Women in Asia: Restoring Women to History

by Barbara N. Ramusack, Sharon Sievers

Overview

"These four volumes in this major series . . . provide a single-source reference to the status of the field of women's history and to ways that the field can be expanded. . . . A basic set for all academic libraries." —Library Journal Academic Newswire

Writing on South and Southeast Asia, Ramusack surveys both the prescriptive roles and lived experiences of women, as well as the construction of gender from the period of the early states to the 1990s. Sievers presents an overview of women's participation in the histories of China, Japan, and Korea from prehistory to the modern period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253212672
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	06/22/1999
Series:	Restoring Women to History Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Barbara N. Ramusack is Professor of History and Department Head at the University of
Cincinnati, where she is a founding member of the Center for Women's
Studies. She has published The Princes of India in the Twilight of Empire
and several articles on British feminists and Indian women.

Sharon Sievers is professor of modern Japanese history and department
chair at California State University, Long Beach, where she has also
served as director of the Women's Studies Program. Sievers is best known
for her prize-winning book on turn-of-the century women in Japan, entitled
Flowers in Salt: The Beginning of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan.

Read an Excerpt

Women in Asia

Restoring Women to History

---

By Barbara N. Ramusack, Sharon Sievers

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 1999 Indiana University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-21267-2

---

CHAPTER 1

WOMEN IN SOUTH ASIA

Barbara N. Ramusack

INTRODUCTION TO SOUTH ASIA

South Asia is an area of the world containing remarkable ethnic, linguistic, religious, geographical, and political diversity. This cultural variety makes South Asia a fascinating topic of study, but it also means that the generalizations intrinsic to a synthesis of its history are more challengeable than those made about many other areas of the world. Textbooks try to make its history comprehensible by dividing India into North-Aryan-Indo-European and South-Dravidian cultural areas and into Hindu and Muslim India. Over the past two millennia Aryan customs have gradually moved across the Deccan plateau into south India, but their influence remains uneven. Furthermore, these broad categories represent only the most obvious differences and ignore many cultural patterns that frequently were and are more meaningful in the lives of individual South Asian men and women. Thus northwestern India has close cultural ties to western Asia, whereas northeastern India reflects social arrangements found in Southeast Asia, even though both northwestern and northeastern India are encompassed in the Indo-European language sphere and have populations in which Muslims are a majority. Finally, none of these geographical and cultural categories indicate the intricate mosaic of tribal societies that are concentrated primarily in northeastern and central India but exist throughout the South Asian subcontinent from the Himalayas to the Malabar coast in the southwest. These tribal societies resisted integration into both the Aryan and Dravidian social frameworks until the twentieth century. Consequently, many scholars debate the validity of using the term "Indian" to describe such a multiplicity of cultures and regions.

Nowhere is the problem of making generalizations more hazardous than in a survey of the history of women. Initial Western images of Indian women tended to focus on practices exotic to Westerners, such as physical seclusion (purdah) and the ritual self-immolation of Hindu widows (sati). Purdah and sati were customs associated primarily with north India and particular classes but came to be considered typical of all Indian women, who were reduced to one undifferentiated category. Some Indian nationalists reacted with theories of a golden age for Indian women before the arrival of either Muslim or British imperialists. Recent scholarship on women in South Asia has analyzed the manner in which class, religion, caste, ethnicity, and colonial political and economic structures have influenced the condition of women. There have also been efforts to understand how South Asian women themselves view their options and positions (R. Kumar 1994; Forbes 1996).

Yet the work of most scholars on women, while it has recorded complex variations in the lives of South Asian women, has had limited influence on the general writing of South Asian history. Feminist scholars, such as those included in a compelling collection of essays edited by Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (1990), have made women and gender significant categories of analysis for some historians of nineteenth-century India. Most influential in this volume are articles by Uma Chakravati on the erasure of lower-class women from the nationalist reconstruction of ancient Indian history, Lata Mani on the ways in which Indian and British men debated social reforms on the ground of women's bodies in the controversy over sati, and Partha Chatterjee on the nationalist closure of debate on women's status. However, there have been no major shifts in periodization or in categories of South Asian historiography resulting from this research on gender (Ramusack and Burton 1994).

