भारतीय इतिहास के ६ स्वर्णिम पृष्ठ (वीर सावरकर - विदेशी आक्रान्ताओं पर विजय गाथा)

after being heated in the goldsmith’s chafing dish, once her foetus came out after delivery. 480. It is, however, really strange that even this Deval Smriti, which was so particular about the re-purification and reconversion of the fallen Hindu women, with a view to stopping the numerical losses of our community, should not have cared to do the same for their children born of the Muslim women. It is very difficult to explain why it should have failed to do so. We were reminded of this Deval Smriti when once we were told of a custom amongst the Bengali Hindus: if a child widow or an unmarried girl in a Hindu family gave birth to an illegitimate child, it was to be solicitously given over to the Muslims, who lived beyond the local river for being brought up as their own. This expedient was no doubt thought of by the Hindu priesthood with the best intention of saving the family from public humiliation and the society from every contagion of that sin. The Muslims too, thinking that these Hindu children increased their number, gladly accepted them. The simple god-fearing Hindus on the other hand, never for once understood that their own number decreased to that extent. It is quite evident that this Bengali custom must have been popularized by some Smriti like the Deval Smriti. 481. The basic cause of this cowardly arrangement made by even those reformers who condemned the caste division, ban on repurification of the ‘fallen’ and favoured reconversion, was the deep-rooted silly belief of the Hindus, that the purity of the caste was to be preserved at all costs and even at the risk of caste extinction. But the Hindu society of those days never understood that the very same purity of their caste was lost, when lakhs of their women fell into the hands of the Muslims, and that if those prohibitions on reconversion were to continue, the whole of the Hindu society would perish. 482. Another thing to be noted is that the portion, now extant, of the Deval Smriti does not provide for the conversion of the original Muslims to Hinduism, as it did for the conversion of the unfortunate Hindu converts. The reason probably is only this, that the Hindus considered it a great sin to admit another community into their own fold. Even the religious laws gives up to the writer of the Bhagwat Geeta seemed to be extremely worried how to keep off the intermingling of the castes and subcastes within the Hindu Society itself.