WOMEN OF MALABAR.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 57, 4 September 1909, Page 11

WOMEN OF MALABAR.

It is a far cry to Malabar, away down there at the southern end of the Indian Peninsula. Malabar is not on the highroad of the visitor to "India's coral strand," but Mr. Henry Bruce, in "Letters from Malabar" who writes with observation and humour, found it interesting. A critic asks : What do our suffragists think of this?: — "In the upper class, women enjoy an independence unknown in any other part of the world, including the privilege of choosing and changing their own husbands, a privilege which they exercise with much discretion, rarely divorcing a husband if he' turns out at all a possible person." And, again, here is an item for the Suffragists, who would find Malabar to be a land of considerable progress from their point of view : — "In Malabar it is unnecessary, or at least unimportant, to know your father ; it is your mother who counts, for all purposes of inheritance. How beautifully this system of matriarchy solves certain problems!" The heat in Malabar, so very near tha equator, is peculiar, something we are content merely to read about: — "The Malabar heat is not gross or apparent. It is more hidden and inward, yet undeniable. It s.iys with an imperative voice : 'Take off that coat !' The sun does not burn from brazen skies. There are pleasant clouds and breezes which seem cool. I am told that the Malabar climate is letting me down easy, since I have been able to sleep well for 'two nights without mos-quito-nets."

The courts at Frankfort have annulled the remarkable death-bed marriage of Count Emich zu Leiningen-Westerburg, who died in July 1906, eight days uftei wedding a certain' Fraulein yon Nordeck. The evidence proved that the count had never been, legally divorced from his first -wife, but consented to marry Fraulein yon Nordeck after a week's acquaintance on payment of £100. He al&o consented to acknowledge her son as his own so that the latter would inherit the Leiningen family estates. It was shown that Fraulein yon Nordeck made the acquaintance of the dying count through a Frankfort marriage-broker Qiid that he was not the father of her child.