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Women's status in ancient India : Hindu, Buddhist and secular perspectives

A collection of essays on the conditions of women in ancient India. The early papers, like Atelkar and Horner, date to the 1930s. Topics dealt with include women's status and how it changed, property rights, prostitution, sati, etc.

To the modern reader, Altekar appears to be making statements without marshalling adequate evidence; he seems to be pining for the golden era of the past. For him the vedic and samhita era (upto 500BC) was a relatively golden period for indian women (they were allowed considerable freedom, except to property. they could even re-marry, although this is opposed by Kosambi see below). He compares the status of Indian wome to the Greek situation, and finds the Indian position better. The sati movement, according to Altekar, gained strength only after 500BC (for reasons unanalyzed). Some of these challenges to his claims have been highlighted by Uma Chakravarti in her essay on the "Altekarian paradigm".

Women in Buddhism: a study of Almswomen

I.B. Horner, on the other hand, paints a detailed picture of Buddhist period, citing primary evidence at each step, and the work appears far more credible. At one point, while listing the questions an almswoman would be asked joining the saMgha, she observes that she would be asked "Have your father and mother given their consent" - but not if her husband had. Since almswomen were not admitted before the age of twenty, well past the age of marriage, this is very interesting. Nonetheless, there are no stories of a wife declaring unilaterally to the husband her intention of joining (as there is of husbands). Society at large expected wives to follow their husbands, and although husband's consent was not officially a part of this list, it was actually an offence for the ordainer to accept a girl who had not the consent of her husband.

The almswomen had eight belongings: three robes, alms-bowl, razor,
needle, girdle, and water-strainer.  She also had a bodice,
saMkacchika, coming from below the collar-bone to above the navel, for
the purpose of hiding the breast.  This was apparently not the practice
among ordinary women.  Also, all forms of jewellery were strictly
prohibited.

At the same time, some of Horner's comments on the status of women appear to
reflect modern conditions almost:

In the pre-Buddhist days, the status of women in India was on the whole low
and without honour.  A daughter was nothing but a source of anxiety to her
parents; for it was inauspicious and a disgrace if they could not marry her;
yet, if they could, they were often nearly ruined by their lavish expenditure
on the wedding festivities.

Similarly, men are interested in marrying primarily to get heirs to perform
his funeral rites.

Another essay by N.N. Bhattacharya analyzes the notion of women's
property, stridhan, which remains a concept even today in
Indian law.

In an article titled "Prostitution in ancient India", Srikumari Bhattacharji
outlines the differing models of promiscuity, and distinguishes the
particular cash-economic transaction called prostitution.  However, such
women, while being "illegitimate", did indeed have independent econoomic
status, whereas legitimate (married) women did not.

Kosambi's urvashI and purUravas

The essay that I found most impressive was D.D. Kosambi's urvashI
and purUravas, which was written in 1951 and was collected in [Kosambi, D
D (1962): Myth and Reality: Studies in the Formation of Indian Culture,
Popular Prakashan, Bombay].  It starts with an analysis of kAlidasa's
vikramorvashiyam, the story of King purUravas of the lunar race and the
nymph urvashI.  Urvashi is abducted by the demon keshI, and is rescued by
purUravas.  But she is recalled to heaven, to act the part of Lakshmi in a
play staged before Indra.  When she mispronounces Purushottama as
purUravas, the director Bharata sentences her to human life.  This enables
her to mate w purUravas, but the course of their love is interrupted again
when she is turned into a vine for stepping into a sacred grove.  But a
charmed jewel restores her.  The jewel is stolen by a kite, and when this
kite is shot dead, the arrow is found to carry the legend that urvashI has
borne the king a son.  This results in another union, which is prolonged
because heaven is busy fighting a war.

Kosambi's interest is in tracing the sociological origin of the story
and the transformation of the narrative, which is first glimpsed in the
Rigveda, to the day of Kalidasa.  He touches upon the commentaries of
Keith and Max Muller, which he finds lacking in explanation.  Geldner's
analysis of eight sources, some identicalm, observes the transition of
the story from a tragedy where the lovers are never united again, to a
happy romance.

