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The Brahmanic Indian family is intensely patriarchal. The woman is an adjunct, significant for her aid to man in working out his density. According to the religion of the Hindus, this density is unfulfilled at his death; a son is necessary to continue the work of salvation. This is part of the rationale which emphasizes the unquestionable superiority of man over woman even before birth. John P. Jones says: “The greatest disappointment in the life of a Hindu woman is not to be able to present her lord a son to solace him in this life and to assist him through the valley of death.”
There is in the Hindu family a strong tradition of idolization of sons. Such a tendency is operative is probably most other societies; however, it evidently reaches an extremity among the Hindus. The following excerpt from one of the Rig-Veda Brahmanas may give us some idea of the antiquity of the attitude. hariccandra Vaidhasa Aisraka was the son of a king; a hundred wives were his, but he had no son from them. In his house dwelt Pravata and Narada; he asked Narada:
“What doth man gain by a son?”
The latter replied:
“A debt he payeth in him,
And immortality he attaineth,
That father who seeth the face
Of a son borning living.
The delights of the earth,
The delights of the fire,
The delights in the waters of living beings,
Greater than these is that of a father in a son.
By means of a son have fathers ever
Passed over the deep darkness;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The son is a ship, well-found, to ferry over.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Food is breath, clothing a protection,
Gold an ornament, cattle lead to marriage.
A wife is a comrade, a daughter a misery
And a son a light in the highest heaven.”
From infancy girls are taught man-worship; this constitutes their principal training, for education in a formal sense is ordinarily not allowed them. The ideal of Hindu womanhood is she who lives only to serve her husband – indeed, she who is most successful in deifying her husband.
There is no other god on earth for a woman than her husband. The most excellent of all the good works that she can do is to seek to please him by manifesting perfect obedience to him. Therein should lie her sole rule in life.
Be her husband deformed, aged, infirm, offensive, in his manners; let him also be choleric, debauched, immoral, a drunkard, a gambler; let him frequent places of ill-repute, live in open sin with other women, have no affection whatever for his home; let him rave like a lunatic; let him live without honor; let him be blind, deaf, dumb or crippled; in a word, let his defects be what they may, let his wickedness be what it may, a wife should always look upon him as her god, should lavish on him all her attention and care, paying no heed whatever to his character and giving him no cause whatever for displeasure.
A woman is made to obey at every stage of her existence. As daughter, it is to her father and mother she owes submission; as a wife, to her husband, to her father-in-law, and to her mother-in-law; as widow, to her sons. At no period of her life can she consider herself her own mistress.
By
comparing woman with “the soil in which seed is sown,” Hindu men have further
fortified their position of importance. “The seed is declared to be the more
important; for offspring of all created beings is marked by the characteristics
of the seed.”
Ministering to the pleasures and desires of man is the only possible legitimate
vocation of women, and this goes so far as to make life without such employment
a meaningless existence.
Suttee-mindedness is an extreme form of the man-centered attitude of Hindus. The suttee may be said to represent man’s supreme achievement in subjugating woman to his service. It is an overwhelming symbol of the meaninglessness of her life apart from his. Climbing onto the waiting pyre which presently will be an inferno, she assumes the stature of a goddess, her shining virtue being that she has fully accepted the brutal fact that her life is an inseparable adjunct to that of her deceased master and god.
Since, regardless of the number of wives he has, a woman’s life may be identified with only one man, and, since woman were created solely for the service of husbands, a widow is a woman without a purpose. She may not remarry, for to do so would be not only a grave insult but also a possible deprivation to her dead husband. On the other hand, immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her husband may have a double valve: She may continue to be of service to him immediately after his death, thus saving him the inconvenience of having to remain wifeless until her natural death; and the act of extreme submission symbolized in the suttee may be an unforgettable lesson in man-worship to living Hindu women.
Not love but duty is the impelling social force in the suttee. In the case of a husband, the death of one wife creates only the problem of securing another. Indeed, the symbolic meaning of the suttee has been carried so far in some communities that “if a man died during an absence from home in another country, his wife was recommended to take his slippers or any other article of dress and burn herself with them tied to her breast”.
Sometimes the suttee was voluntary, but the horror of the occasion frequently terrified even the most convinced Hindu woman. Today suttee is practically abolished in India. We should expect suttee-mindedness, however, to linger much longer, for it is a part of Hinduism. A free life among women is not compatible with a caste system.
