Kriyálopa. Kriyá + lup + ghaiṋ = kriyálopa. Kriyálopa is when a ritual, observance, rule or regulation is abolished due to an awakening of or a development in the faculties of judgement, intellect or wisdom. Kriyálopa is also when some old, worn-out customs and mores are done away with because of environmental pressures or under the impact of natural circumstances.

There was a time in Indian society when, out of superstition, people used to burn alive many innocent women on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Today that custom has been abrogated. I know certain villages in Burdwan District where a large concentration of higher castes live, particularly Brahmans and Kayasthas, which have places called in the local language águnkhákii [“fire-eaters”]. What is the meaning of águnkhákii Águnkhákii means those women who “ate fire” alive; that is, fire was put into their mouths. In other words, these are places where sati was carried out. In our childhood we saw our mothers, our aunts and elderly ladies visiting those places, treating them as sacred. They used to apply the dust of those places in the parting of their hair. But with the development of intellect and the discerning faculty, people today consider sati barbaric, and the practice has been abolished.

As far as I can remember, the last sati took place in a Kanyakubja Brahman family in a village near Barh in Patna District. The British administration was about to take legal steps against the widow’s brothers-in-law when they all ran away. It was discovered that the relatives had killed the widow out of greed for her property.

When a pharaoh of ancient Egypt died, his queens, perhaps numbering in the thousands, were buried alive in his tomb. That custom is now dead and gone.

One of my great-aunts (the younger sister of my grandmother) was married at the age of three, became a widow at the age of seven, and died at the age of 109. That means that out of 109 years of her life, she had to bear the hardship of widowhood for 102 years.⁽¹⁾ One day (I was very young at the time), I asked her, “Grandma, do you remember your husband?”

She said, “No, I don’t remember him at all. My mother-in-law told me that we used to play hide-and-seek. We often got into fights and came to blows. My mother-in-law would come and separate us. Mother-in-law used to pick me up and take me out of the backdoor, and my husband’s aunt would pick him up and carry him out of the front door. I don’t remember more than this.”

Even a five- or six-year-old boy from the so-called upper caste would extend his feet to accept prańám from an eighty-year-old man of a lower caste. Those young boys did not feel the slightest prick of conscience or humanity. This was the ill result of caste distinctions. But today that opportunistic structure of casteism has already been destroyed, it can collapse at any moment.

Social injustices of this sort have been going on for a long time all over the world. They are still rampant today – in one place in the name of religion, in another in the name of God, in another in the name of social purity, in yet another as the steamroller of an evil administration. These social injustices are gradually disappearing, depending upon the development of intellect, conscience, faculty of judgement, etc. This is kriyálopa.

This abolition of old customs may also take place because of natural circumstances or any other factor. Formerly, even poor families had to sell their property to arrange the obsequies of their departed parents. Nowadays normally such things are rare. In such cases, kriyálopa took place under circumstantial pressure. But the custom of incurring heavy debt and selling one’s property to marry off one’s daughters still continues. Of course, when women become a little more socially-aware and men become a little more conscientious, and if women become economically self-reliant by bringing about a change in the economic structure, this custom of kanyádáya [forced social obligations to marry the daughters with dowry and feasts] will die out. And when the caste system will fully die out, the marriage system will develop in a healthy atmosphere. Many unhealthy customs will vanish from society.

Footnotes

(1) In India, not only are upper-caste widows barred from remarriage, they are placed under social and religious strictures. –Trans.