Lighted to Lighten: the Hope of India A Study of Conditions among Women in India

To say that the world is one is to-day's commonplace. What causes its new solidarity? What but the countless hands that reach across its shores and its Seven Seas, hands that devastate and hands that heal! There are the long fingers of the cable and telegraph that pry through earth's hidden places, gathering choice bits of international gossip and handing them out to all the breakfast tables of the Great Neighborhood. There are the swift fingers of transcontinental train and ocean liner, pushing the dweller from the West into the Far East, the man from the prairie into the desert. There are the devastating fingers of war that first fashion and then carry infernal machines and spread them broadcast over towns and ships and fertile fields. Thank God, there are also hands of kindness that dispense healing medicines, that scatter schoolbooks among untaught children and the Word of God in all parts of earth's neighborhood. And, lastly, there are hands that seem never to leave the house roof and the village street, yet gain the power of the long reach and set thousands of candles alight across the world.

"Why don't you let them alone? Their religion is good enough for them," was the classic comment of the armchair critic of a generation ago. Time has answered it. Nothing in to-day's world ever lets anything else alone. We read the morning paper in terms of continents. To the League of Nations China and Chile are concerns as intimate as Upper Silesia. To the Third Internationale the obscure passes of Afghanistan are a near frontier. Suffrage and prohibition are echoed in the streets of Poona and in the councils of Delhi. Labor strikes in West Virginia and Wales produce reactions in the cotton mills of Madras. And the American girl in high school, in college, in business, in society, in a profession, is producing her double under tropic suns, in far-off streets where speech and dress and manners are strange, but the heart of life is one. That time is past; we cannot let them alone; we can only choose what shall be the shape and fashioning done by hands that reach across the sea.

"Once upon a time,"[1] men and women dwelt in caves and cliffs and fashioned curious implements from the stones of the earth and painted crude pictures upon the walls of their rock dwellings. Archaeologists find such traces in England and along the river valleys of France, among the sands of Egyptian deserts and in India, where armor heads, ancient pottery, and cromlechs mark the passing of a long forgotten race. Thus India claims her place in the universal childhood of the world.

The Brown-skinned Tribes.

"Once upon a time,"[2] when the Stone Men had passed, a strange, new civilization is thought to have girdled the earth, passing probably in a "brown belt" from Mediterranean lands across India to the Pacific world and the Americas. Its sign was the curious symbol of the Swastika; its passwords certain primitive customs common to all these lands. Its probable Indian representatives are known to-day as Dravidians--the brown-skinned people still dominating South Indian life, whose exact place in the family of races puzzles every anthropologist. It was then that civilization was first walking up and down the great river valleys of the Old World. While the first pyramids[3] were a-building beside the long green ribbon of the Nile and the star-gazers[4] of Mesopotamia were reading future events from her towers of sun-dried bricks, Dravidian tribes were cultivating the rich mud of the Ganges valley, a slow-changing race. Did the lonely traveler, I wonder, troll the same air then as now to ward away evil spirits from the star-lit road? Did the Dravidian maiden do her sleek hair in the same knot at the nape of her brown neck, and poise the earthen pot with the same grace on her daily pilgrimage to the river?

The Aryan Brother.

"Once upon a time" Abraham pitched his tent beneath the oaks of Mamre, and Moses shepherded his father-in-law's flocks at "the back side of the desert." It was then that down through the grim passes of the Himalayas, where now the British regiments convoy caravans and guard the outposts of Empire, a people of fair skin and strange speech migrated southward to the Land of the Five Rivers and the fat plains of the Ganges. Aryan even as we, the Brahman entered India, singing hymns to the sun and the dawn, bringing with him the stately Sanskrit speech, new lore of priest and shrine, new pride of race that was to cleave society into those horizontal strata that persist to-day in the caste system. Thus through successions of Stone-Age men, Dravidian tribes, and Aryan invaders, India stretches her roots deep into the past. But while there were transpiring these

"Old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago,"

where were we? The superior Anglo-Saxon who speaks complacently of "the native" forgets that during that same "once upon a time" when civilization was old in India, his ancestors, clad in deer skin and blue paint, were stalking the forests of Europe for food.

