Page:Nil Durpan.djvu/205

 than two or at most three passages in which English ladies are mentioned at all.

The first passage occurs in a conversation between two poor Bengali women in a village. One woman says, "The lady has no shame at all, and when the Magistrate of the Zillah rides about through the villages, the lady also rides on horseback with him." The speaker then goes on to say "the bou (or married woman) riding about on a horse!" The other woman has just before said, "The wife of the planter, in order to make her husband's case strong, has sent a letter to the Magistrate since it is said that the Magistrate hears her words most attentively." To say that these words impute want of virtues to a lady because she writes a letter about a case in Court to a judicial officer, or that to go on to argue that it ascribes unchastity to a whole class of English women, does not seem to me to be fair or reasonable. No doubt, it may be injudicious for ladies to write private letters to Magistrates and other judicial officers in order to get situations for servants, or for applicants whom they wish to befriend, and the fact of such an officer receiving and answering in Court a letter from a lady, the wife of an actual or possible litigant, on whatever subject it may be, may convey impressions to the very suspicious mind of an ignorant Native; but it never entered into my thoughts to conceive that an allusion to this practice would warrant general charge of even indelicacy in thought or deed, against women. As regards the statement that a lady riding about the village "must have no shame," I do most emphatically contend that this expression in the mouth of either a Hindoo or Mussulman woman expresses nothing but the regular innate idea generated by Oriental seclusion. The very words, which in Hindusthani would be iska kuch sharm neh hai, and in Bengali tahr kichchu lajja nahe, are familiar expressions in the mouth of every Native speaking of any act which he thinks offensive or in bad taste, done by any one who does not please him. A Native woman brought up in seclusion, with the ideas she has received from childhood, generally speaking, can no more understand or appreciate propriety in the unrestrained, liberal, enlightened, and virtuous intercourse of men and women in our society than we can understand or appreciate the social policy which marries girls in their childhood and consigns them through