Customary morality cannot be a guide to modern life.

What the line is asking

• Customary morality: honour, a purity rule, a feast, a silence.
• Cannot be a guide: it fails the stranger, the daughter, the ‘outcaste’.
• Modern life: cities, a phone, a labour market, a Constitution.

Family / gender

• Khap, a dowry, a widow’s dress. Custom as a law without a gazette.

Caste

• A well, a temple, a job. Art. 17 vs a custom that never read it.

Speech / science

• A book banned by ‘sentiment’. A vaccine refused as impurity.

The counter

Custom is also a language, a festival, a care of the old. Burning all custom is another fundamentalism. The guide is a test: does it widen the last person? If yes, keep. If it needs a beating to survive, it is not a guide.