Aversion is
usually the motive which leads Indian women to what are called
"suicides for love." As Griggs remarks (_l.c._):
"Sometimes it happens that a young man wants a girl,
and her friends are also quite willing, while she alone
is unwilling. The purchase-bundle is desired by her
friends, and hence compulsion is resorted to. The girl
yields and goes to be his slave, or she holds out
stoutly, sometimes taking her own life as the
alternative. Several cases of the kind have come to the
personal knowledge of the writer."
Not long ago I read in the Paris _Figaro_ a learned article on suicide
in which the assertion was made that, as is well known, savages never
take their own lives. W.W. Westcott, in his otherwise excellent book
on suicide, which is based on over a hundred works relating to his
subject, makes the same astounding assertion. I have shown in
preceding pages that many Africans and Polynesians commit suicide, and
I may now add that Indians seem still more addicted to this idiotic
practice. Sometimes, indeed, they have cause for it. I have already
cited the words of Belden that suicide is very common among Indian
women, and that "considering the treatment they receive, it is a
wonder there is not more of it." Keating says (II., 172) that "among
the women suicide is far more frequent [than among men], and is the
result of jealousy, or of disappointments in love; sometimes extreme
grief at the loss of a child will lead to it.
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