resembling the professional dancing girls, that they
cannot be persuaded to learn anything the latter are taught. If a
Brahman woman is rich her life is spent in demoralizing idleness; if
she is poor, so much the worse, her earthly existence is concentrated
in monotonous performances of mechanical rites. There is no past, and no
future for her; only a tedious present, from which there is no possible
escape. And this only if everything be well, if her family be not
visited by sad losses. Needless to say that, amongst Brahman women,
marriage is not a question of free choice, and still less of affection.
Her choice of a husband is restricted by the caste to which her father
and mother happen to belong; and so, to find a suitable match for a girl
is a matter of great difficulty, as well as of great expense. In India,
the high-caste woman is not bought, but she has to buy the right to get
married. Accordingly, the birth of a girl is not a joy, but a sorrow,
especially if her parents are not rich. She must be married not later
than when she is seven or eight; a little girl of ten is an old maid in
India, she is a discredit to her parents and is the miser-able butt of
all her more fortunate contemporaries.

One of the few noble achievements of Englishmen in India which have
succeeded is the decrease of infanticide, which some time ago was a
daily practice, and still is not quite got rid of. Little girls were
killed by their parents everywhere in India; but this dreadful custom
was especially common amongst the tribes of Jadej, once so powerful in
Sindh, and now reduced to petty brigandage. Probably these tribes were
the first to spread this heartless practice. Obligatory marriage for
little girls is a comparatively recent invention, and it alone is
responsible for the parents' decision rather to see them dead than
unmarried. The ancient Aryans knew nothing of it. Even the ancient
Brahmanical literature shows that, amongst the pure Aryans, woman
enjoyed the same privileges as man. Her voice was listened to by the
statesmen; she was free either to choose a husband, or to remain single.
Many a woman's name plays an important part in the chronicles of the
ancient Aryan land; many women have come down to posterity as eminent
poets, astronomers, philosophers, and even sages and lawyers.

But with the invasion of the Persians, in the seventh century, and later
on of the fanatical, all-destroying Mussulmans, all this changed. Woman
b