Pic Courtesy: Rajesh Vasudevan (https://secure.flickr.com/photos/rageshev/)
It is Gandhiji’s birthday today. Did you know that even Gandhi was married when he was just thirteen years old? He talks about his personal experience in his autobiography – My experiments with truth.
Excerpts:
Much as I wish that I had not to write this chapter, I know that I shall have to swallow many such bitter draughts in the course of this narrative. And I cannot do otherwise, if I claim to be a worshipper of Truth. It is my painful duty to have to record here my marriage at the age of thirteen. As I see the youngsters of the same age about me who are under my care, and think of my own marriage, I am inclined to pity myself and to congratulate them on having escaped my lot. I can see no moral argument in support of such a preposterously early marriage.
Let the reader make no mistake. I was married, not betrothed. For in Kathiawad there are two distinct rites – betrothal and marriage. Betrothal is a preliminary promise on the part of the parents of the boy and the girl to join them in marriage, and it is not inviolable. The death of the boy entails no widowhood on the girl. It is an agreement purely between the parents, and the children have no concern with it. Often they are not even informed of it. It appears that I was betrothed thrice, though without my knowledge. I was told that two girls chosen for me had died in turn, and therefore I infer that I was betrothed three times. I have a faint recollection, however, that the third betrothal took place in my seventh year. But I do not recollect having been informed about it. In the present chapter I am talking about my marriage, of which I have the clearest recollection.
Read the entire chapter here.
Even though Gandhiji had an early marriage, he was extremely critical of the phenomenon. In his autobiography he mentions how he blamed his father for marrying him off when he was just a teen. Gandhiji also strongly spoke against child marriage in various public platforms including newspapers, public meetings etc. Following are some of Gandhiji’s famous statements about early marriages. (Courtesy: here)
“Victims of child marriage, thousands of girls vanish from view at the early age of twelve. They change into house-wives!”
“Let us now consider the case of our girls who disappear, so to say, from view after marriage. They are not likely to return to our schools. Conscious of the unspeakable and unthinkable sin of the child-marriage of their daughters, their mothers cannot think of educating them or of otherwise making their dry life a cheerful one. The man who marries a young girl does not do so out of any altruistic motives, but through sheer lust.”
“A girl of fifteen can never be fit for delivery. A child born of such a girl is deficient in vitality. Our children are so sickly that bringing them up becomes a veritable job indeed, with the result that many children die within a year of their birth. Along with child-marriage, we should hold ill-matched unions responsible for the deaths of a great many infants. It is not at all surprising that the children of men who marry when they are no longer fit for marriage do not survive.”
Even though the age at marriage has shown a marginal increase across the country, early marriage trends showed a prevalence of 60% and above in the last National Family Health Survey conducted in 2005-06. So much of what Gandhiji had to say hold true even today. His observations about maternal and infant mortality rate can be seen even today. India has one of the worst maternal and infant mortality rates even in 2013. The annual State of the World’s Mothers report found that 56,000 mothers die annually while 309,000 babies die within the first 24 hours of being born in India every year. It is important to take a moment to reflect upon Gandhiji’s criticism about early marriages and join the fight against this social evil.