496 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Another figure in European history who might have been mentioned with advantage, is Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, who was both a loving mother of many children and an able ruler. And if we want to go into the earlier history of Europe, the Empress Theodora of Byzantium is perhaps the most striking example of a woman, who rose from the lowest position to that of supreme power. She started as a prostitute and ended as an Empress.
I do not think that this would be the ideal of Indian womanhood, just as I do not think that statecraft adds one inch to the dignity of a woman.
Even if it were true that in Indian women were used to statecraft, long before they ever did in Europe out author apparently was not able to find any historically varified instances of an earlier period then the Rani of Jhansi and Chandbibi, who both belong to the most recent epochs of India’s history.
But the most astonishing statement of the article under review is that “ it was, alas, the Buddhist theory that seems to have first thrust women into the background. ”
What this “theory” is, has unfortunately not been revealed by the learned author, and though I have scrutinized the Budhist Sacred Texts and their teachings, I have found no special theory about women, but only about the human species in general. The Four Noble Truths, the Formula of Dependent Origination, and the Eightfold Path of Liberation make no distinction between man and woman.
All through Buddhist history it was a special feature of Buddhist Society that woman had a far more favourable position than in most Non-Buddhist countries. The fundamental equality of man and woman has been the lodestar of Buddhist Society from its earliest beginnings.
Anybody who has lived in Buddhist countries, be it Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Indo-China, Tibet, knows that the status of women is astonishingly high. Because the Buddhist wife does not look up to her husband as to a god, she is not expected to eat after her husband has finished his meal, or to immolate herself after her husband’s death as an alternative to a life of utter dejection and privation. On the contrary, she is free to leave her husband if she