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_ Since, as Ward attests (116), the young widows "without exception, become abandoned women," it is obvious that one reason why the priests were so anxious to prevent them from marrying again was to insure an abundant supply of victims for their immoral purposes. The hypocritical Brahmans were not only themselves notorious libertines, but they shrewdly calculated that the simplest way to win the favor and secure control of the Indian populace was by pandering to their sensual appetites and supplying abundant opportunities and excuses for their gratification--making these opportunities, in fact, part and parcel of their religious ceremonies. Their temples and their sacred carts which traversed the streets were decorated with obscene pictures of a peculiarly disgusting kind,[271] which were freely exposed to the gaze of old and young of both sexes; their temples were little more than nurseries for the rearing of bayaderes, a special class of "sacred prostitutes;" while scenes of promiscuous debauchery sometimes formed part of the religious ceremony, usually under some hypocritical pretext.
[FOOTNOTE 271: Ploss-Bartels, I., 385-87; Lamairesse, 18, 95, XX., etc.]
It would be unjust, however, to make the Brahman priests entirely responsible for Hindoo depravity. It has indeed been maintained that there was a time when the Hindoos were free from all the vices which now afflict them; but that is one of the silly myths of ignorant dreamers, on a level with the notion that savages were corrupted by whites. One of the oldest Hindoo documents, the _Mahabharata_, gives us the native traditions concerning these "good old times" in two sentences:
"Though in their youthful innocence the women
abandoned their husbands, they were guilty of
no offence; for such was the rule in early times."
"Just as cattle are situated, so are human beings,
too, within their respective castes"
which suggests a state of promiscuity as decided as that which prevailed in Australia. Civilization did not teach the Hindoos love--for that comes last--but merely the refinements of lust, such as even the Greeks and Romans hardly knew. Ovid's _Ars Amandi_ is a model of purity compared with the Hindoo "Art of Love," the _K[=a]mas[=u]tram_ (or _Kama Soutra_) of V[=a]tsy[=a]yana, which is nothing less than a handbook for libertines, of which it would be impossible even to print the table of contents. Whereas the translator of Ovid into a modern language need not omit more than a page of the text, the German translator of the _K[=a]mas[=u]tram_, Dr. Richard Schmidt, who did his work in behalf of the Kgl. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, felt it incumbent on him to turn more than fifty pages out of four hundred and seventy into Latin. Yet the author of this book, who lived about two thousand years ago, recommends that every one, including young girls, should study it. In India, as his French translator, Lamairesse, writes, "everything is done to awaken carnal desires even in young children of both sexes." The natural result is that, as the same writer remarks:
"Les categories des femmes faciles sont si nombreuses
qu'elles doivent comprendre presque toutes les personnes du
sexe. Aussi un ministre protestant ecrivait-il au milieu de
notre siecle qu'il n'existait presque point de femmes
vertueuses dans l'Inde."
The Rev. William Ward wrote in 1824:
"It is a fact which greatly perplexes many of the
well-informed Hindus, that notwithstanding the wives of
Europeans are seen in so many mixed companies, they
remain chaste; while their wives, though continually
secluded, watched, and veiled, are so notoriously
corrupt. I recollect the observation of a gentleman who
had lived nearly twenty years in Bengal, whose opinions
on such a subject demanded the highest regard, that the
infidelity of the Hindu women was so great that he
scarcely thought there was a single instance of a wife
who had been always faithful to her husband."[272]
[FOOTNOTE 272] Here again we must guard against the naive error of benevolent observers of confounding chastity with an assumption of modest behavior. In describing the streets of Delhi Ida Pfeiffer says (_L.V.R.W._, 148):
"The prettiest girlish faces peep modestly out of
these curtained bailis, and did one not know that
in India an unveiled face is never an innocent one,
the fact certainly could not be divined from
their looks or behavior." It happens to be the
fashion even for bayaderes to preserve an
appearance of great propriety in public.] _
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