HINDOOS. 
141 
h^ye absolutely made their acquisition of the knowledge of letters>a; 
curse, and they are by a positive prohibition denied all access to their 
scriptures. Being thus degraded, even by their sacred writings,, 
women in India are in a state of ignorance and superstition, which 
has no parallel in the history of tribes the most savage and bar- 
barous, 
“ A female is despised as soon as she is born : she comes into the 
world amidst the frowns of her parents and friends, disappointed that 
the child is not a boy. Every mother among the tribe of Rajpoots 
puts her female child to death as soon as born. While 1 was in Ben- 
gal, I was informed of the case of a Rajpoot who had spared one of his 
daughters, and she lived till she attained the age when India girls a rC: 
marriageable. A girl in the house of a Rajpoot was, however, so exr 
traordinary a circumstance, that no parent chose to permit his son to ^ 
marry her. The father then became alarmed for her chastity and the 
honour of his family, and he therefore took her aside one day, and 
with a hatchet cut her to pieces! — These arelhe circumstances into 
which your sex enter into life in British India, 
“ In childhood and youth they have no education, no cultivation of 
any. kind whatever. There is not a single girl’s school in all India ; and 
the mother being herself entirely unlettered, and being the devoted 
victim of a dark and cruel superstition, is utterly incapable of improv- 
ing her child. The first days of the girl are therefore spent in an 
inanity which prepares her for a life doomed to be spent in supersti- 
tion and vice. 
“ In the age of comparative childhood she is united in marriage, 
without any knowledge of, or having ever seen, her husband : when 
they meet together for the first time, they are bound together for life. 
Thousands who are thus married in a state of childhood, lose their 
husbands without having ever lived with them, and are doomed to a 
life of widowhood, for the law forbids them to re-marry. Parents in 
some cases marry fifty or sixty daughters to one brahmin, that the 
family may be raised to honour by a marriage-relation to this man. 
These females never live with the husband, but in the houses of their 
own parents, or they leave the houses in which they have been thus 
sacrificed for the supposed honour of the family, and enter the abodes 
of infamy and ruin. 
“Supposing the female, however, to have been united to a person 
who really becomes attached to her, — what a mother I Without the 
knowledge of the alphabet; wholly unacquainted with mankind, and 
with all the employments of females in a civilized country ; unable 
either to make, to mend, or to wash the clothes of her household I 
She never sits to eat with her husband, but prepares his food, waits 
upon him, and partakes of what he leaves. If a friend of the other 
sex calls upon her husband, she retires. She is veiled, or goes in a 
covered palanquin, if she leaves the house. Slie never mixes in public 
companies. She derives no knowledge from the other sex, except 
from the stories to which she may listen from the mouth of a religious 
mendicant. She is, in fact, a mere animal, kept for burden or for 
slaughter, in the house of her husband. A case lately occurred in 
Calcutta, of a girl being burnt alive on the funeral pile with the dead 
