ONE OF INDIA'S MANY CURSES.
A BENGALI press correspondent thus speaks of the awful curse of child marriage in Calcutta, mostly in the higher castes: Taking Bengal, I find that there are about 4,000 baby girls in the province, under one year, who have already been “married,” and over 600 baby girls out of this number, under one year, who have become widows! You will have some idea of the aggregate number of girl-widows, growing in proportion as the age limits rise, if you carry the age up to twelve. And when you consider that the custom prevails mostly among the higher classes, you will realize the enormous proportion, to total women population, of girl-wives and girl-widows. Multiply this figure by the number of provinces in India, and you get a rough idea of the extent of this crying evil of the Kali-yuga and the number of its victims. Imagine babes and sucklings in a state of what William Hunter described13as “perpetual penitential widowhood!” How many of the girls of five and seven and upward, to say nothing of these babes of twelve months, must have been “married” to men old enough to be their fathers and grandfathers, with the moral certainty of becoming widows long before reaching their teens. Nowhere are the words “marriage” and “religion” so badly abused as in India.