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Dr.Ambedkar being administeared the Oath by the first President of Indian Republic Dr.Rajendra Prasad. Jawahar Lal Nehru the then Prime Minister of India, looking on. (1947) Ram was a hero. Abram was a coward who became the Patriarch of Judaism, Jesus, and Islam. When kings Pharaoh and later Abimelech demanded his wife, Abraham, as he was later called, acquiesced without a murmur. To protect his own life, he sent Sarah into their harems (Genesis 12: 14–20, 20: 1–17) describing her as his sister. Then he followed pagan aristocrats and took concubines for himself (1 Chronicles 1: 28–34). In contrast, when the “demon” king Ravan abducted Sita, Ram organized an army of monkeys, burnt down Lanka, killed his powerful enemy, and rescued his wife. That contrast is quite ironic, since it was not Ram but Abraham who has shaped the law that regulates modern Hindu marriage. Abrahamic tradition, as taught by the Christian New Testament (though not by Judaism and Islam), redefined Hindu marriage because of the way Ram’s and Abraham’s narratives end: to protect his honor, Ram banished his wife while she was pregnant with twin boys. And, Abraham sent away his concubines and became loyal to his wife. Before choosing monogamy, however, Abraham requested God to accept his concubine’s son as his heir. God rejected Abraham’s prayer because marriage is not a human construct that can be re-structured by human whim. If Abraham was to follow God, he had to learn that one man marrying one woman was divine design that had been corrupted by human sin. Restoring the divine design for marriage was a part of God’s salvation that Abraham was to unfold in human history. Abraham became the Savior’s patriarch because he obeyed God and devoted himself to his wife. Naturally, the Bible’s language is discreet, but no mature reader can miss that in Genesis 17:15–19 and 18: 9–15 God commands an elderly Abraham to sleep with his wife, not with younger concubines. Both Ram and Abram lived in cultures that accepted all sorts of marital perversions including polygamy and harems. Some of these corruptions, as we shall see, had been given highest religious status. But, God called Abraham to transform Canaan’s wicked cultures that respected neither the wife nor marriage. In choosing Abraham, God restored what humans had lost due to sin. The Bible begins by telling us that God created “man” as male and female, to become “one flesh.” Husband and wife were not to be separated: either by one’s whims (1 Corinthians 7:3–5 and 10), or by another human being (Genesis 2:19–25). Marriage in India It is because of the Bible that independent India gave to Sita the right to reject Ram’s edict exiling her. Under The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, Section 9, a Sita can now sue Ram for her conjugal rights. Likewise, if this law had existed at the time, Kasturba could have sued Mahatma Gandhi for her right to have her husband sleep with her and not with other women in his ashram. Because Hindutva leaders often lecture about a “Uniform Civil Code,” not many Hindus realize that the law giving a Hindu wife an exclusive right over her husband comes from the Bible. It overturned Hindu religious/cultural tradition, and was designed by the British to put in place a system of liberating laws that were just, clear, understandable. That became the reason for the Divorce Act, 1869, Section 32. But didn’t Ram have only one wife? In the time of the epics, Mahabharat and the Ramayan, it was normal for a girl to be married before she reached puberty. That was most likely the reason Sita became pregnant only after she was brought back from Lanka and not before. Her twins were born after she was banished, without being divorced. So, did her young husband live as a celibate after expelling her? Different answers to that question are given by more than three hundred different versions of Ram’s story. However, what these versions seem to agree upon is that after Sita’s twins had grown up, Ram followed his father’s example and performed the Ashvamedha Yagya (the Horse Sacrifice). The yagya, explained in Yajurveda, required the Chief Queen to spend a night, with the sacrificed horse, naked and mimicking copulation, while three naked queens went around the horse, uttering obscenities. The queens were then given away to the priests. (See Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith, The Texts of the White Yajurveda [Munshiram Manoharlal], and Arthur Berridale Keith, The Veda of the Black Yajus School Entitled Taittiriya Sanhita, [Oxford]). While Sita’s idol may have been used in this sacred ritual, is it possible that self-respecting priests would perform this most powerful yagya if they got idols instead of queens? Why would they violate the Vedas at their own expense? Since Brahmin priests cannot corrupt their most magical ritual, the Jain Ramayan makes better sense of the story that after expelling Sita, Ram took 8,000 wives, and the chief queens were: “Maithili, Prabhavati, Ratinibha, and Sridama” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayana#Jain_version.) Even if Ram performed the yagya only symbolically and not in a scripturally prescribed manner, the indisputable point is that the Ram–Sita model did not inspire Hindu Scriptures or tradition to define marriage as monogamy (an exclusive and lifelong relationship between one man and one woman). Keshab Chandra Sen and the Battle for Reforming Hindu Marriage The 1869 Act mentioned above intensified the movement to reform the Hindu world. The pioneers of the nineteenth century social reform movement had not opposed polygamy mainly because they were Kulin Brahmins. The first reformer, Raja Rammohun Roy (1772–1833), had already been married to three wives before he was nine years old. By the 1850s, thinkers–activists such as Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–1891) had begun to publicly agree with Christian missionaries that polygamy was evil. They could see that their culture allowed elderly Kulin Brahmins to marry prepubescent and teenage girls even after they were already on their deathbeds. Since Brahmanism had banned widow-remarriage from ancient times, after Lord Bentinck banned Sati in 1829 these girls were left with few options once they became widows. They could live as domestic slaves