But the centre of interest was naturally the Altar. This was just a plain raised platform of wood, carrying bravely its variety of offering. Great mountains of yellow and white flowers, with fruits, chiefly the cocoanut, fruit of healing, old Sanskrit manuscripts, lettered palm-leaves, thumbed and blotted copybooks and tattered “primers”—the prayers of children—the pointed reed, and ink-horns, glass inkpots and steel pens from the “Europe” shop across the way; a school edition of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” Ganot’s Physics, quaint combs and mirrors, powder-boxes, and perfumes, “the tears of scented grass,” or that more subtle “scent of red rose leaves.” Why not? Is she not woman, even though a Goddess and learned? The “Europe” products, I notice, carry milk in place of ink. “Sanctify to us this Western Education”—is that what it means in this country, where deepest feeling finds outlet other than through doors of speech?  

Sometimes, by no means generally, there will be an image of the Goddess. One such I have seen in the house of a rich merchant. It was a life-sized figure dancing on a lotus, the full bloom, pink-edged, in her hand she bore a bina, for the Goddess of Wisdom is also Queen of Harmony; and the rich man’s friends had honoured her as was meet, with priceless gifts of Kincab, of gem, of trinket. Now Wisdom of necessity has yet one more aspect, she is Goddess of Perfect Speech. It is of her that the tongue-tied prays eloquence, the scholar success; and the offering to her in this capacity you will find absent from no Altar, rich or poor. To omit this would mean the curse of the dumb for ever. It is a little cake of rice and milk, this oblation for lapses from accuracy, for “benevolent falsehood.”
“Oh Guest of the hours, remember the past, the puzzling need of the tangled moments, remember—and forgive.”
A list of benevolent falsehoods must needs vary with the age. Manu includes (viii, 130) “The giver of false evidence for a pious motive, for such an one shall not lose a seat in heaven,” his lapses being called the “Speech of the Gods.”
“To save a life,” “To protect a cow,” “To counteract the thriftless ways of husbands,” have added Hindu women of my acquaintance.

And Shumbo maddened by her laughter vowed victory, and her very glory was a peril, for he seized upon her hair, and impeded her much. Then did the Gods take counsel again together. It was the Destroyer who found help. “Let us each give her of our strength,” said he, “that evil may be smitten for ever.”

And they did all even as he suggested, and the incoming of this great strength made her so that she lost some of her comeliness. And now was she called Kali . . . She that is black.

And the strength of the Gods was as wine to her, and she fought intoxicate. And behold, while all the Gods and Demons watched, they fought—those two—the Nurse of the World and the King of Evil, and Kali won.
Then was there great rejoicing on earth and in heaven, and Kali joyed no less than her creatures, and she danced in her joy, drunk with the blood of her victim.

And for the third time the Gods took counsel, for they said, “The thing we have ourselves made strong will at last destroy even us.”

And the Great God said: “She is wife to the Destroyer. This is his business.” And Shiva thought long and earnestly, for even he could not causelessly retake the strength that he had given. And the end of the meditation was that he went forth from Heaven and lay in her path as she came down from the Snow mountains in her dance of Death. And she, mad with victory and blood, seeing nothing, danced on to his chest exultant, when looking down, she recognized her husband, and was shamed and sobered. And this final vision of Kali is the one worshipped by her children—Kali, the four-armed, the Conqueror of Demons, vanquished only by the husband who lies under her feet. 

I went back to my Wise Woman of many years. “To the ignorant,” she said, “Kali but wants a life—Kali slays and Kali makes alive. Said I not once before, blessing and cursing, death and life, these are the Soul’s eternal doors. In the house of Kali the doors are ever open. But, for us women, the lesson to hide in the heart is this—Kali, the Great Destroyer, the Nurse of the World, the Dread-Inspirer, is vanquished only by—her husband.”

Here, then, meet ancient story and modern history, the history of every Hindu woman throughout the Land. The last stage of perfection is wifely submission.

And so, once more was fulfilled the destiny of a woman.

“But for three days in every year does Uma go back to her parents and her swanlets in the mountains of Snow; and this journeying of Uma is always at Durga-pooja time when we make feast for many days to worship the Ten-handed.”
In the silence which fell upon us after this story, she of many years was heard to yawn, while all the women snapped their fingers till her jaws met again.

From Shiva’s Temple gleaming white among the yellow-green of the date palms came the sound of the pooja bell—some one, a woman probably, praying for her Lord to the Lord of Killing and Cursing. Clear against the gray-blue sky stood the cross-crowned spire of the Christian Cathedral; and almost at our doors, rang out the prayer-keeper’s call to the faithful Moslem: “There is no God so great as God.”

