Page:History of Bengali Language and Literature.djvu/1024

 978 BENGALI LANGUAGE & LITERATURE. [Chap. there like mute images without uttering a word,— without heeding the sensations of pain caused to the body. While their husbands lived, such women were not known to display their great love out- wardly. They ministered to the wants of numerous members living together in the family, and gave the minutest attention to each of them and to the servants ; but they really lived and moved, without ever saying so, in the thought of their husbands ; they kept the vermillion mark on their forehead and the shell-bracelets on their wrists ; and prized these sacred signs of wifehood more dearly than their lives. A Hindu wife would sooner agree to be killed than allow them to be removed. This patient all-engrossing sentiment, this love without a thought of return, constant and unchangeable through all vicissitudes of life, in spite of many ills,—its object only the offering of life-long devo- tion and humble service to the husband,—is ex- pressed in many of the old poems of Bengal,—in our folk-lore and in those rustic songs which | have mentioned in previous chapters. The peculiar position of the Hindu wife trained her silently to sacrifices of all sorts for domestic feeling. She is not the joy or inspiration of social gatherings as a western womanis. Outside her home there is absolutely no scope for the apprecia- tion of her qualities. Praise from outside world would be as assuredly spurned by her as abuse. Even in one’s own family, it would not be good taste to allude to the beauty of a woman who has once borne a child. Her environment develops her domestic instincts more than anything else. Cut . aS tc