One example of the inertia in historical discourse is the school of subaltern historiography, which focuses on the autonomous politics of subalterns, or the people, as opposed to the elites studied by colonialist and neo-colonialist historians. In the first eight volumes of their collected essays, the subalterns have included only four contributions on Indian women and their representation in fiction and scholarship (R. Guha 1987a; Krishnaraj n.d.; Spivak 1987; Stephens 1989; Tharu 1989; Visweswaran 1996) and two on the concept of domesticity (P. Chatterjee 1992; Chakrabarty 1994). In the ninth volume (Amin and Chakrabarty 1996), there is change; the majority of the essays now include women and/or gender as categories of analysis. In this volume Kamala Visweswaran has noted how the subaltern project has previously subsumed gender under the categories of caste and class, named women as a social group distinctive from subalterns who are presumed to be male, or denied women their agency when confining them to the domestic sphere (1996). Thus the historiography of women in India is alive and well but still struggling for recognition and incorporation into the myriad patterns of Indian history.

Although this survey attempts to indicate the diverse situations of women in South Asia, it too makes regrettable compromises because available scholarship deals primarily, though certainly not exclusively, with north India, the social frameworks associated with Hinduism and Islam, and the colonial and post-colonial periods. There are three readily apparent compromises: there is more coverage of north rather than south India; there is disproportionate attention to the period from 1800 on; and there is no coverage of Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Tibet because of spatial constraints.

INDUS VALLEY CIVILIZATION, 2500–1700 B.C.E.

The archeological remains of the Indus Valley civilization were first unearthed during the 1920s and are still being excavated. This incomplete record and the difficulty of deciphering the Indus script, which is available only in short texts, has limited the information that we have on women or on many aspects of social and intellectual life during this period. From the material remains that have been dated from 2500 to 1700 B.C.E., archaeologists have argued for the prevalence of fertility goddesses based on figurines with full breasts and hips — an ideal of female beauty and movement that influenced the Indian classical dance tradition, which in modern times is preserved in the bharatnatayam school with its emphasis on delicate movements and the use of mime — and a delight in jewelry as personal adornment that continues into the present era.

ARYANS AND THE VEDIC AGE, 1700–500 B.C.E.

The arrival of the Aryans during the centuries after 2000 B.C.E. represented the displacement of an agriculturally based, literate society by one whose economy was based on cattle herding. In Western historiography the most distinctive institutions of the Aryans were their social organization and their religious hymns. The importance of the Vedas as the religious expression and historical record of the Aryans is indicated by the frequent designation of this era as the Vedic period.

Aryan society had three main divisions — priests, warriors, and commoners — and provided the basic outline for what Westerners, first the Portuguese and then the British, described as the caste system. As it evolved over millennia, the Aryan social framework came to include four broad categories known as varna, which means "color." The brahmans, who were priests and teachers, came to be acknowledged as having the primary position. The kshatriya, warriors and administrators, cooperated with the brahmans in the organization and administration of political structures and cultural institutions and were acknowledged to be equal to brahmans, or second only to them. The vaishya — merchants, artisans, and eventually cultivators — were third. These three divisions, which the Portuguese labelled casta (breed), traced their origin to Aryan society and claimed status as the twiceborn or clean castes. As such they enjoyed a physical birth and a later ritual birth when they donned the sacred thread that signified their entrance into adulthood and religious learning. The fourth varna, labelled sudra, were the servants of the three higher varna and probably the indigenous people conquered by the Aryans. Below the four varna were the "untouchables," relegated to occupations considered physically demeaning and spiritually polluting, which generally meant anything dealing with human emissions and death. This division had its own hierarchy that ranged from landless agricultural laborers at the top to midwives, who directly handled the polluting afterbirth substances, at the bottom. Each varna was divided into caste groups that claimed descent from a mythic founder, and each caste group was further subdivided into jati that formed the endogamous unit within which one married. Within a jati, men and women were born into a gotra or specific endogamous lineage. These categories were not immutable and frequently reflected geographical and ethnic variations. Mobility within the structure also occurred through ritual, political, and economic interactions among jatis or other groups.