“There is no God so great as—my God.” It is what we are all saying; and it makes at once the strength and the tragedy of human lives. “No God so great as my God.” What different things we mean when we say that—we of the bustling outside world.

The Hindu woman means one thing only. “No God so great as my God.” That was the lesson each was taking from the story of Durga and Uma. Did not almost every fable and legend chant that chorus? “No God so Great.” . . . In punishment may be sometimes, or in penitence (see the miracle of the Destroyer himself turned monk for Durga)—but most of all in graciousness.

This same penalty, loss of caste, is the reason for what has been called in official documents “enforced widowhood.” The Priests attached excommunication to re-marriage. And since, as we have seen, things social and things religious overlap in Hinduism, the Priests had the opportunity of banning in both ways. No more invitations to caste dinners, as well as no more visits to the Temple, to sacred Tanks and Wells and Bathing Ghats, for the excommunicated. Few women and fewer men will face excommunication of this type, and one reads with amusement of the ardent reformer who, before proposing marriage to a charming widow of his acquaintance, wrote a hundred notes to friends and acquaintances, “Will you dine with me if I marry So-and-so?” There were not fifty righteous found willing, even on paper! But in truth the number of those who wish or would countenance re-marriage is very small. The feeling of the orthodox about marriage is this: It is a Gift—the gift by a Parent of a daughter to a husband. The Gift must be a first Gift, no one must have had earlier use of it, no one must even have had earlier chance of longing for it. You must be certain the possession is your very own—wherefore the giving in infancy. Wherefore again, even if you died after mere symbolic and before actual possession of your gift, the Gift was nevertheless yours. Infant widowhood. How can it be given again—that Gift? If it would be sin in infancy, it would be worse sin later on. And the woman’s reasoning is of the same class. The best believe in the sacrament of marriage: they worship their husbands as the life-force: for his using or abusing, his pleasure or neglect they exist. He being gone, what is there? In the old days there was suttee, and who shall say but that the moral strength it represented did not make for something in the national consciousness? No one ever enforced widowhood. No one enforced suttee: no one to-day can really restrain suttee. One old test was putting your smallest finger into the fire and burning it to the bone: if you could stand that, unflinching, you were worthy to be suttee. Another was stirring boiling hot rice with your bare hand. I know a woman whose proudest memory is that some Great-Aunt or Grandmother stood the test. 

One word more. I have called this study the Nasal test. We all know what happens when a Hindu wife lapses from rectitude. There is no scene in a law Court, but she goes through life self-betrayed; she has lost the tip of her nose. The pain of the punishment is obviously its publicity; but it would be interesting to know whether in origin it had any connection with caste. Is it possible that the mutilated nose was but symbolical of the husband’s right to excommunicate? “For this sin you are to me outcast. I know no greater punishment. Reap even as you have sown!” 

For our studies in sad monotone we must go to the wives of one section of the “England-returned,” as they are called.
Try to picture this lady. She can speak her own vernacular, perhaps read it, but Western influences have passed her by. Greatly skilled is she in things domestic. She has watched her husband with awe through the throes of his local university, and then he sails away out of her ken to that unknown land beyond the “black waters” of separation. Dimly through the years does she hear of him, and great fears are at her heart as she thinks of the women he must meet in that land of “the unveiled”; but these are fears she may tell to none. What pre-emption can she have in his affections? Then he comes back, wearing a bright pink shirt, an English top-hat, and patent leather shoes. He drives a dog-cart, and divides his time between his office and his club; he dines at English houses—new fears here for breach-of-caste rules. But she worships nevertheless. To buy him blessings is still left to her, and Indian wifehood was ever a school for altruism; but in a family group you will grant the inharmoniousness of the anachronistic.

Let it be ceded here, however, that there is another sketch possible of that “England-returned” one. Some diversity of interests cannot be avoided; but I have known a few little wives whose Anglicized husbands did their best to educate them, led them painfully through the new ideas, brought them somewhat into the “reformed” life.

To myself the attempt has often seemed pathetic, trying “to walk with one foot,” to “clap with one hand”; but our little lady is painted this time in a glad luminosity of gratitude that, having seen the world, he should still deign to care.

But sometimes the woman, too, has had chance of Western education. I have known one or two of her kind in Bengal and Madras, more in Bombay. Perhaps she passed through the stage transitional herself once; at any rate, she has arrived all safely, keeping her pretty national dress, keeping also her vernacular. A great part of her day must be re-made for the ceremonies of orthodox Hinduism which she has discarded; yet, something solid she has in its stead, since no influence will ever make a Hindu woman irreligious, thank God.

