234 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
this measure and I suggest to the mover of this motion that he can take another Member into the Select Committee and I suggest Shrimati Annie Mascarene, M.A.B.L. being taken into the Select Committee.
Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava : I have no objection to add the name.
Shri K. M. Munshi (Bombay : General): I beg to support this motion. My honourable friend, Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava was pleased to describe this measure as a small measure. I beg to differ from him. It is a very big measure and a very important one. It should have been passed not now, but forty years ago. When the question was first raised before the courts and when the courts held in different provinces that marriage between the Hindus of different castes were invalid for one reason or the other. But in those days the Government benches were not prepared to allow the Hindu community to be dynamic and wanted to perpetuate the old customs which were enshrined in text books composed 700 or 800 years ago. I remember a case, Sir, I think it was some 40 years ago, when the validity of the marriage of a widow, whose husband had died several years ago was raised before the Bombay High Court and the High Court held that after long years of married life and leading case where I tried for four years to establish that the marriage bet-after having grand children, her marriage was invalid because she happened to belong to a higher caste than her husband. I was concerned in another leading case where I tried for four years to establish that the marriage between a Hindu of higher caste with a wife of a lower caste was invalid. But for the fact that Sir Lallubhai Shaw was a judge of catholicity, perhaps I would have won the case, but even then the validity of anuloma marriage as we call them,—between the husband of a superior Hindu caste and the wife of an inferior Hindu caste—is not accepted as valid in some of the provinces. The question has also risen with regard to Hindus and Jains in part of the country. Hindus and Jains marry freely, but the point has always come before the lawyers for opinion whether a marriage between a Hindu and a Jain was valid. Now these are questions which ought to have been solved, as I said, years and years ago. But we have reached a stage when this must be solved immediately.
My honourable friend, Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava referred to the special case of the Punjab. It is not a special case of any particular province; it affects the whole of the country. On account of education,