Then there came the lady of the Taj, Mumtaz Mahal, beloved of Shah Jahan, the Master Builder.  We know less of her history, less of the secret of her charm, only that she died in giving birth to her thirteenth child, and that for all those years of married life she had held her husband’s adoration.  For twenty-two succeeding years he spent his leisure in collecting precious things from every part of his world that there might be lacking no adornment to the most exquisite tomb ever raised.  And when it was finished—­rare commentary on the contradiction of Mughal character—­the architect was blinded that he might never produce its like again.

All that was a part of yesterday—­a story of rise and fall; of woman’s repression, with outbursts of greatness; of countless treasures of talent and possibilities unrecognized and undeveloped, hidden behind the doors of Indian zenanas.  What of to-day?

To-day:  The Average Girl.

Meenachi of Madura, if she could become articulate, might tell us something of the life of the average girl to-day.  Being average, she belongs neither to the exclusive streets of the Brahman, nor to the hovels of the untouchable outcastes, but to the area of the great middle class which is in India as everywhere the backbone of society.  Meenachi’s father is a weaver of the far-famed Madura muslins with their gold thread border.  Her earliest childhood memory is the quiet weavers’ street where the afternoon sun glints under the tamarind trees and, striking the long looms set in the open air, brings out the blue and mauve, the deep crimson and purple and gold of the weaving.

There were rollicking babyhood days when Meenachi, clad only in the olive of her satin skin with a silver fig leaf and a bead necklace for adornment, wandered in and out the house and about the looms at will.  With added years came the burden of clothing, much resented by the wearer, but accepted with philosophic submission, as harder things would be later on.  Toys are few and simple.  The palmyra rattle is exchanged for the stiff wooden doll, painted in gaudy colors, and the collection of tiny vessels in which sand and stones and seeds provide the equivalent of mud pies in repasts of imaginary rice and curry.  Household duties begin also.  Meenachi at the age of six grasps her small bundle of broom-grass and sweeps each morning her allotted section of verandah.  Soon she is helping to polish the brass cooking pots and to follow her mother and older sisters, earthen waterpot on hip, on their morning and evening pilgrimages to the river.

Being only an average girl, Meenachi will never go to school.  There are ninety and nine of these “average” unschooled girls to the one “above the average” to whom education offers its outlet for the questing spirit.  She looks with curiosity at the books her brother brings home from high school, but the strange, black marks which cover their pages mean nothing to her.  Not for her the release into broad spaces that comes only through the written word.  For, mark you, to the illiterate life means only those circumscribed experiences that come within the range of one’s own sight and touch and hearing.  “What I have seen, what I have heard, what I have felt”—­there experience ends.  From personal unhappiness there is no escape into the world current.