Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1885 — The Awful Life of East Indian Widows. [ARTICLE]

The Awful Life of East Indian Widows.

A Hindoo lady has sent a striking contribution to the Times of India. She takes enforced widowhood as her theme, and writes strongly and bitterly of what she describes as the brutalized human nature that could lose sight of the difference between a child widow of six and a matron widow of sixty, and provide for the innocent mite that life of long misery which is the invariable lot of the Hindoo widow. She tells how directly after the husband’s death the widow’s hair is cut off and her ornaments are taken away; how she must thenceforth wear the coarsest clothes and eat the most unsavtory food. Her presence is shunned, and she becomes the leper of society, doomed to pass her life in seclusion. She is not allowed to mix freely with her people. If she unwillingly intrudes on any occasion of festivity the company curse her presence and regard it as of evil omen. The menial work of the family becomes her lot as a matter of course. . “Suppose,” asks the Hindoo lady, “it had been enacted that when a man. lost his wife he should continue celibate, live on coarse fare, be tabooed in society, wear mourning weeds for the remainder of his life, and practice neverending austerities, would not my countrymen have long since revolted against such inhuman treatment ?” She goes on to give a striking illustration of the venerable head of a Hindoo family sending out his creatures to hunt down a girl of ten io bless his remaining years, and then, turning to his widowed grand-daughter of fifteen, and telling her that her widowhood is a punishment for the loss of her husband, which can only be expiated by a life of austerity, devotion, and purity. —London Times.