When the widow is a child, not yet arrived at the age of living with her husband, the only ceremony at the death is the cutting of the tali cord. The other ceremonies and degradations are reserved for the time when she arrives at the full age of wifehood, when the whole ceremony is enacted as though the wife had been a real wife, and the little girl-widow is compelled to join that great army of women in India, nearly twenty million strong, of whom a million are child-widows.
I met a great many widows in India, and even among the Brahmo Samaj, which sect is now trying to break the tyrannical yoke of custom, I never heard of one who dared to brave public opinion and remarry. I knew one charming widow—I think the most beautiful woman I saw in India—who had practically broken all class restrictions except this last. It was said that she had been in love with a man for many years, and he had repeatedly tried to persuade her to undergo the censure of her people by marrying him, but she dared not do it. She was only thirty years old, but she must remain until the end of her life a widow, almost an outcast.
In the cities and among the modernized people of India this state does not hold such sorrow for women as in the villages and country districts, where the people have not come into contact with Western civilization. In these purely Hindu towns, where all social life is controlled by custom and the influences of superstition and religion, when the woman can no longer wear the red mark of wifehood upon her forehead, her case is pitiable.
The Indian Government has made laws legalizing the remarriage of widows, but even when it has the Government sanction, custom and tradition are too strong, and practically no woman will take advantage of it. It would mean not only lifelong disgrace for her, but also would reflect so severely upon her relatives and the members of her caste that they would be involved in endless disgrace.
There are many homes scattered throughout India for these helpless women. Pundita Ramabai has a place near Poona where she has nearly eight hundred widows in her charge, and they are a sad sight as they go in squads of from two to three hundred to their work at the printing press or at the looms attached to the mission. Some widows had been with her for years, and quite likely will remain for life, as no one will marry a widow, and they do not seem to be acquiring a practical education with which they could earn their living in the world. The Gaekwar of Baroda is solving the widow question by educating them as teachers at the Government expense, only asking that in return for his care they devote a certain number of years as school-teachers in his State.