head of cattle in British Judin, half of them useless. Great cattle-owning areas where no fodder at all is planted. Little children in myriads withering for lack of milk. Cows iri myriads milkless from starvation. Cows and children daily nuitiplying, multiplying, multiplying.' Cows, unlike children, sacrosanct to the Hindu world.,so that to kill one useless, suftoring* moribund skeleton were a desperate crime. . . Yet cows left without compunction to perish slowly. The amazing fact is that while cows are kept alive children are slain without mercy. Infanticide is rife in the ease of female babies, and is even 'favoured ’ by orthodox Hindu opinion, there is a grisly tale of a thorn hedge near a village where the British Deputy Cniiiiissioiior, on a visit, detected an appalling smell, and thereupon ordered the hedge to he cut down before his eyes, revealing the b dies of numerous girl babies thrust living into it. .Miss Alayo is a witness who writes with perfect impartiality. An American by race who studied Indian institutions ell tlio.spit, she has no pre-judii-s in favour of the British.

Yet her testimony to the work which they have done and are doing, assailed by the Balms and the Hindu extremists, is unfaltering. If they have n t cleared up the festering son* which calls itself Hindu civilisation it is because they have treated it as a principle of state to respect that alien religion with its repulsive gods and goddesses.