WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
of feminine rights and position that does not find illustration somewhere within her boundaries."
The erotic valuation of women in India is not, as it may appear at first, a simple expression of sensuousness. It is something deeper, more subtle. Love and religion are intermingled, even in the zenana.
The amours of Krishna and Radha, in the "Prem-Sagar," are said by some Occidental critics to bore with their reiterations of love-adventures, and have been described as "indecent." Probably, judged from the prurient-prudish standpoint of the West, they are so. But who shall decide? Does not the Old Testament, used in our churches, contain the most amorous of pictures in the "Song" ascribed to King Solomon?
The veil screening the face of Hindu women has been accepted as an emblem of the oppression of the sex. May it not possess a very different significance? It is true that a woman may not show her face to any man save father, brother, and husband. But the veil is, in a sense, a tribute to Woman, whose loveliness and sweetness of countenance has in it something sacred, which must not be exposed to the common gaze. No Hindu woman feels herself degraded by the practice of veiling part of her features. She would be insulted if you suggested that the veil symbolised her bondage to men.
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