the problem of the peculiar position of women among the Hindus.
Perhaps"--and here the babou's voice grew very grave and earnest--"the
human imagination is incapable of conceiving a lot more wretched than
that of the Hindu widow. By immemorial tradition she could escape it
only through the flames of the _satti_, the funeral-pile upon which
she could burn herself with the dead body of her husband. But the
_satti_ is now prohibited by the English law, and the poor woman who
loses her husband is, according to custom, stripped of her clothing,
arrayed in coarse garments and doomed thenceforth to perform the most
menial offices of the family for the remainder of her life, as one
accursed beyond redemption. To marry again is impossible: the man who
marries a widow suffers punishments which no one who has not lived
under the traditions of caste can possibly comprehend. The wretched
widow has not even the consolations which come from books: the decent
Hindu woman does not know how to read or write. There was still one
avenue of escape from this life. She might have become a _nautchni_.
What wonder that there are so many of these? How, then, to deal with
this fatal superstition, or rather conglomerate of superstitions,
which seems to suffer no more from attack than a shadow? We have begun
the revolution by marrying widows just as girls are married, and by
showing that the loss of caste--which indeed we have quite abolished
among ourselves--entails necessarily none of those miserable
consequences which the priests have denounced; and we strike still
more deeply at the root of the trouble by instituting schools where
our own daughters, and all others whom we can prevail upon to
send, are educated with the utmost care. In our religion we retain
Brahma--by whom we mean the one supreme God of all--and abolish all
notions of the saving efficacy of merely ceremonial observances,
holding that God has given to man the choice of right and wrong,
and the dignity of exercising his powers in such accordance with his