Indian historians commonly view the Vedic period, which extended from about 1500 to 700 B.C.E., as the heart of the golden age of Indian culture. It was an era of territorial expansion as the semi-nomadic, cattle-herding Aryans moved from northwestern India into the fertile Gangetic plain and then gradually southward into the jungly recesses of central India. The Aryans also began to cultivate cereal grains and to use wooden and later iron plows to work the soil. There were economic surpluses to support a priestly class who produced the Vedas, four major collections of religious hymns, that they then transmitted orally for centuries.

But what was the condition of women during the Vedic period?

Prior to the 1980s, many historians of ancient India, both Indian and Western, concluded that the position of women in Vedic India was "fairly satisfactory" (Altekar 1978: 338), but they tended to treat the condition of women in a topical manner that did not pay much attention to continuity and change through chronological periods. Since they were transmitted orally, the Vedas, the main source of information for these scholars, did not provide a firm temporal context. Historians of religion sometimes reach opposing conclusions about the religious activities of women. Wendy O'Flaherty has characterized the Rig Veda — the earliest collection of Aryan religious hymns, dating from about 1300 to 1000 B.C.E. — as "a book by men about male concerns in a world dominated by men [, and] one of these concerns is women." O'Flaherty divides the hymns about women into conversation hymns and marriage hymns. Both types are concerned with sexual rejection of the female by the male, but the marriage hymns end happily whereas the conversation ones frequently do not (O'Flaherty 1981). Julia Leslie thinks that some Vedas were composed by women who performed sacrifices to the Aryan gods and probably wore the sacred thread that signified their knowledge of the Vedas and participation in sacrifice, the key religious act of the Aryans. She argues that three of the most notable hymns composed by women are Ghosa (Rig Veda [RV] X, 39 and 40), Apala (RV VIII, 80), and Visvavara (RV V, 28). Apala sacrificed to Indra, the god of storms and monsoons, telling him, "Drink thou this Soma [a still-unidentified ritual liquid which may be translated literally as "moon juice"] pressed with teeth, accompanied with grain and curds, with cake of meal and song of praise." Visvavara offered sacrifice to Agni, the fire god and a major rival of Indra, pouring oil on the fire and chanting, "Thy glory, Agni, I Adore, Kindled, exalted in thy strength" (Leslie 1983: 91-92). Thus the evidence is mixed on the status of women in Vedic religious practice (Upadhyaya 1974).

Recently Giti Thadani has argued that patriarchal interpretations of the Vedas have obscured the existence of dual feminine principles that reflect non-generative sexual relationships and the shift from woman-focused to male-dominated cosmologies. This transformation is encapsulated in the rape of Usha, the goddess of dawn and light, by the warrior god, Indra, who eventually slays his enemy, Vitra, and his enemy's mother. Thadani also reinterprets the sexual relationship between Urvashi, a goddess associated with the moon and mares, and the human Pururvas as signifying that lesbian feminine desire brings immortality while heterosexual relationships are progenitive and lead to mortality (Thadani 1996). Thadani then delineates the evolution of legal and social constraints on female sexuality, especially female sexual desire for and pleasure with other women.

The later Vedic period, dated from the eighth century B.C.E. onward, witnessed a series of religious challenges to the Vedic emphasis on sacrifice and the growing dominance of brahmans. These revolts paralleled key economic changes in Aryan society. After a gradual shift to agriculture, Aryans, who increasingly intermarried with indigenous peoples, had the surplus wealth to support cities and new forms of political organization. Religious activity shifted from the worship of many gods to the contemplation of one underlying principle or truth and an emphasis on personal self-control. The Upanishads, which were collections of treatises composed by professional philosophers between 700 and 500 B.C.E., explored metaphysical issues and introduced the concepts of karma (that actions have consequences) and transmigration (that essences or souls move through many existences). By the sixth century B.C.E., Buddhism and Jainism provided heterodox means of achieving release from the cycle of transmigration through individuals following the correct life.

