THE

CALCUTTA CHRISTIAN OBSERVER.

February, 1836.

I.-Polygamy of the Kulin Bráhmans,

Of the varied castes into which the aborigines of India are divided, that of the bráhman stands pre-eminent. According to the Gentu code, (a heterogeneous mass of law, love, and physics,) men are emanations of the deity. Whilst from the more ignoble members of Brahma all other tribes exuded, the brahman, springing into existence from his mouth, claims the homage of mankind, and with complacency receives the appellations of God.

Until a change of dynasty partially removed this illusion, the bráhman could not, without derogation to his honor, engage in the common avocations of men and although this evil age (afuèm) annually tearing from him his shreds of divinity, discovers without remorse the frailties of his humanity; still he sways an iron sceptre over the consciences, persons, and property of the lower castes, some of whom seek his blessing by drinking the water in which he has laved his feet, and others by still more disgusting practicest.

Such an elevation of one mortal above another, might be considered the acme of pride; but we have not yet reached the climax: above the Bansha bráhman rises the Khetriya, and over him the Kulin-the proudest of the proud-who, if not disgusted by the

* Seven years ago a fire broke out in a bazar, zillá Murshedábád, and destroyed two cows, the property of a poor man. The brahmans asserted that this calamity was the punishment of a crime in a former birth, and compelled him to distribute the produce of his remaining effects among them, to eat his food mingled with the excrements of the cow, and to wander as a beggar in a state of nudity, a girdle of rope on his loins and a chain of iron round his neck excepted. From these wanderings he has not returned, except by transmigration he may have appeared in a new birth.

+ We have seen a man lick from the dust the phlegm which a bráhman had expectorated.

servility of parasites, may live as a prince not among beggars, but among princes of his own tribe.

How niggardly soever his habits ;-how despicable soever his literary attainments, and contemptible his manners;-how filthy soever his person, and disgusting his costume ;-how rapacious soever his disposition, and mean his conduct, to be a Kulin (charity with a vengeance which can cover such a multitude of sins!) is to be divine. To be regarded with veneration, and flattered by adulation; to be privileged with a home in the bosom of every bráhman family; aye, and to be bribed with money for consenting to eat of the bounty of his fellow bráhman, are the usurped prerogatives of the Kulin. His visits are welcomed, his stay solicited, his departure regretted, as the removal of a divine being, whose presence confers the summum bonum of temporal and eternal blessings; at which time he is pressed to accept of cooking and other utensils of brass, or more valuable metal, according to the abilities of his host; and quits his temporary abode with a bonus to supply the expenses of his journey.

Fulsome adulation has been injurious to the best of men; it is a tree so corrupt as to poison the morals of him who feeds on it. Pride and insolence, a dissolute life, effeminacy and habits of indolence, a contempt of all useful pursuits, all honorable attainments, together with an aptitude for fraud, theft, revenge, and murder are the certain diseases produced by its fruit. Muscular strength, fortitude, and courage, together with the powers of thinking, and capacity for research, are all blighted by its noxious shade. The moral condition of the Kulin in the present day affords sufficient proof of all, and more than all this to convince the most incredulous*.

Notwithstanding his divine origin, as he eats, sleeps, and dies like other men, we may suppose him to possess the dispositions, appetites, and passions incident to human nature; to be attracted, at least in some period of his life, by connubial happiness; and when married, to seek a settled home, that he may confer on his offspring an education suited to their rank: but, in tracing the path of the divine Kulin, such a supposition would mislead us. Though originally restricted to two wives, with one of whom only he should cohabit, unless she be sterile, he now defies all moral restraints, and multiplies his wives more rapidly than he numbers the years of his lifet: aye, and has

* We believe that a reference to the records of the criminal courts would show, that Brahmattar lands, by supporting the bráhmans in superstition and indolence, have produced more dacoitís than wretchedness and want.

+ Braja Bandopádhya, who lived at Janái Baksá, married 43 wives: one of them was the daughter of Rupa Adhikárí, at Beldánga, zillá Murshedábád.

been known at the verge of death, when his friends were bearing him to his long home, anxious lest the ebb of life should bear him beyond their reach ere they could lave his body in the sacred stream, to have married two wives on the last evening of his existence*.

One of the least evils arising from this practice is, that other brahmans are compelled to purchase their wives; and bráhman daughters, as other cattle in the market, are vended, according to their beauty, youth, and connexions, at from 200 to 400 rupees a head.

