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It may now be asked at the end of our survey, what was the spirit of the
laws? Were they meant to crush woman-hood to nothingness or were they framed to give
greater protection and safety to woman in the changing times. The motive justifies the end:
to commit murder is a crime, but when it is done for self-defence or to save an
unfortunate innocent victim, it amounts to a virtue.
True it is that anyone who has witnessed the pathetic condition of
women in India at the dawn of British rule cannot but be shocked at it: the
enforced child-marriages, the exposure of female children, putting to death female children
by throwing them at the junction of the Ganges and the sea, the violence used to make
women follow the Sati rite and thus end their miserable existence, the shameful treatment
accorded to a widow, the famous kulinism which made marriage a profession rather
than a sacrament, made woman not only an object of pity but many a woman sighed in the
secret recess of her heart and wished that she had never been born a woman in this
unfortunate country.
But were the laws to blame for this state of affairs or the customs of
the time? The later commentators while sanctioning a particular custom peculiar to their
age, used all the force of their argument and ingenuity of scholarship in reconciling the
new with the old. They had always to revert to the Vedas and even modify
the words of the
sacred texts for enforcing the new law. A glaring instance is the Sati rite. When this was
sanctioned by law the authors got the highest sanction of the Rig-Veda (X. 18), the only
hymn which describes the, disposal of the dead.
Kaegi has clearly mentioned how it happened: " The
well-known custom of burning of widows for thousands of years demanded
by the Brahmins-is nowhere evidenced in the Rig-Veda; only by palpable
falsification of a hymn has the existence of the custom been forcibly
put into the texts which, on the contrary, prove directly the opposite--
the return of the widow from her husband's corpse into a happy life and
her re-marriage". 1 this is just an
example of the gross injustice done to our traditional and authoritative
texts!
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