418 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
I come from a province which is not in the South. It is a backward province, educationally, culturally—call whatever you like that benighted backward province of Bengal. I know of the domestic conditions of the families inhabiting there. Go to any Hindu household in Bengal you will find that besides the sons, daughters, and other natural heirs, all manner of relations, sisters’ sons, nephews, nieces, maternal uncles’ sons, uncles’ daughters, all knit together and maintained in the joint family system. They are all regulated and restrained by moral and religious influences. You will find it in almost every household.
The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (Minister of Law) : What is the difficulty ?
Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra: I shall tell you where the difficulty is. There is no difficulty for those who have no family of their own. The difficulty happens in this way. For dividing trouble here I shall illustrate with reference to myself. If in my family my sons, daughters, father’s sisters’ daughters and sons, mother’s daughter’s sons and daughters etc. sister’s daughters were to live together and if one of my sons contracts intimacy with his first cousin even when he is a minor or an adolescent, knowing human nature being what it is, do you eliminate the possibility of this attachment growing up and culminating in marriage ? If you do, you are poor students of history, poor students of sociology and poor students of psychology. After all, the call of human flesh is there and no legislation, however omnipotent can root out this natural and powerful impulse in mankind. If you sanction matrimonial unions between blood relations—between closest relations in the household, I shudder to think what would happen to society ? The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar: Nothing.
Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra : Nothing of course, if you do not care for society ; nothing, of course, if you believe in a kind of society only where there are only social butterflies sucking honey here and there and making merry ; but I am for a society which has attained or will attain for India the position which is her own, the position for which she is respected all the world over. If you throw away all these things, if you put up a sort of Vademecum, a Hindu Code, where you find all sorts of marriages, between first cousins and blood-relations sanctioned, if you legalise all these incestuous marriages the society will be a sink of moral degradation.