Rigveda narrative

Rigveda X.95: (this version merges the more literal one on p.263 with the
slightly more fluid one on p.262):

1. (PurUravas): Oh, my wife, stay, though cruel in mind; let us discourse
   together.  Our chants unuttered will bring no joy in days to come.
2. (Urvashi): Why should I speak to you? I have passed away like the first of
   the dawns.  purUravas, go back to your destiny; I am like the wind,
   difficult to catch.
5. (Urvashi): Thrice a day did you ram me with your member, and impregnated
   me unwilling (as I was).  purUravas, I yielded to your desire.  O hero,
   you were then the king of my body.  ...
12. (purUravas): When will the son that is born yearn after his father?  He
   will shed flooding tears, knowing (what happened).  ...
14. (PurUravas): Then let your lover fall dead, uncovered.  let him go to the
   furthest reaches, never to return; let him lie in Nirrti's lap (Goddess of
   death); let him be eaten by raging wolves.
15. (Urvashi): O purUravas, you are not to die, not to fall dead, the unholy
   wolves are not to eat you.
   (PurUravas?Urv?): There is no friendship with womenfolk, their hearts
   are the hearts of hyenas.  ...
   [In Kosambi's translation this last is said by P; in Eggeling's version,
   embedded in the Shatapatha brAhmaNa XI 5.1, it is said by Urvashi]
17. P: I, the best (of men) submit to the atmosphere-filling, sky-crossing
    Urvashi.  May the blessings of good deeds be thine; turn back, my heart
    is heated (with fear).
18. U: Thus speak the gods to thee, son of Ila; inasmuch as thou art now
    doomed to death, thy offspring will offer sacrifice to the gods, but thou
    thyself rejoice in heaven.

Male sacrifice?

Kosambi's analysis focuses on the fact that in most versions of the story,
PurUravas eventually is killed in a sacrifice [in some versions, he becomes a
gandharva or a heavenly spirit, consort of the apsaras].  Kosambi's
explanation is that "purUravas is to be sacrificed after having begotten a
son and successor upon urvashI; he pleads in vain against her
determination.  This is quite well-known to anthropologists as a sequel to
some kinds of primitive sacred marriage." p.265.  He also emphasizes that
"the primary reason for the survival of any Vedic hymn is its liturgical
function."  Kosambi views the dialogue as
    part of a ritual act performed by two characters representing the
    principals and is thus a substitute for an earlier, actual sacrifice
    of the male." p.266 (italics Kosambi).

Part of Kosambi's justification for this analysis is lexical - P addresses
his wife as ghore, which means the grim or dreaded one, used for gods like
Indra; hardly a lover's term.  The assurance "Thou is not to die" [15] is
given in almost identical terms to the sacrificed, cooked and eaten horse in
RV. 1.162.21 na vai u etan mr^yase.

Kosambi also attempts to analyze purUravas birth:

    the learned purUravas was born of Ila, who was both his father and
    his mother, or so we have heard.  -  (mahAbhArata 1.70 16):

and suggests that this may be a link to manu, and that the lack of paternity,
is "not unknown when matriarchy is superseded.  The implication is that
purUravas is a figure of the transitional period when fatherhood became of
prime importance; that is, of the period when the patriarchal form of society
was imposing itself upon an earlier one."  [p.269] This argument seems rather
thin, and is not pursued further.  However, the speculation that the Aryan
story may reflect a transition from a matriarchal society is of considerable
interest.

UrvashI as uShas

The last part of the article analyzes the equivalence of urvashI with uShas,
who in RV IV 1.15 is an high mother goddess:
   We seven sages shall generate from mother uShas, the first men
   sacrificers; we shall become aMgirasas, sons of heaven, we shall burst the
   rich mountain, shining forth.
And in another verse she is said to have once been Indra's equal, but that
her cult was smashed up by Indra.  All these
references may also point to a form of hetaerism (group marriage, women seen
as belonging to the tribe as a whole), e.g. in RV I.167.4, where the goddess
rodasI is common to all the mAruts, under the title of sAdhAraNI.

Another interesting suggestion is that the ritual of widow-burning may be a
leftover from the time when matriarchy was actively suppressed; in Greek
myth, the first widow who survives her husband and re-marries, instead of
entering his flaming pyre, is Gorgophone, daughter of Perseus. (see below)

see also a portrayal of the urvashI-pururavas story as it appears in the 
r^igveda in Sushil K De's 
Ancient Indian erotics and erotic literature (1959).

Contents

Introduction
I.  Issues and perspectives:
    1. The position of women in Hindu civilization: retrospect and prospect/
       A.S. Altekar. a
    2. Beyond the Altekarian paradigm: towards a new understanding of gender
	    relations in early Indian history/
       Uma Chakravarti
    3. Women under primitive Buddhism: laywomen and almswomen
       I.B. Horner

II. Women and the economy:
    1. Proprietary rights of women in ancient India
       N.N. Bhattacharyya
    2. Turmeric land: women's property rights in Tamil society since early
	    medieval times
       Kanakalatha Mukund
    3. 'Rural-urban dichotomy' in the concept and status of women: an
	    examination (from the Mauryas to the Guptas)
       Chitrarekha Gupta
    4. Aspects of women and work in early South India
       Vijaya Ramaswamy

III. Socio-sexual constructions of womanhood
    1. Polyandry in the Vedic period
       Sarva Daman Singh
    2. Prostitution in ancient India
       Sukumari Bhattacharji
    3. Woman and the sacred in ancient Tamilnadu
       George L. Hart, III

IV. Religious beliefs and practices:
    1. Urvasi and Pururavas
       D.D. Kosambi
    2. Women's patronage to temple architecture
       Harihar Singh
    3. The world of the Bhaktin in South Indian traditions--the body and
	    beyond
       Uma Chakravarti

Widow-immolation in Greece?

