frequently. She is shunned as a creature of ill omen.
Inasmuch as girls are married at five or six, all this may happen to a
child of ten or twelve, if her husband dies, although she never has
lived with him. In 1856 the English made a law by which widows might
remarry, but the higher classes very rarely allow it. If they do allow
it, the groom is forced to marry a tree or a doll of cotton, so that he
too may be widowed. The mores resist any change which is urged, although
not enforced, by people of other mores. The reforms proposed in the
treatment of widows have no footing at all in the experience and the
judgment of Hindoos, if we except a few theists in Calcutta, and they
have never taken a united and consistent position. Monier-Williams[1297]
describes the case of a man who married a widow. He was boycotted so
completely that all human fellowship was denied him. He had to go to a
distant place and take a position under the government. Among the lower
castes of the Bihari Hindoos a widow may marry the younger brother of
her deceased husband, to whom her relation is always one of especial
intimacy and familiarity.[1298]

+408. Difficulty of reform.+ It appears that the difficulty about the
remarriage of widows is due to the fact that it runs counter to
fundamental religious ideas. The Hindoo reformers are charged with using
forms of wedding ceremony which are inconsistent with facts. Some widows
are virgins, but there is not always a father or mother to give them
away by the formula of "virgin gift." The women all have a notion, taken
from the words of a heroine in the Mahabharata, that a woman can be
given but once.[1299] They cling to the literal formula. By the form of
first marriage also a woman passes into the kin of her husband for seven
births (generations), the limit of degrees of consanguinity. It is
irreligious and impossible to change the kin again, because consequences
have been entailed which run seven generations into the future.[1300]
This is all made to depend, not on the consummation of the marriage, but
on the wedding or even betrothal. The census shows that the taboo on the
remarriage of widows and the custom of child marriage extend and
increase together.[1301] Where husbands are scarce girls are married in
childhood in order to secure them, and widows are not allowed to
remarry.[1302] By the remarriage of widows rajpoots and rajpoot families
lose their rank and precedence.[1303] In Homer the remar