Women in India

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 8, 1908

India a land of strange contradictions! Here excessive humaneness toward animals exists side by side with harshest and most unsympathetic treatment of women. The Indian woman has suffered, beyond her sisters of any other heathen land, the disabilities that later Hinduism has put upon her sex. As early as the fifth century before Christ, Manu, the famous lawgiver, in his code defines the place of woman and her relation to her husband as that of a slave to her lord, a creature to her master. He is to exercise the severest discipline in her treatment and in her standing in this world, and any glimmering hope that she may have of a life to come depends upon her obedient service to lordly man.

The sad history of Indian womanhood, as seen by those brought up in the free air of Christian teachings, has been pathetically summed up in three brief sentences, which, though not wholly true, still contain so much truth as to afford a severe arraignment of Brahmanism. This terse history is, “Unwelcomed at birth, unhonored in life, unwept in death.” No heavier burden lies upon life in India than the inhuman and debasing treatment of womanhood by the religious prescription of the ruling faith. India can make but little advance in any true progress or civilization, except as the wrongs of child marriage, enforced widowhood, and the social suspicion and disrespect and religious discrimination against her, are lifted off the heart and mind of the Indian woman. No blacker cloud darkens any national sky than the cloud of unhonored womanhood which overhangs India.

Among the most futile of the defenses that are offered is, that the Indian woman desires the conditions under which she lives, and most earnestly resists any alteration of social conditions. This has always been the lame apology of the wrong-doer. The slaveholder has always held his slaves for their good, and has always pleaded their belief in his statement of the case; anything to the contrary has always been the mischievous work of meddlesome friends of the slave. So with Indian women, there are not a few Western men who are tempted to believe the Hindu putting of the case. But what if the woman, deprived for centuries of the ordinary rights and privileges of a human being, should be sunk through the generations into passivity and even ignorant welcoming of her servile place. Alas, for the captive bird that never knew freedom!

But let any faintest understanding of the true state of the case, any feeblest knowledge of how other women live, and are trusted and honored reach her, and at once the woman’s heart in India pines for what she immediately recognizes as her natural right. Listen to the prayer of one of these as recorded by her fellow countrywoman, the Pundita Ramabai: “O Lord, hear my prayer. For ages dark ignorance has brooded over our minds and spirits; like a cloud of dust it rises and wraps us round; and we are like prisoners in an old and moldering house, choked and buried in the dust of custom; and we have no strength to get out. Bruised and beaten, we are like the dry husks of the sugar-cane when the sweet juice has been extracted. Criminals confined in jails are happier than we; for they know something of the world. They were not born in prison; but we have not for one day, no, not even in our dreams, seen thy world, and what we have not seen we can not imagine. To us it is nothing but a name; and not having seen thy world we can not know

thee, its Maker. We have been in this jail; we have died here, and are dying. O God of mercies, our prayer to thee is this, that the curse may be removed from the women of India!”—Selected.