"'Tis too horrible; The weariest and most loathed earthly life Which age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death?"
Can imagination conceive a more dismal, ghastly scene? But religion has crowned the practice with the weight of national sanction, and thus deadened the finer sensibilities of our nature. Sad as this picture is, the most staunch advocate of liberalism can hardly expect to escape such a fate. To a person accustomed to such scenes, death, and its concomitant agony, loses half its terrors. How many Hindoos are annually hurried to their eternal home by reason of this superstitious, inhuman practice? Instances are not wanting to corroborate the truth of this painful fact. Persons entrusted with the care and nursing of a dying man at the burning Ghaut soon get tired of their charge, and rather than administer to his comfort, are known to resort to artificial means, whereby death is actually accelerated. They unscrupulously pour the unwholesome, muddy water of the river down his already choked throat, and in some cases suffocate him to death. "These are not the ebullient flashes from the glowing caldron of a kindled imagination," but undeniable facts founded on the realities of life.
The process of Hindoo _antarjal_ or immersion is another name for suffocation. Life is so tenacious, especially in what the Hindoos call _old bones_, or aged persons, that I have seen some persons brought back home after having undergone this murderous process nine or ten times in as many days. The patient, perhaps an uncared-for widow cast adrift in the world, retaining the faculty of consciousness unimpaired, is willing to die rather than continue to drag on a loathsome existence, but nature would not readily yield the vital spark. In spite of repeated murderous processes, the apparently dying flicker of life would not become extinct. In the case of an aged man, the return home after _immersion_ is infamously scandalous, but in that of an aged widow the disgrace is more poignant than death itself. I have known of an instance in which an old widow was brought back after fifteen _immersions_, but being overpowered by a sense of shame she drowned herself in the river after having lived a disgraceful life for more than a year. As I have observed elsewhere, no expression is more frequent in the mouth of an aged widow than the following: "Shall I ever die?" Scarcely any effort has ever been made to suppress or even to ameliorate such a barbarous practice, simply because religion has consecrated it with its holy sanction.