How can we help the fact that the number of women in this class must increase daily? The age marches forward towards personal and individual dignity, and the old ideals of the vicarious are being pushed into the background of the unregenerate.

The majority suffer in silence; some gloriously, some ingloriously and sadly rebellious. Some fall into the hands of the Widow Remarriage Committee, and are re-married. It is not for the onlooker to say whether this solution is sufficient. A few are now beginning to find that life has some use for a woman unmarried, even for her. They are learning to earn their own living and to bless the world with honest labour. She is buying back the curse, this widow who works, in a way which must surely conserve for the nation much of that selflessness which we claimed in the suttee, and certainly much more apparent usefulness. As doctor, teacher, nurse, and in humbler walks of life, which of us who know modern India have known and not blessed the Hindu widow? For the first time, too, since the Vedic era, do we find in India unmarried girls over ten years of age. This is the nearest approach to spinsterhood in the East, and the spinster—she is very rare—is almost always a self-respecting woman earning her own living.

A new little settler has lately sought the shelter of this Raj, a six-year-old Baby in self-protective exile from her own Estate. Under local law she succeeds as the only unmarried “female” to a considerable inheritance, and as a consequence all around her, grandmothers and sisters included, are interested in her death. They have been drugging her, and she has been brought into headquarters under Police guard. I found her in a wretched house set down in a swamp, and furnished with a hard plank-bed and a box. “Lotus-born,” that is her name, is a miserable shrimp of a Baby, arms like sticks, and a plaintive long-suffering little face, like a cry for help sounding in my ears to this day. She was very ill indeed, burning with malarial fever, and aching, she said, in every limb. She lay on the hard “takht-posh,“ and beside her sat her nurse, another baby, eight years old. She sat like a frog, legs crunched up, and her nursing consisted in giving the sufferer a loving pinch every now and then, murmuring, “There! that makes it better.” And the six-year-old, in a monotonous little voice which struggled after cheeriness, would answer, “Yes! Oh! yes.” 

 Later I saw more of the child, and watched her grow human and childlike. The “dog-girl,” I called her, because she had a passion for dogs, would rescue the most mangy pariahs off the streets and care for them herself, fearless of consequences. I promised that my own dear “Chow” should visit her, but as he was, I explained, a high-caste dog, it could only be when the outcasts were out of the way! It was so I got rid of the yapping pack in the days of heat; but watching from her window, one later day of hail and thunder-showers, she saw some ill-treatment in the street, and re-admitted the “outsiders from Caste.” It was on this occasion she rebuked me. “Is the spark of life in Caste-Brother and outcast, in Chow=dog and Pariah? Then why should I not care for these?”
“But you are a Hindu, Caste is your religion?”
“That is man’s invention; where man has not invented, let me hear the voice of God calling me to have compassion on a fellow life.”
And now she has heard the voice of God calling her out of this life of fellowship, perhaps, who knows, in supreme compassion of her own little stunted, shadowed life of high-castehood.

There is in her the strangest mixture of ritual and freedom from ritual. That is because she is a woman. Hinduism, as we find it in India now, is but a tradition, of which the women keep the record. You may believe what you will, there are no articles of belief, there are idols for the ignorant, there is poetry, allegory, which you may interpret as you will; there are the beautiful songs of the Bhagavad Gita, there is the propitiation of evil spirits, there are the extortions of the ash-smeared; there is the ecstasy of the wife-worship of Life, of her husband, her child. There is the crown of self-sacrifice, and there is the demand of the stronger for the service of the weaker. All stand for Hinduism; but none connote Hinduism. Of its essence is caste . . . and here we are back again at our marriage register. The one fear of the Hindu is, lest so-and-so will not marry into his family. If he does that which would prevent marriage he has ceased to be a Hindu. 

Excommunication occurs for breaking ceremonial laws, not for moral lapses; a man may be accepted after serving a prison sentence, yet outcasted for eating forbidden food. Altruism in this context is often a "soul-saving arrangement" where one performs good works primarily to buy merit for their next life. She illustrates a higher form of faith through a story of a woman who missed her pilgrimage to Mecca to tend to a sick dog, discovering that God dwells where one tends a fellow life. The chapter concludes with the image of a leper in the Temple of the Foot, whose face is "a-quiver with peace" during worship despite her physical suffering, finding a sense of reality in a world she views as a "world of illusions".