BOOK NOTES

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIX, Issue 227, 24 August 1929, Page 2

BOOK NOTES

HINDU CHILD-WIVES. of. tho Gods” (stories by Katherine Mayo).—Miss Mayo’s ruthless indictment of certain Hindu institutions in her “Mother India” has won her world fame. The grave charges made in it have not been answered and are not capable of being answered, because they rest on undisputed evidence. In this volume she repeats, them and emphasises them in the form of twelve short stories, though before each story is an assurance that it is an episode taken from real life, only the names being altered. Her purpose, she says, is to bring home to the West “exactly what it means, worked out in flesh and blood, to be in Hindu India a childwife, a Temple prostitute, a Suttee, a child-widow, an Untouchable, or a Sacred Cow.” The ghastliness of the picture is in large part due to the influence of the Hindu religion. As Bishop Whitehead writes in a letter to Miss Mayo:—“lt is this religious snnctiou that has made the efforts, often the splendid and courageous efforts, of Indian social reformers so ineffective. . . . Try to imgaine what London would be like if in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and other leading churches largo establishments of prostitutes had been kept for centuries past for tho use of the clergy and worsliippers. What chance would reformers have of raising or even maintaining the standard of sexual morality? Yet that would be parallel to the state of affairs actually existing in South India.” Nothing more hideous can be conceived than the practice of marrying children or even babies to grown men (which is denounced by Indian reformers and the Arya Sarnay), and nothing is more certain than the racial decadence which must follow upon it. The one really cheerful episode in the book concerns a child who escaped to a Moslem mosque and there found safety in the higher and nobler morality of the Maliommedan faith. It is Miss Mayo’s firm conviction that were British authority withdrawn tho fighting races (who are largely Moslems) would make very short work of the moro decadent’ types among the Hindus. On the plight of the Untouchables (the Indian “outcastes,” some sixty million in number) Miss Mayo throws a startling light. The 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,” he said. . . . “At least you could wash.” “May it please the Sahib, we have no well.”

“Then bring water from the wells of the village beyond.” “Nay, those are tho wells of the caste folk. If we approached their wells, thereby 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 wnter?” “From mudholes and marshes, when such be. Otherwise our women walk, half a day’s journey to the water station of the railroad and there await the coming of the train. For the enginemen are Muslims, and when they fill their engine’s needs will also mercifully fill our women’s jars.” It will be seen, when Sir John Simon’s Commission reports, whether these poor creatures are to be abandoned to the tender mercy of their exploiters and oppressors. To one of her stories Miss Mayo profixes with caustic irony a quotation from Gandhi, to the effect that Hinduism’s “worship of the cow is, in my opinion, its unique contribution to the evolution of humanitarianism”; and shows the appalling misery which animals suffer in that land of cruelty. Slie sums up the position Thus: “One hundred nnd forty-seven million head of cattle in British India,' 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 in myriads milkless from starvation. Cows and children daily multiplying, multiplying, multiplying. Cows, unlike children, sacrosanct to tho Hindu world, so that to kill one useless, suffering, 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 aie slain without mercy. Infanticide is rife in the case 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 Commissioner, on a visit, detected an appalling smell, and thereupon ordered the hedge to be cut down before his eyes,. revealing the bodies of numerous girl-babies thrust living into it. Miss Mayo is a witness who writes with perfect impartiality. An American by race who studied Indian institutions on the spot, she has no prejudices in favour of the British. Yet her testimony to the work which they have done and are doing, assailed by the Babus and the Hindu extremists, is unfaltering. If they have not cleared up the festering sore, which calls itself Hindu civilisation it is because they have treated it as a principle of state to respect that alien leligion with its repulsive gods and goddesses.