Gifts to the West.

Nor did these old civilizations forbear to reach hands across the sea and share with the young and lusty West the fruits of their knowledge. On a May morning, as skillful carriers swing you up to the heights of the South India hills, there is a sudden sound reminiscent of the home barnyard, a scurry of wings across the path, and a gleam of glossy plumage; Mr. Jungle Cock has been disturbed in his morning meal. Did you know that from his ancestors are descended in direct lineage all the Plymouth Rocks and the White Leghorns of the poultry yard, all the Buff Orpingtons that win gold medals at poultry shows? Other food stuffs India originated and shared. Sugar and rice were delicacies from her fields carried over Roman roads to please the palates of the Caesars.[5]

Traditions of Womanhood.

Besides these contributions to the world's pantry, there were gifts of the mind and spirit. To those days of long ago modern India looks back as to a golden age, for she was then in the forefront of civilization, passing out her gifts with a generous hand. Of that ancient heritage not the least part is the tradition of womanhood,--a heritage trampled in the dust of later ages, its restoration only now beginning through that liberty in Christ which sets free the woman of the West and of the East.

Much might be written on the place of the Indian woman in folk-lore epic and drama. Helen of Troy and Dido of Carthage pale into common adventuresses when placed beside the quiet courage and utter self-abnegation of such Indian heroines as Sita and Damayanti.

The story of Rama and Sita is the Odyssey of the East, crooned by grandmothers over the evening fires; sung by wandering minstrels under the shade of the mango grove; trolled by travelers jogging in bullock carts along empty moonlit roads. Sita's devotion is a household word to many a woman-child of India. Little Lakshmi follows the adventures of the loved heroine as she shares Rama's unselfish renunciation of the throne and exile to the forest with its alarms of wild beasts and wild men. She thrills with fear at Sita's abduction by the hideous giant, Ravana, and the wild journey through the air and across the sea to the Ceylon castle. She weeps with Rama's despair, and again laughs with glee at the antics of his monkey army from the south country, as they build their bridge of stones across the Ceylon straits where now-a-days British engineers have followed in their simian track and train and ferry carry the casual traveler across the gaps jumped by the monkey king and his tribe. Sita's sore temptations in the palace of her conqueror and her steadfast loyalty until at last her husband comes victorious--they are part of the heritage of a million Lakshmis all up and down the length of India.

Of the loves of Nala and Damayanti it is difficult to write in few words. From the opening scene where the golden-winged swans carry Nala's words of love to Damayanti in the garden, sporting at sunset with her maidens, the old tale moves on with beauty and with pathos. The Swayamvara, or Self Choice, harks back to the time when the Indian princess might herself choose among her suitors. Gods and men compete for Damayanti's hand among scenes as bright and stately as the lists of King Arthur's Court, until the princess, choosing her human lover, throws about his neck the garland that declares her choice. Happy years follow, and the birth of children. Then the scene changes to exile and desertion. Through it all moves the heroine, sharing her one garment with her unworthy lord, "thin and pale and travel-stained, with hair covered in dust," yet never faltering until her husband, sane and repentant, is restored to home and children and throne.

So the ancient folk-lore goes on, in epic and in drama, with the woman ever the heroine of the tale. True it is that her virtues are limited; obedience, chastity, and an unlimited capacity for suffering largely sum them up. They would scarcely satisfy the ambitions of the new woman of to-day; yet some among us might do well to pay them reverence.

Those were the high days of Indian womanhood. Then, as the centuries passed, there came slow eclipse. Lawgivers like Manu[6] proclaimed the essential impurity of a woman's heart; codes and customs began to bind her with chains easy to forge and hard to break. Later followed the catastrophe that completed the change. The Himalayan gateways opened once more and through them swarmed a new race of invaders, passing out of those barren plains of Central Asia that have been ever the breeding grounds of nations and swooping upon India's treasures. In one hand the green flag of the Prophet, in the other the sword, these followers of Muhammad sealed for a millennium the end of woman's high estate.