With the subjugation of woman it became necessary to guard her, for if lower-caste men were to gain access to submissive women of upper castes the system would be speedily disrupted. Thus the society had to be definitely convinced about the inborn untrustworthiness of women. Manu says with assurance:
Through their passion for men, through their mutable, temper, through their natural heartlessness, they become disloyal towards their husbands, however, carefully they may be guarded in this world. When creating them, Manu allotted to women a love of their bed, of their seat and of ornament, impure desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice, and bad conduct. For women no sacramental rite is performed with sacred texts; thus the law is settled.
The aim is to keep a constant watch over the woman, to give her no opportunity to act independently, and to limit very carefully her spatial mobility. “Carefully watch the procreation of your offspring, lest strange seed fall upon your soil.” It is, then, a sacred duty of Indian caste-men to guard the women of the caste; and so to this day there is a basic suspicion about Indian women, while not a little of their caste difficulties is due to reports and rumors about their sexual deviations. “Among the higher classes, where we might expect more liberality, we find less. Women are not permitted to pay visits and never leave home except for the house of a relative, and these journeys are rare, and attended with much anxiety.”
In order to emphasize the perfidy of women the authors of the sacred literature of the Hindus warned men to guard themselves against seductions; indeed, in this respect one may not trust even his own relatives. Says Manu: “It is the nature of women to seduce men in this world; for that reason the wise are never unguarded in the company of females. For women are able to lead astray in this world not only a fool, but even a learned man, and to make him a slave to desire and anger.”
A good example of the hypothesis that the number of divorces in a country need not be an index of “familial happiness” is presented in the stability of the Hindu family. There is no divorce in Brahmanic India, but desertion is man’s prerogative. There is a powerful social coercion against women leaving their husbands, for, should they do so, their future life will be defined as purposeless—a punishment extreme, indeed. For any action of a wife against a husband which interferes with the solidarity of the family, the wife will be held blamable, and this regardless of the role of the husband. “She would rather undergo any suffering than testify against him in a court of law, especially as social opinion may not uphold her.”
It has been said that in India a man marries “for his own convenience, without any view to his wife’s happiness.” It may be, however, that this end can be facilitated by looking to the happiness of his wife. And, in fact, Indian women are overburdened with jewelry, while family ritual sometimes throws a halo of honor about the wife. Thus, though they are objects of restraint and distrust, enlightened self interest calls for a certain pampering of Hindu women.
At any rate, the place of women in Brahmanic India is every where—weternized area excluded – considered right. On this score the society has attained peace with itself, and naturally no one is able to formulate a question about it. In fact, we should expect Hindu women themselves to lament the social condition of women, say, in Western society, as unfortunate. According to William Crooke:
She, no less than her husband, would resent the belief that she is downtrodden and degraded. In a land where the affairs of life are regulated by custom, she is quite content to repeat the experiences of the heroines of old times, whose docility and reverence for the men with whom they were linked are an ideal which she is proud to follow.
Another indication of the strength of the culture may perhaps be illustrated by the following: Out of respect for husbands, wives may not mention their names. Some such title as “master” or “lord” may be used. “In no way,” says Louis H. Gray, “can one of the sex annoy another more intensely and bitterly than by charging her with having mentioned her husband’s name. It is a crime not easily forgiven.” Among women themselves, then, as might have been expected, man’s superiority is propagated. Even the supreme effort at self-subordination, the suttee, has been claimed by Hindu women as a right and privilege, and there are cases where considerable restraint by foreign officials had to be exercise in order to prevent it.
Hindu women tend to be the keepers of custom in its pristine simplicity. Their almost universal illiteracy and the overwhelming social emphasis upon limitations to their emotional life leave them yet another avenue for passionate preoccupation. The Hindu woman is the arbiter of custom for custom’s sake, the unyielding anchor of Hinduism, the strict rote mistress of daughters-in-law, and the cryptic power behind the meticulous, irrational life of the Hindu home. Her knowledge of what is right is critical and fastidious; and custom, which is religion in India, is usually stronger than any possible novel ideas of a father or husband. “These illiterate women,” Underwood comments, “are a drag upon progress because the women of India exert a great influence within their homes. They dominate their husbands and sons even when these have received a western education.” Ketkar attributes the influence of pundits in present-day India to their following of women and men of little education.
Hindu men have struggled in the past to produce a quiescent womanhood unschooled in intellect. Believing her to be of a low order mentally and innately irresponsible, they have limited her mobility and ruled out the slightest possibility of romantic love. All this is consistent with a caste culture. At length, however, she has become a power with which even the most ambitious leader of social change in modern India must reckon. The educated man may now be ready for reform, but his womenfolk, among others, are the unlimited heirs to a system that brooks no progress.
