or betrothed to men old enough to be their grandfathers.  A great many girls are married literally in the cradle, says the authoress just quoted (31).  “From five to eleven years is the usual period for this marriage among the Brahmans all over India.”  Manu made twenty-four the minimum age for men to marry, but “popular custom defies the law.  Boys of ten and twelve are now doomed to be married to girls of seven to eight years of age.”  This early marriage system is “at least five hundred years older than the Christian era.”  As superstitious custom compels poor parents to marry off their daughters by a given age “it very frequently happens that girls of eight or nine are given to men of sixty or seventy, or to men utterly unworthy of the maidens."[261]

MONSTROUS PARENTAL SELFISHNESS

In an article on “Child Marriages in Bengal,"[262] D.N.  Singha explains the superstition to which so many millions of poor girls are thus ruthlessly sacrificed.  “It is,” he says,

“a well-nigh universal conviction among Hindoos that every man’s soul goes to a hell called Poot, no matter how good he may have been.  Nothing but a son’s fidelity can release or deliver him from it, hence all Hindoos are driven to seek marriage as early as possible to make sure of a son.”  “A son, the fruit of marriage, saves him from perdition, so that the one purpose of marriage is to leave a son behind him."[263] A daughter’s son may take his son’s place:  hence the eagerness to marry off the girls young.  In other words, in order to save themselves from a hell hereafter the brutal fathers drive their poor little daughters to a hell on earth.  And what is worse, public opinion compels them to act in this cruel manner; for, as the same writer informs us, the man who suffers his daughter to remain unmarried till she is thirteen or fourteen years old is “subjected to endless annoyances, beset with stinging remarks, unpleasant whisperings and slanderous gossip.  No orthodox Hindoo will allow his son to accept the hand of such a grown-up girl.”

How preventive of all possibility of free choice or love such a custom is may be inferred from another brief extract from the same article: 

“The superstitious notion of a Hindoo parent that it is a sin not to give his daughter in marriage before she ceases to to be a child impels him urgently to get her a husband before she has passed her ninth or tenth year.  He sends out to match-makers and spares no pains to discover a bridegroom in some family of rank equal or superior to his own.  Having found a boy ... he endeavors to secure him by entreaty or by large offers of money or jewels.”

The Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati (22) gives some further grewsome details which would seem like the inventions of a burlesque writer were they not attested by such unbiassed authority.  “Religions enjoin that every girl must be given in marriage; the neglect of this duty means for the father unpardonable sin, public ridicule, and caste excommunication.”