EMB ARRASSMENT OF EMPIRE have just read, and with great surprise,
a letter from my friend, Dr. Sudhin N. Ghose, in your issue of December 18, in which he vehemently denies Kipling's knowledge of Indian India, and even charges him with lying. I admire Dr. Ghose both as a writer and as a man, but in this instance I am afraid he has °,.°t been able to forget the Bengali's grievance against Kipling and has been very, very unfair. I shall not deal, however, with the larger question of Kipling's knowledge as a whole, for that will need convincing only a long essay if the demonstration is to be familiarity to sceptics, but also a jury .whose comparable with the India which Kipling described is and to his own. I shall only correct Dr. Ghose 1,nd make partial amends to Kipling on one specific k °Int Were brides ever brought to the bridegroom's "°1-Ise for the wedding in India? MY own mother was, she came over from the neigh- be°ring district, and our family were not quite ti3a,riahs, My father took a niece of his to another dis- trict for her wedding. I myself saw two weddings in my ancestral village home, one of a cousin in 1903 and the other of a nephew in 1907, in which the brides
were brought over from their villages, in the latter case with immense pomp.
The fact is that, among us Hindus, marriage cus- toms vary greatly. Apparently, Dr. Ghose knows only one of these, that of the higher castes of West Bengal, to one of which (Dakshin Radi Kulin Kayastha) he belongs. However, during the last fifty years or so, under West Bengal influence, well-to-do East Bengal families, too, have been bringing over the bridegroom, instead of sending out the daughters. My sisters were married in our house, and we, the brothers, went to our brides' houses.
But when this is done the expenses of the journey, if it is a long one, are usually borne by the bride's family and the bridegroom's people demand higher class railway fares, even when at their own expense they travel only third. • In regard to Kipling it is always safe to assume that when he is describing sense experiences he is as unlikely to go wrong as a camera or a sound recorder.
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