HINDU TREATMENT OF WOMEN
Hindu doctrines also give rise to a very low regard for women, and to such horrific practices as ‘Suttee’ and dowry murder. The Christian concept of woman as someone to be cherished and loved, a helper who complements her husband, equal to him in the sight of God, and of man as a leader who would give his life for his wife, is foreign to Hindu thought. A Hindu man is ‘patidev’, his wife’s god, and the wife is ‘pavirata’, totally subsumed.
Suttee is the practice of a widow offering herself to be burned on her husband’s funeral pyre. She is said to be ‘Sati’ or ‘true’ by so doing. Suttee arises from the Hindu belief that a Hindu wife is subordinate to her husband to the extent that if he is happy, she should be happy, if he is sad, she should be sad, and if he dies, she should die. Suttee was mythologically committed upon his death by the wives of the Hindu god ‘Krishna’.
Suttee was outlawed by British Governor Lord Bentinck in 1829 but only after a thirty-year campaign by the Christian missionary William Carey, who witnessed one such horrific event in 1799.
Hindu traditions die hard. In 1987, 18-year-old Roop Kanwar was reduced to ashes on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband, 24-year old Maal Singh, at Deorata in Rajastan. It is not known whether she was willing or was forced to comply. None of the 4,000 witnesses to the event came forward to allow proceedings to be brought. Roop Kanwar was deified and her shrine earned her husband’s family $15,000 in offerings in ten years.
DOWRY MURDER
In Genesis, we read of the fourteen years labour the hard-working Jacob had to give for his wives. Bride-price seems odd to us, but at least the idea was that a man should be able to demonstrate that he could support his wife. The bride’s father was supposed to keep the money safe if the couple fell on hard times. Instead, of course, Laban, Rachel and Leah’s father, wasted it: “He hath sold us, and hath quite devoured also our money” (Gen. 31:15), they complained.
The Hindu concept of dowry is the reverse. The Hindu scriptures record that Sita brought a huge dowry for her husband Rama. Accordingly, the practice of dowry is widespread in India. But if the husband’s relatives decide that the dowry is insufficient, they will go back and ask for more. A good time for securing more money will be at the gift-time of Diwali. But if her family cannot afford to pay more, the bride can be murdered. The murder is often concealed as suicide, or as a ‘kitchen accident’. Stoves belonging to Hindus seem to burst frequently, but oddly enough, they rarely harm mothers, just daughters-in-law. Hindu men also carry out barbaric attempts to induce internal bleeding, just as the ‘gods’ did in the Hindu scriptures. India’s national magazine, Frontline, carried the following harrowing report:
“Manjula was married in May 1998, when she was just 18, to Vruthesh Prasad, a mechanic in the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation. Her father gave her a dowry worth almost Rs.2 lakhs (200,000 Rupees – over £2,500, a collosal sum of money in India – SG). Manjula used to complain to her mother and sister that she was being harassed by her husband, his brother and other members of his family for more dowry, but her family told her she must adjust and that they would try to meet the demands. On July 7, 1999, more than a year after her marriage, Manjula was dead. She was found in her brother-in-law’s bathroom, a tin of turpentine and a box of matches lying near her, a pool of blood under her head and between her legs, her upper torso and face burnt. Her husband’s family said she had committed suicide.” (Frontline 14-27th August 1999)
According to ‘Frontline’, deaths of young brides are now totalling around 1,200 a year in the southern city of Bangalore alone. Other government figures admit that 7,300 women were killed in India by their in-laws, just in the first nine months of 1995, for bringing insufficient dowries. Where the women survive a ‘kitchen accident’, ending up in the hospital burns unit, it is rare for them to testify. Frontline reports a high level of social acceptance within Hindu society for dowry murders:
“Motivated mainly by greed, the crime is committed within the four walls of a home on an unsuspecting wife by her own husband or his family; there are rarely any eyewitnesses who are prepared to give evidence against the murderers. The large number of these deaths is an indication that the law is not a sufficient deterrent for those who commit these crimes. Nor have these grotesquely violent murders sparked the kind of social outrage that could pressure the government and its law-enforcing machinery into acting swiftly and firmly in enforcing the law. The scale of this problem, its causes and consequences, have not been adequately acknowledged by the state and its agencies, the media, or the public at large.” (Frontline ibid)
FEMALE INFANTICIDE
Mainly because of the dowry burden, and at the urging of Vedic scriptures, Hindu parents prefer boys to girls. The practice of female infanticide is inevitable, and modern technology has spawned the sophisticated version of selective abortion. The population as a consequence is lopsided, with a quoted figure of 92 women to 100 men in 1991.
Trial by ordeal in the case of suspected adultery by the wife is also sanctioned by Hindu scriptures. The accused wife is made to walk through fire, and any sign of a burn is taken as proof of guilt. If ‘guilty’ she is sentenced to be devoured publicly by dogs. Adultery may include merely looking at man, but in any case, the husband is not required to bring evidence, or prove the fact in any way. Just his accusation is sufficient to instigate the trial by ordeal.
It is necessary to admit that there is a single instance of trial by ordeal in the Bible and that it is also for suspected adultery. (Numb. 5:11ff) The big difference is that the Biblical example needs a miraculous intervention to prove guilt, not, as in the Hindu version, innocence. In every other Biblical case, proof in the form of two or more witnesses is required to convict. Mutilations of women are also carried out on Hindu women, sanctioned by the Hindu scriptures, but the details are just too appalling to recount. Cases are very well attested.
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