EVERY- DAY LIFE OF INDIAN WOMEN. 43 



EVERY-DAY LIFE OF INDIAN" WOMEN. 



By Captain KICHAED CAENAO TEMPLE. 



ONE of the chief characteristics of Indian domestic polity is 

 extreme subdivision, and the tendency among all classes of 

 the natives of India is toward the social isolation of groups with 

 contracted interests, and the consequent accentuation of minute 

 differences in habits of life. The results of this are what is gener- 

 ally known as " caste," and it is caste that underlies and controls 

 all social matters that are peculiarly Indian. At first sight, there- 

 fore, under these circumstances, there can be no such thing as a 

 common method of life among the women of a population which 

 is an ill-assorted compost of wild and savage tribes of diverse ori- 

 gin ; -of Brahmans and orthodox Hindoos ; of heterodox Hindoos 

 and Brahmanists by conviction and birth ; of Buddhists, and Jains, 

 and Parsees ; of Mohammedans, and Jews, and Christians of long 

 standing ; of Aryan and Dravidian races ; of aboriginal clans of 

 Aryan and non- Aryan descent ; of highly cultivated communities 

 and completely ignorant tribes ; of whole peoples within and with- 

 out the pale of Oriental civilization. But, nevertheless, there ex- 

 ists a standard of life which is Indian, and to which all the varie- 

 ties of the natives of India are drawn — just as there is a life which 

 is Oriental in the usually restricted sense of that term, habits that 

 are Indo-Chinese, and manners that are European. No one sup- 

 poses that Norwegian and Italian ladies live exactly in the same 

 way, or that English and Spanish women adopt precisely the same 

 mode of life ; but that there is a general line of conduct which is 

 common to all European countries is apparent to every one who 

 observes mankind. So it is in India. And the overshadowing in- 

 fluence to which every true native of the great peninsula unknow- 

 ingly submits is that wielded by the modern Brahmans through 

 their stanch henchmen, the high-caste Hindoos. In describing, 

 therefore, in very general terms, the aims and habits of an ordi- 

 nary Brahmani, one can give a fair notion of a life which every 

 Indian woman, however antagonistic her creed and race, is uncon- 

 sciously led on by instinct, as it were, to imitate, and which is her 

 invariable model. 



Habits of life are enormously, if not mainly, influenced by re- 

 ligion, and this leads me to say a few words here regarding Brah- 

 manism as a living and active faith, though it has been the fashion 

 in certain authoritative quarters to look on it as dying, if not al- 

 ready dead. Granting that it is not a proselytizing, in the sense of 

 being a missionary, religion, and granting that its fundamental the- 

 ory — it is only a theory and not a practice, be it remembered — is, to 



