WOMAN’S LIFE IN INDIA.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 909, 15 January 1881, Page 2

WOMAN’S LIFE IN INDIA.

On the day of her marriage, the Hindoo girl of any age from three to ten, is put into a palanquin, shut up close, and carried to her husband’s house. Hitherto she had been the spoilt pet of her mother; now she is to be the upon whom she is to wait, whose commands she ife implicitly to obey, and who teaches het what she is to do to please her husband—what dishes he likes best, and how to cook them. If the mother-in-law is kind, she will let the girl go home occasionally to Visit her mother. The girls are married even as young as three years of age, and should the boy to whom such a child is married die the next day, she is called a widow, and is from henceforth doomed' to perpetual widowhood: she can never marry again. As a widow she must never wear any jewellery, never dress her hair, never sleep on a bed, but on a piece of matting spread on the hard brick floor, and sometimes, in fact, with not ewen that between her and the cold bricks, and no matter how cold the nights may be, she must have no other covering than the thin garment she has worn during the day. She must eat but one meal a day, and that of the coarsest kind, and once in every two weeks she must fast for twenty-four hours. She must never sit down nor speak in the presence of her mother-in-law or sisters-in-law, unless they command her to do so. Her food must be cooked and eaten apart from the other women’s. She is a disgraced, degraded being. She may have been a high caste Brahminic woman, but on her becoming a widow, any, even the lowest servants, may order her to do what they do not like to do. No woman in the house must ever speak one word of love or pity to her, for it is supposed that if a woman shows the slightest commiseration for a widow, she will become one herself. If a widow becomes so ill that she cannot go down to the room where they take their food, she may lie where she is and die. No woman dares assist her; if she has a son, he may do all he can for her. Not only does she never have a kind word said to her, but she is constantly reviled and reproached, for it is supposed she must have done something very wicked in a former state of existence that the gods have punished her thus by making her a widow. I saw an account a short time ago in an English paper, that they had been trying to take the census of the population lately in India, and as far as they had gone, they found that there were “eighty thousand widows under six years of

age 1” Can you- imagine the amount of suffering that sentence tells and foretells ? Such is the life and death of the happiest, the most favoured amongst these Bengali women.