CURSE OF CHILD MARRIAGE

[Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav]

Prof. Dr. Yogendra Yadav

Gandhian Scholar

Gandhi Research Foundation, Jalgaon, Maharashtra, India

Contact No. – 09415777229, 094055338

E-mail- [e-mail];[e-mail]

 

 

CURSE OF CHILD MARRIAGE

 

 

Mrs. Margaret E. Cousins has sent me notes of a tragic case that appears to have just occurred in Madras and has arisen out of a child marriage, the girl being 13 years and the ‘husband’ 26. Hardly had the pair lived together for 13 days when the girl died of burning. The jury has found that she committed suicide owing to the unbearable and inhuman solicitations of the so-called husband. The dying deposition of the girl would go to show that the ‘husband’ had set fire to her clothes. Passion knows no prudence, no pity. But how the girl died is beside the point. The indisputable facts are:

 (1) That the girl was married when she was only 13;

 (2) That she had no sexual desire in as much as she resisted the advances of the ‘husband’;

(3) That the ‘husband’ did make cruel advances;

(4) And that she is now no more. It is irreligion, not religion, to give religious sanction to a brutal custom. The Smritis bristle with contradictions.

The only reasonable deduction to be drawn from the contradictions is that the texts that may be contrary to known and accepted morality, more especially, to the moral precepts enjoined in the Smritis themselves, must be rejected as interpolations. Inspiring verses on self-restraint could not be written at the same time and by the same pen that wrote the verses encouraging the brute in man. Only a man innocent of self-restraint and steeped in vice could call it a sin not to marry a girl before she reached the age of monthly periods. It should be held sinful to marry a girl for several years after the periods begin. There cannot be even the thought of marriage before the periods begin. A girl is no fit to bear children on beginning the periods than a lad is to procreate as soon as he grows the first hair on his upper lip. The custom of child marriage is a moral as well as a physical evil.

For it undermines our morals and induces physical degeneration. By countenancing such customs we recede from God as well as swaraj. A man who has no thought of the tender age of a girl has none of God. And under grown men have no capacity for fighting battles of freedom or, having gained it, of retaining it. Fight for swaraj means not mere political awakening but an all-round awakening social, educational, moral, economic and political. Legislation is being promoted to raise the age of consent. It may be good for bringing a minority to book. But it is not legislation that will cure a popular evil; it is enlightened public opinion that can do it. I am not opposed to legislation in such matters but I do lay greater stress on cultivation of public opinion. The Madras case would have been impossible if there had been a living public opinion against child marriages. The young man in question is not an illiterate labourer but an intelligent educated typist. It would have been impossible for him to marry or touch the girl if public opinion had been against the marriage or the consummation of the marriage of girls of tender age. Ordinarily, a girl under 18 years should never be given in marriage.