The Social and Military Position of the Ruling Caste in Ancient India, as Represented by the Sanskrit Epic c2.s6.100

c2.s6.100

It is said that the ‘dependence’ of women is a new thing. But there is no doubt that restrictions on the social freedom of women were early practiced, and I find nothing to warrant the assumption that anything of Vedic freedom in this regard survived except in the earliest traditional form of the Epic. ‘Women should always be guarded,’ and when Sūrya says to Kuntī (iii. 307. 15) that it is ‘contrary to nature’ that women should be āvṛtāḥ (secluded), he for a selfish end tells half the truth; but it was already second nature for women to be kept at home, girl and wife, all her life. Such a security against harm is the firmly enclosed court in the Nala story. A description elsewhere gives us the information that one enters through three different inner rooms of the palace, before coming to the garden, where there was a playground for the women, decked with flowers and fountains (xii. 326. 31 ff.). We know from Vedic times that the women had separate apartments, and the seclusion of the royal dames is a carrying out of this exclusion from the home of the man.* But how was it in the humble house? Here there must have been much intercourse.† The homely rules of the student show this, as well as the intercourse related in the Brāhmaṇas between honorable women and guests. But theoretically the woman was never an individual capable of taking care of herself. There is a much tempted St. Anthony in one of the later portions of the Epic who expresses to a young woman this trite truth with great force: ‘an aphorism-maker says that women are all liars; that is the truth; it stands so in the Veda; do you say you are independent? There isn’t any such thing as women’s independence, because women are not independent; it is the opinion of the lord of creation that a woman isn’t fit for independence.’‡