Between the twilights : $b Being studies of Indian women by one of themselvesSorabji, Cornelia
General
Between the twilights : $b Being studies of Indian women by one of themselves
Sorabji, Cornelia
India -- Social conditions; Women -- India
But to return to the husband’s respect for his wife, that is a good
thing to record. Say it is only policy; “where women are honoured,
there the Gods are pleased; but where they are not honoured, no sacred
rite yields reward.”... Say it is grounded in the fact of her being his
possession; possibly, but at any rate it is there. How pre-eminently
he regards her as his _property_ there is proof upon proof. He leaves
to no other hand punishment for encroachments; he shuts her away, lest
eyes of others who do not own her should see and covet--it takes more
than one generation to kill the anger in the eye of a man at a glance
of admiration from another, honest though it be; and when he dies she
remains his property still, that is the reason of perpetual widowhood;
and till it was forbidden did she not, as suttee, acknowledge that she
was his property, useless when no longer needed?
There is a temple on a City wall in a country of sand and low scrub,
gray with dust. The Temple is beautiful with its outlook on the sea of
sand, and the little earth holes of water where the women dig in the
sand. It is a Temple to a woman. She was beautiful beyond words, and
Kings sought her in marriage, and fought for her with the King to whom
she was betrothed. And at last one of the Kings slew the Betrothed, and
claimed the hand of Ranak Devi. But she, rather than betray the trust
of him whom she had never seen, but whose she was nevertheless, sought
refuge in suttee. It is her Temple which you find on the City wall, and
round about it have gathered other women--there is a very forest of
Suttee Stones. You may know them by this sign--the hand and arms of a
woman graven in the stone, always the right hand, palm outwards.
And you find here also the _pallias_ or memorial stones to warrior
Kings and to great rulers among women. For the place of memorial
stones, of the dead, of silence, is a place of glory. To it come the
bereaved, the empty-handed, to give thanks for those who have attained;
to it come the young, bending beneath blessings; death and life walk
ever hand in hand, and the white jasmine triangles of the newly-wed
make a fragrant carpet in the Temple of Memory.
But one cannot write truly of the conception of Love in any nation
without writing a book without end of the conception of each loving
soul in its loneliness and aloofness. And, when I said this to my
Wisest of the Wise, she made answer: “So it is, even so” ... and there
was such beauty in her face that I wished it had been possible to hear
her parable of Love. But silence of words was between us, naturally, on
the things we most held sacred.
And it was one who sat by who took up the thought.
“There was a King who loved his Queen with all his soul, and one day,
overcome of this love, he fell at her feet in an ecstasy, even in the
presence of the co-wives, who being jealous, said: ‘Shameless one! lift
up the hands of the King to your head.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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