From the Kula Shástra alone (an unorthodox workt), we learn the origin of the Kulin.

Ballál Sena, a rájá, by descent a súdra, and by birth illegitimate, in the 63rd year of his age, (about A. D. 904,) appears to have assembled around him the most reputed of his subjects for wisdom and morality; and to have dignified those who possessed decision, meekness, learning, character, love of pilgrimage, aversion to bribes, devotion, love of retirement, and liberality, with the appellation of Kulin, (how unlike the thing now called a Kulin!) thus strewing the walks of literature, science, and morality with the attractions of honor and wealth.

Whatever were the reasons for his conduct, whether we suppose the learning of the age to have been a mere gossamer of sophistry; and morality, by a continuous ebb, to have left the exhalations of a putrid marsh, to poison the intellectual atmosphere, until the energies of the sovereign were required to rescue his people from crime and barbarity or whether, taking for our guide the fabled traditions of the times, we admit, that whilst the rest of mankind were sunk in ignorance, India was the only country exalted by wisdom; and that Ballál Sena was nobly ambitious to elevate his subjects still higher in moral excellence: whatever the circumstances of the age, or the motives of the sovereign, the measure commends itself as calculated to found.

Káli Thakur, who resided at Murágáchá, near Dharmada, married 60 wives.

Sridhar Cháturjya, who dwelt at Setgáchya Begune, married 60 wives, one of them the daughter of Káli Siddhantha, at Akrá Bishnupur near Daihát.

A Kulin at Ulá, near Sántipur, married 100 wives.

From such examples, Mahomet with his haram appears merely as a satellite to the Kulin.

Rám Lochan married 60 wives. In his last sickness his friends, (unable from the distance to carry him in one day to the river,) tarried for the night at the village of Singha. There he married two daughters of Rám Prasad Bandhyopádyáya, an inhabitant of Kánchoní, and died the next morning.

+ None of the books denominated Hindu Shástras make mention of the Kulin.

an empire of knowledge on the ruins of ignorance, give stability by equitable laws to the throne, and encircle so wise a ruler with a halo of glory, which malevolence could not obscure, and which future generations should venerate.

All must regret that the advanced age of Ballál Sena did not permit him to complete his noble design. Had he lived to disrobe of their father's honors those Kulin sons, whom neither paternal example nor the sovereign favour could stimulate to morality; and to remand individuals so unworthy of their father's distinctions back to poverty and neglect; he would at its first setting in have arrested a tide of arrogance and wickedness, which without opposition has rolled on through subsequent ages.

In its career of spoliation, ambition laughs at honesty and shame, and halts not till it has torn the laurel from the brows of the last competitor: that of the Kulin, however, having torn from man every resemblance of equality, and scaling the heavens, usurped the attributes of God, had no further conquests to make, but merely to maintain the position in which the death of Ballál Sena had left it-a task not difficult, for the division of the people into castes was hereditary, and the Kulin, once exalted, had the customs, habits, prejudices of a thousand years in favour of his retaining that supremacy with which he outrages common

sense.

To pursue the gradations through which Kulin polygamy obtained its present abominable excess, would neither interest nor profit. Human nature, unbridled, rapidly advances in the path of crime; and the Bráhman and Kulin mutually stimulated-this by covetousness and lust, that by fame-would agree to trample down every obstacle to the attainment of their wishes. The Kulin, denuded of moral sensibilities, had much to gain by multiplying his wives; and the Bráhman, inflated with the pride of exalting his family, forgot the solicitudes of a father when by giving his daughter to the nominal embraces of a Kulin*, he inclosed her in an iron cage of necessity, dammed up the streams of domestic comfort, and consigned her to solitude worse than that of widowhood; a prey to passions, designed by the beneficent Creator to make her an affectionate wife, and the happy mother of a contented family; but which by this unnatural custom, as fires smothered up, consumed by slow degrees her constitution, or breaking out into flames, constrained her to

* Rám Sankar Nyayabhusan, resident at Gow Maye, married Tárámaní, daughter of Síba Bhattáchárjya, at Panuhat near Katwa. Some neighbours (one of whom was Bhagabat Nandan), more curious than delicate to learn the nature of a Kulin's conversation with his new bride, secretly assembled near his sleeping apartment, and heard him refuse her admission to his bed unless she could bring him a present of money.