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She can never remarry, no matter how young she may be at the beginning of her widowhood. It was to ameliorate this condition of affairs that Pundita Ramabai set herself many years ago. She gathered child-widows under her protection, surrounded them with Christian influences, and gave them a Christian education.
A time of famine threw upon her care in one year twenty-four hundred girls, who depended upon her alone for food to keep them from starving. That time of great distress is now past, but when we remember that in India there are estimated to be as many as two millions of child-widows, it will be clear that the need of a refuge for such is still immensely great.
Western-educated Indians will not openly deny its evils the iron-bound principle of caste, which, in spite of many concessions in non-essentials to modern exigencies of convenience, remains almost untouched in all essentials and, above all, in the fundamental laws of inter-marriage, the social outlawry of scores of millions of the lower castes, labelled and treated as 'untouchable, infant-marriage, the prohibition of the re-marriage of widows, which, especially in the case of child-widows, condemns them to a lifetime of misery and semi-servitude, the appalling infantile mortality, largely due to the prevalence of barbarous superstitions, the economic waste resulting from lavish expenditure, often at the cost of lifelong indebtedness, upon marriages and funerals, and so forth and so forth.
She knew by heart the sacred scriptures of her people long before she became a Christian. She could repeat from memory an amount of them equal to that of our whole English Bible. It is especially the improvement of the condition of women, and particularly of child-widows, to which she has devoted her attention. The condition of the child-widow in India is most pitiable.
There is room to hope that in course of time the Child-widows' Home will have outlived its purpose in the time when gentler ideals will prevail, and the sorrows of child-widows will have ceased, and the institution will no longer be a need. It is less than three hundred years since Mr.
But the reputable prophets who availed themselves of the proffered hospitality were few; and the 'Ice-house' had a deserted look. A few years ago the Madras Government acquired it for the excellent purpose of a 'Brahman Widows' Home' for Brahman girl-widows at school. This is the purpose that it now fulfils. From Ice-house to child-widows' home!
One can imagine the far-reaching influence of this institution, if he remembers that out of the twenty-four hundred scholars who were received and taught in that dreadful time of famine, more than fifteen hundred were child-widows and many of them of the highest caste. Ramabai is a great scholar.
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