Democratic Sentinel, Volume 15, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 February 1891 — A Terrible Ostracism. [ARTICLE]

A Terrible Ostracism.

It is true that the British law in India permits the widow to marry again. But custom, far more powerful, forbids it; and the family abetting remarriage, even in the case of maiden widows, would, in most parts of India, be doomed to social ostracism. An enlightened Hindoo in Madras, the editor of the native newspaper, had a daughter whose child-husband died. The two had been married in infancy, and never lived together. This editor, pitying his daughter’s widowed condition, determined to obtain for her another husband. The father was esteemed by the European community and popular with his own race. If any one could safely contravene prejudice and custom he seemed to be the man. He procured a worthy young man as a husband for the “widow,” who had never met a husband before. They were married, and the father felt that he had done a noble act both for his daughter and his people. But the weight of ostracism, more terrible and intolerable in India than in any other country, began to oppress the editor and his family. Enlightenment and philosophy were not sufficient antidotes for the bane of loss of caste. The editor’s wife was the first to succumb. Her European friends encouraged her; but in vain. She died, not of disease, but of heart-breaking, crushed by social odium and contempt. Her husband, at last accounts, was striving to bear up as manfully as possible; but there was a ring of melancholy and despair in his latest letter to a British friend who gave these facts publicity.