The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c13.s1.23

c13.s1.23

That this rite should have the sacrificer's wife as its focus can perhaps be explained by the ambivalent position of women in the exclusively patrilineal brahminical system. In the context of the system's stress on the identification of father and son, woman's role is all but excluded. She passes out of her own family, and she cannot be fully integrated in the family into which she marries except as the passive means that enables the father to be reborn as his own son, without propagating herself.²⁷ She has to remain an element of insecurity between the two lineages which, through her, establish or maintain connubium. In this way, we can understand why in the *Maitrāyaṇī* and *Kāṭhaka Saṃhitās* woman is roundly identified with untruth, as against sacrifice, which is truth. In fact, it is not so much the infidelity of woman that seems to be at stake here as it is the ambivalent relationship between the two families or clans whose connubial alliance is represented by woman, for if she would not tell the truth, it is not she who is to suffer but a relative of hers.²⁸