Caste in India: The Facts and the System c6.s6.18

c6.s6.18

The rigorous attitude of Hinduism towards widows is well known, and we may recall the difficulty with which the British Government suppressed the barbarous custom whereby the surviving wife was condemned to follow her husband on the funeral pyre. The custom which encouraged by every means, if it did not explicitly exact, such a sacrifice could not well be indulgent towards second marriages for women. Their condemnation may not go back to primitive times, but it is undoubtedly very ancient, as is testified by literary tradition. It has taken on extraordinary authority throughout the whole of India. Certainly this prohibition is not nearly universal, but it is general in the higher castes.³ Ardently propagated, to all appearance, by the example and precept of the Brahmans, it has become a touchstone for the social status of the castes; those who practise it are alone esteemed. Its abandonment by the higher castes causes them to sink in the social scale ; ¹ its adoption by the lower castes is a means of raising and of strengthening their position in the Brahmanic scheme of society.