HINDU WIDOWS.
At the 22nd Session of the Indian National Social Conference held at Madras in December 1908, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu moved the following Resolution:—
“This Conference invites all communities concerned to give their earnest endeavours to save Hindu widows from the customary disfigurement, to ameliorate their condition by providing them with educational facilities and a Widows’ Home after the model of Professor Karve’s so that they may become better qualified than now to be sisters of mercy and useful and respected members of Society, and also by placing no obstacles in the way of their remarriage.”
In doing so she characterised the necessity for having a resolution on this subject on the agenda as a national disgrace. While other countries were advanced in civilisation, they in India, were still dealing with primitive social questions which they should have outlived long ago. She hoped that the day would come very soon when it would not be required that they should proclaim to the world their national disgrace. Only during the last three days they met together in Council, deliberating how to achieve their political freedom. Did they believe, were they so presumptuous as to think that such a thing would be possible, when at the very core of their social organisation they had this degrading cancer!
It seemed incredible to any thinking mind that it was possible for the sons of a country that had produced a law-giver like Manu who taught the ideals of justice, a country that produced Lord Buddha who taught ideals of love, to have so forgotten and to have fallen so low that they had lost the instincts of their chivalry to which the Hindu widow had a claim, first for the weakness of her sex, and next for the sake of her suffering. (Cheers.) It was still more incredible that the daughters of a country that had produced such immortal women, whose names came down the annals of their civilisation, should so far have lost, not merely their mother-love, but should also have forgotten the very first principles of their religion, that love was the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of man and the Sisterhood of woman ? In conclusion, she advocated the establishment of Widows’Homes in all parts of the country for the education of widows.