The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c23.48

v1.c23.48

These laws regarding women are on the whole the most self-contradictory in the later codes. As the position of woman is more or less indicative of the state of civilisation, it is important to notice that the high regard paid to woman is confined to her function as a mother of sons. The bride must be a virgin (not a widow, Manu, IX, 65) and the remarriage of widows is generally not countenanced; but the codes do not sanction the custom of suttee till late, and the provisions for widows show that, though they probably lived miserably and without honour, they were not expected to die with their husbands. The Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa both recognise the custom of suttee, but only the former (and probably not in an early part) gives a case of a royal widow burning herself with her husband. It is perhaps the extension of a royal custom, as in the epic, which has made the rule general, so that later law and practice recommend suttee for all. A parallel would be the Self-choice (*svayaṃvara*) or election of a husband by a princess, afterwards regarded as an election-rule in the case of other maidens. The mother is praised as equal to the father in honour, and in default of sons she may inherit (Manu, ix, 217), but if she bear only daughters or has no children she may be divorced (*ibid.* 81)¹. In general, a woman receives respect only as potential or actual mother of sons. Manu repeats with unction the dictum of the Sūtras that a woman is never independent (ix, 2 f.), and says that she may be slain for unfaithfulness and divorced for barrenness; he also regards women as too ‘unstable’ to be called as witnesses (viii, 77). The view that women are chattel is yielding in the Çāstra to a more enlightened opinion. In the epics also the rigidity of the law is not upheld by the tenor of tales showing women in a very different light from that exhibited in the didactic parts of the epic. Even at a much later age women were students, as they were wise in antiquity, and the annals of the law itself testify to the ability of the sex, for in the eighteenth century one of the great legal commentaries on the Mitāksharā was written by a woman, Lakshmīdevī. At what time the Purdah (‘curtain’) rule came to confine women to the house is uncertain; but probably not before foreign invasions had compelled the Hindu to adopt it. The epics and law-books speak of confining a woman as a punishment for ill-conduct (e.g. Manu, viii, 365), but Manu insists that ‘no man can really guard women by force’ (ix, 10). To go veiled is only a court-custom alluded to in both epics.