Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India

369 Pages·2000·22.01 MB·English

by  Mandakranta Bose

Faces of the Feminine in
Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India
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Faces of the Feminine in
Ancient, Medieval, and
Modern India
EDITED BY
Mandakranta Bose
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
2000
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Faces of the feminine in ancient,
medieval, and modern India/edited by Mandakranta Bose.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references,
ISBN 0-19-5122294
1. Women—India—History. 2. Women—India—-Social conditions.
3. Women—Religious aspects—India. I. Bose, Mandakranta
1938-HQ1741.C36 1999
305.4'0954—dc21 98-8137
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To my husband,
Tirthankar Bose
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Preface
T
his study of women in India explores some of the less frequented areas in the
field. In recent years, studying women's issues or reevaluating literature by
and about women has been a major activity in the academic enterprise and the
world, and lives of Indian women have been fertile ground for both fieldwork and
theorizing. Indeed, so many of these studies are coming out of India, as well as the
Western world, that one might think we have exhausted the field. Why, then, do
we need another collection of essays? The reason for undertaking it is to provide a
path to many untapped primary sources of information about women's lives. To
examine India's three-thousand-year-old culture, including vast bodies of literature
spanning every area of public and personal life, is, indeed, a daunting task. Not
surprisingly, although valuable contributions have been made in some areas, a
scholarly sense of the entire domain awaits development. Our incomplete knowledge
of sources affects both research and pedagogy. As teachers of Indian studies, some
of us constantly lack the reading material to offer our students who want to explore
primary texts and documents in order to prepare themselves for historical research
on women's issues. We hope that the present study, while by no means a final map,
will be a critical guide to this vast field.
The purpose here is twofold: to point researchers toward primary material and
to analyze specific issues critically on the basis of such material. The writers of this
collection are women who have made special studies in the history, literature, and
culture of India. Most of them have lived in India for a number of years or for their
entire lives. What they have written comes from their own experience and
understanding of the culture and is firmly grounded in their research. Not all of
them share the same viewpoint or proceed along the same tracks. Some of the
essays attempt feminist critical analyses, some concentrate on textual and historical
evidence, and some are historical surveys. This mix, I hope, will enable readers to
recognize some of the central issues of women's lives and their cultural roots, to
become aware of the resources for studying them, and to find ways to approach
them.
viii Preface
The essays in this collection are organized in a broadly chronological scheme,
going from early Indian history through its medieval period to the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. We begin with studies in the lives of women of ancient times,
their roles in society, their access to education, and their power and control over
their own lives. This was the period when the society gradually established itself as
patriarchal, controlling every aspect of women's existence. As society became
stratified, women's roles were defined as subservient to men in the name of social,
legal, and moral stability. Early literature on codes of conduct and law makes this
quite clear. Treatises on law founded on the sacred books of the Hindus had a far-
reaching and defining influence on social life. As foundational documents of the
Hindu way of life that codified both social relations and personal belief as religious
imperatives, these texts have exerted a deep impact on women's lives and conduct
through history, and their teachings have not yet entirely lost their force. They are
thus some of the most useful sources for understanding women's lives in India. Of
particular interest is the fact that the conditions governing the lives of women in
India that appear in the earliest texts of the tradition seem more egalitarian than
those in texts from later times, as we may gather from references to learned women
going back to 1500 B.C.E.1 Later texts reflect the increasing rigidity of Hindu society
and its elaborate structuring of power relations and ethical principles. Confined
within that structure, women's lives from about 500 B.C.E. became more patrifocal
and thus constricted and homebound. From law books to literature, the emerging
picture of a woman's life in India is total subjugation and submission. One can see
why judgments such as the following are broadcast: "women, rooted in their families,
remain graceful subordinates of men."2 One of the aims of this book is to look
closely at the provisions in Hindu sacred law that prescribed and idealized that
subordination. The texts examined are those in which Manu and other ancient
Hindu lawgivers laid the bases of women's status, roles, rights, and duties. On this
basis, we may attempt to understand the intimate connection between the religious
framework and the social, as expressed in the lives of women. Other kinds of
literature that we propose to examine are the ancient Hindu epics and literary and
philosophical works. This is the task of the first part of the book, which covers the
ancient period, reaching back before the beginning of the common era and
continuing to its early years.
A vital part of the history of women in India is that, denied the authority of
public presence, they nonetheless left their mark, sometimes faint but often strong,
in the form of poetry. Although the earliest recorded poetry by women in India—
by Buddhist nuns of the sixth century B.C.E.—are very early, there are not many of
them, and very few writings by women are extant from the first few centuries of
the common era. However, the poems by these nuns stand as testaments to these
women's joy at finding freedom from the drudgery of everyday life and at achieving
not merely social but spiritual liberation. Because they are as much philosophical
speculations as simple avowals of love for the ascetic life, these poems help us
understand the power that religious life gave to the writers. The excerpts below
give us a taste of their sense of life:
Preface ix
Mutta:
So free am I, so gloriously free,
Free from three petty things—
From mortar, from pestle and from my twisted lord,
Freed from rebirth and death I am,
And all that has held me down
Is hurled away.
tr. Uma Chakravarty and Kumkum Roy, Women Writing in India, vol. 1, p. 68
Patacara:
The way by which men come we cannot know;
Nor can we see the path by which they go.
Why mournest then for him who came to thee,
Lamenting through thy tears: "My son! My son!"
Poems of Early Buddhist Nuns (Therlgathd), p. 63.
Quite different from these spiritual perceptions are Tamil poems by women of
the Sangam period (150 B.C.E-250 C.E.). The hundred and fifty or so short poems
from the early years of the common era, mostly founded on a warrior ethic, instruct
a mother how to bring up her child as a warrior or a wife to prepare her husband to
march out to the battlefield.3 These poems are written in the heroic mode and tell
us little about women except that their ideals of self-worth conformed wholly to
the demands warfare made on their menfolk. Other women poets are mentioned
in ancient texts, but their works are now lost. The only exception is Vidya or
Vijjaka, who probably lived around the sixth century C.E. and wrote poems about
love and life.4 Never voluminous, women's writing became scarcer as society became
more rigid, pushing women into the margin of a male-dominated society and making
education less accessible to them. The first part of this volume traces this erosion
of women's options and ends with an analysis of rituals dealing with goddesses and
women in Hinduism.
The second part of the collection is concerned with the medieval period—
that is, from about the ninth to the early eighteenth century. It begins with an
essay on the goddess-woman equation in Tantra. The articles that follow deal with
aspects of the Buddhist and Jain faiths and the new wave of devotional Hinduism
that revolutionized women's perception of the world and the self, expressed in
some of the most enduring poetry and music of India. Songs and poems by the best
known women poets of devotional Hinduism, such as Antal from Tamilnadu (ninth
century), Akka Mahadevi (twelfth century), Jana Bai, Bahina Bai, Atukuri Molla,
and others (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries), appear throughout this long period.5
Devotional Hinduism swept through India, taking root as an ideology that offered
an irresistible alternative to the mystique of Brahmanical religion and gave
legitimacy to the common individual, at least in the spiritual context. It gave
space to people on the margin, such as women, lower castes, and outcastes. Women,
powerless and silent in many domains of community life, found strength in their
sense of the divine and their own voice in poetry and songs. One of the most
original minds of the twelfth century belonged to the poet Akka MahadevI of the
ViraAaiva sect, who left a set of powerful poems expressing her love for the divine.