DR. AMBEDKAR AND THE HINDU CODE BILL 645
of the contents of the Bill. The question has been raised often and often here, why hurry why not wait for a year or two or three years? We have already waited long enough. Why should we not wait for another period? It is not a question of eleven years which the Hindu code has taken, nor is it a question of two years which have elapsed since. This has been mooted from the last century.
The House will be pleased to recall Act III of 1872. The Special Marriage Act which was first placed before the legislature was in 1868 by Sir Henry Maine at the instance and on the initiative of Keshub Chunder Sen, Bengal’s great social reformer. As a matter of fact, to go further back, in the fifties of the last century, the Widow Re-marriage Bill was on the legislative anvil. The great Ishwar Chunder Vidyasagar was exerting a great influence on the public mind to get their support for Hindu widow remarriage. It was at that time that a remarkable petition signed by four hundred men was put up before the legislature, in which they said that although they were orthodox Hindus, they did not believe in restricting themselves to a particular caste, they believed in inter-caste marriage, they believed in monogamy, they believed in certain ceremonies being essential for the purpose of observing pure Hinduism but that they wanted to eschew other ceremonies and that, therefore, they wanted the help of the legislature to pass a comprehensive Bill, not only the Hindu Widow Remarriage Bill but a Hindu Marriage Bill, in which provision would be made for inter-caste marriage, for adult marriage and for marriage solemnised with certain ceremonies only to which they did not take exception, and not every ceremony which at that time was considered to be obligatory. This was somewhere about
1856 and it was a most representative body that put forward this petition. Among those notable public men who signed the petition were people like Peary Chand Mitter, Radha Nath Sikdar, Abhoy Charan Mullik, and Rasik Krishna Mullik. They had nothing whatever to do with the Brahmo Samaj : they were orthodox Hindus. Side by side with this organisation there were all the activities of the Brahmo Samaj going on. The Brahmos had already solemnised inter-caste marriages, because they believed that “Right was right: to follow right were wisdom in scorn of consequence.” They did not care what the law was. They said that they would break down caste notwithstanding the fact that there might be difficulties regarding legal validity. Later on they thought that this state of affairs should be removed for the sake of posterity, for the