All of these traditions allowed for religious participation by women. In the first Upanishad (the Brhadaranyaka), Gargi Vacaknavi, a woman who represents the tradition of Vedic scholarship among women, debated publicly at the court of King Janaka around 600 B.C.E. Her bold questioning of the concept of negative regression pushed a male counterpart to enunciate the basic doctrine that the ultimate principle or supreme Brahman may be defined only by negatives (Findly 1985). In Jainism women were allowed to pursue the monastic life that was considered the preferred life-style. The two major Jain sects, however, had differing views on whether women could attain mokshaf release from the cycle of transmigration. The Digambara monks, who argued that total renunciation included nakedness, held that women could not achieve moksha; the Svetambaras, who viewed renunciation as an interior process or condition, saw such external factors as the absence of clothes as irrelevant and allowed that women might reach moksha. Both sects agreed that women were not to accept nudity as a monastic practice (Jaini 1990).

The Buddha sanctioned the establishment of Buddhist nunneries, although reputedly with reluctance and after imposing eight special rules that subordinated nuns of any age to male monks. Reinforcing this unequal status, the Buddha reportedly said that his doctrine would last only half as long in India since he permitted the ordination of women. Within the Theravada or orthodox Buddhist tradition that dominated in India, Buddhist nuns were known as teachers of Buddha's dharma to other women and are given credit for composing a text known as the Therigatha or The Psalms of the Sisters (Gross 1993; Horner 1975; Willis 1985). But Buddhist laywomen were perhaps more honored. Both queens (such as the unnamed aunt of Virpurisadata, an Ikshvaku king in the Andhra region of south India during the early third century C.E.) and courtesans (such as Ambapali) were celebrated for the construction of stupas that housed Buddhist relics, temples, and monasteries. Nancy Falk has attributed this seeming Buddhist preference for laywomen over nuns to the Buddhist effort to reconcile itself with the indigenous Hindu dharma that emphasized women's role as childbearers. Thus laywomen fulfilled their basic dharma as mothers and still benefited the Buddhist community through their patronage (Falk 1980).

During the last centuries of the pre-Christian era, the more orthodox Vedic tradition associated with the brahmans began to impose restrictions on women as well as lower social groups (Jamison 1996). The sacrificial tradition had become more complex, and knowledge of the Vedas and their ancillary literature was increasingly limited to male brahmans. There was a growing social differentiation as the four major varna of Hindu society became more bounded; intermarriage across varna boundaries was proscribed; and a hierarchy with brahmans at the top evolved. By the late Vedic period women were gradually assigned the same low status as sudras, forbidden to wear the sacred thread, and prohibited from autonomous participation in sacrificial rituals. In an intensive analysis of Vedic texts on srauta — sacrificial rituals that involved offerings of food (including ghee, or clarified butter) and flowers on auspicious occasions, such as the occurrence of the new and full moons — Frederick Smith has delineated the reduction of the role of the wife of the male sacrificer. This role was considered necessary for the sacrifice to be efficacious for the generation of children, the continuation of the cosmos, and the spiritual release of the sacrificer and his wife. The sacrificer's wife participated only in connection with male officiants and performed subsidiary functions that resembled household tasks such as caring for implements that the husband alone used. Increasingly, however, male attendants displaced her at critical moments in the ritual, especially those that celebrated her sexuality and procreative powers ( Smith 1991). Werner Menski claims that a shift of marriage rituals, from a family-dominated ceremony to one gradually conducted by a priest who transforms the polluting substance of the bride's blood and its potentially destructive attributes into auspiciousness, is another indication of changing conceptions of women (Menski 1991).

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Women in Asia by Barbara N. Ramusack, Sharon Sievers. Copyright © 1999 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

SERIES EDITORS' PREFACE, ix,
AUTHORS' PREFACE, xiii,
SERIES EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Conceptualizing the History of Women in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa CHERYL JOHNSON-ODIM AND MARGARET STROBEL, xvii,
Part I: Women in South and Southeast Asia Barbara N. Ramusack,
GLOSSARY, 3,
MAPS, 7,
CHRONOLOGY, 13,
WOMEN IN SOUTH ASIA, 15,
WOMEN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, 77,
SOURCES, 109,
Part II: Women in East Asia Sharon Sievers,
GLOSSARY, 145,
MAPS, 151,
CHRONOLOGY, 155,
WOMEN IN CHINA, JAPAN, AND KOREA, 157,
SOURCES, 243,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS, 255,
INDEX, 257,