Bremmer and den Bosch have more on the Greek story of women joining their
husbands on the pyre, in:
    Bremmer, Jan N.; Lourens van den Bosch;
    Between Poverty and the Pyre: Moments in the History of Widowhood
    Routledge, 1995, 258 pages
    ISBN 0415083702

Wives joining their husbands on the pyre may have been common in ancient
Greece before 2nd c. BCE:
   The 2nd c. traveller Pausanias names Gorgophone as the very first woman
   who remarried after the death of her husband.  In Euripedes' "Trojan
   Women", Andromache decries a woman who takes on a new lover, and in his
   Suppliants Euadne jumps onto the pyre out of love for her husband
   Kapaneus.  - p.34

  This is a diverse exploration of women putatively called widows (the
  classification proves surprisingly difficult, given the many strands of
  religious / social history).  Deals with Hindu satis, widows burned as
  witches, or those who became prostitutes to survive, and also some case
  studies such as Muhammad's first wife, the prosperous merchant Khadijah.

An interesting take on Muhammad's first wife Khadijah:

  In 595, Khadijah, who had been widowed for the second time about a decade
  earlier, employed Muhammmad as the agent in charge of her caravan (which
  was supposed to equal all the other merchants' put together); he was a
  distant cousin who was known for his honesty, with sobriquets like
  "Al-Sadiq" (the truthful) and "Al-Amin" (the trustworthy). Eventually
  they got married and Khadija was to become his first convert.  ]

Other Reviews: The Hindu

Review: Hindu, Seema Alavi

... a collection of essays on women in early Indian societies. A comprehensive
and cogent introduction by Kumkum Roy attempts to link the seemingly
disparate accounts of women in specific social-politico formations to the
larger discipline of social history.

Section one reproduces two very influential essays by I. B. Horner and
A. S. Altekar which laid the agenda for women's studies in the early 20th
Century. Both were, to some extent, a response to the colonial challenge to
"masculine identities". They thus project a "glorificatory" picture of women
in the Vedic and Buddhist past.

A very useful survey essay by Uma Chakravarty critiques this nationalist
response, in the face of colonial onslaught. She suggests that such reactions
derailed gender concerns and subsumed them in the larger male dominated
politics of the nation. Altekar's idyllic image of womanhood in Vedic times,
she says, continues to pervade the collective consciousness of the upper
castes in India. It has also come in the way of developing a more
analytically rigorous study of gender relations in ancient India.

The second set of articles identifies crucial elements in material structures
and works out their gendered nature. N. N. Bhattacharya's insightful essay on
the question of stridhan (women's property) shows how this movable property
could not be put to productive use. It was thus retained as a right because
it ensured the exclusion of women from productive processes. However, this
was not true across the country. K. Mukund shows the variations in women's
access to property across regions, sub- regions, castes, classes and
families. Vijaya Ramaswamy discusses the participation of women labour in
production and other activities and C. Gupta questions the urban rural divide
that is often emphasised in studies of women.

The centrality of marriage in structuring gender relations, the varied
definitions of polyandry and the distinction between prostitution and other
forms of sexual promiscuity are issues which are dealt by Sukumari
Bhattacharji and others in an interesting section on sexual construction of
womanhood. Bhattacharji, a Sanskritist, analyses textual references to
various forms of promiscuity and says that these are different from
prostitution since the latter is a part of cash economy. She highlights the
economic relations that characterise prostitution: relation to the state,
taxing of prostitutes and their unique financial status as compared to other
women. The significant suggestions are that women whose social status was
"legitimate" did not have access to an independent economic status as was
possible for the prostitutes whose social standing was "illegitimate". This
is the sense one derives from literary sources but it seems that they were
shaped through lived social practice.

Finally, the concluding section has essays which attempt to link the divine
with the human as far as the notion of the "goddess" is concerned. Here
worthy of note is Uma Chakravarthy's article which surveys types of women
within the tradition of bhakti or devotional religion in early South
India. Chakravarti views the bhakti tradition as providing a space within
which social meanings could be questioned and reconstituted. She maps out the
social context in which a range of relations were possible between the male
deity and his female worshippers.

---


Kumkum Roy is Associate Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, School of
Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She also wrote The
Emergence of Monarchy in North India.

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