436 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
this is a very moderate measure. You do not expect a wife to carry on with a lunatic, a leper etc. and there is nothing in this Bill which runs contrary to the provisions of Smritis or which is inconsistent with the genius of Hindu society and culture. Most of us know the Smriti.
नष्टे मृते प्रब्रजित, क्लीबेच पतिते पतो । पति: अन्यत् तु नारीणाम् विधीयते ।
These are the grounds given in the ancient text and if something approximating to that is not available today in Hindu society, it is because we have become stagnant and all these dynamic urges for progress have ceased to operate. After all who, and to what extent of Hindu society will this effect? Speaking for my own province, 95 per cent. have already some sort of divorce, not as a matter of law, but as a matter of custom. It is only the two or three per cent. of people of the upper classes who are opposed to it. But taking a fair view, the educated section is completely for it.
On the one hand I agree that divorce must not be made very cheap and that incompatability of temperament should not be one of the grounds. But at the same time, marriage should not be considered a life sentence, if it virtually comes to that. After all, just as marriage has an individual aspect, it has also a social aspect. If the two spouses do not agree, then the bickering and the bitterness and the lack of harmony is not confined merely to the precincts of the family but it has wider application and effect, and society and the general atmosphere roundabout also suffer. If it is the desire of any law giver that whatever piece of legislation he wants to get through it must have the capacity of securing the results contemplated then we have to judge whether what has been all along with us has really given us the result we have asked for. It is a matter for introspection. If today we are providing some way out from wedlock in order to make people, who are readily not happy to get out of it, we are only doing what I think is our social duty.
So far as marriage is concerned, I fail to see how we can object to marriages between persons belonging to different castes. In the year
1949, it would be a sad commentary on our progressive outlook if a single person should stand up here and say—well, marriages between persons belonging to different castes should not be legalised. In free India, I think there is only one caste, the caste of free men : and one religion and that religion of humanity. ( Shri H. V. Kamath, ‘And free women !’). This reform has been before this country so long that