THE ASIATIC JOURNAL AND MONTHLY REGISTER FOR British India and its Dependencies : CONTAINING Original Communications. Memoirs of Eminent Persons. History, Antiquities, Poetry. Natural History, Geography. India Civil and Military Intelligence, Ap- Missionary and Home Intelligence, Births, Commercial Intelligence. Shipping Intelligence, Ship Letter-Mails, Lists of Passengers to and from India. Times appointed for the East-India Com pany's Ships for the Season. Prices Current of East-India Produce. India Exchanges and Company's Securities. Literary and Philosophical Intelligence. Daily Prices of Stocks, &c. &c. &c. TOR LIBRAR VOL. XII. JULY TO DECEMBER 1821. LONDON: PRINTED FOR BLACK, KINGSBURY, PARBURY, & ALLEN, BOOKSELLERS ΤΟ THE HONOURABLE EAST-INDIA COMPANY, LEADENHALL STREET. 1821. THE ASIATIC JOURNAL FOR JULY, 1821. ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS, &c. &c. &c. ON THE STATE OF FEMALES IN INDIA. To the Editor of the Asiatic Journal. SIR:-I feel sorry that, after admitting and that, according to a book which the fact, that there may be seventyfive millions of females in India who can neither read nor write, any person on earth could be found capable of writing a letter like that inserted in your Journal for February last, signed A BENGALEE," the evident intention of which was, to weaken the sympathies of British females towards these miserable beings. I am sure, Sir, an Englishman could not thus feel and thus write about the sex. An Englishman would not have said, in reply to my letter, that because the Hindoo women are employed in pounding brick-ends, they have food, and must be happy. Delicacy forbids me to draw a picture of the situation of the Hindoo female in the public street, engaged in this employment. But I was not soliciting the British public to subscribe for the purchase of rice to feed these females; and I am sorry that it should be necessary to tell this correspondent that women have souls, and that these souls are to live for ever, and that the soul becomes not a whit wiser by making brick-dust; Asiatic Journ.-No. 67. we Christians venerate, even a Jew might "perish for lack of knowledge." It may square well enough with the Shastru, that "ignorance of the alphabet does not necessarily imply wretchedness in the social state;" but an Englishman would not like such a wife: he thinks that a cultivated mind is of such importance in a wife, and in a mother, that nothing else can compensate for the want of it. Nor do Englishmen think, that the happiness of women is to be measured merely or principally by the quantity of boiled rice that is measured out to the animal daily; they think that the mind was given to be cultivated, as well as the body to be fed; and as the future state of the deathless mind depends upon the culture it here receives, they think the state of seventy-five millions of females, who do not know a letter of the alphabet, forms a case of charity, especially to British females,-such a case as was never yet brought before them. I put this case again, Sir, in the shortest possible form. Hindoostan is supposed to contain a population of VOL. XII. B |