Hindu Women: The Rites of Passage
by Penelope Stickney
REL 600
Professor Brian Wilson
April 19, 2000
Hindu Women: The Rites of Passage
To the casual observer, the countryside of India is barren with dull flat green fields or brown dust or mud. Amidst the sun drenched scenery are small clumps of trees, slow muddy rivers, the dull white of humped cattle, or tiny homes and shops all drab with dust, rust, and water stains. Within the old cities the streets are paths labyrinthed among rain-browned official buildings. People are jammed into the streets and half-naked children, suffering from extreme poverty and hunger, share space with the ambling sacred cows. Without homes, whole families live and die in the open. The malnourished elderly with deeply lined faces from toil and hard work endure beside emaciated children and animals. Silhouetted in nature, the country moves through extreme natural crises of famine, flood, and drought.
This face of India takes a new look when its life is understood through different eyes. It is then that the daily activity, though apparently subdued and quiet, exhibits energetic vitality and the extremes of humanity are not ignored but respected as part of natural, cyclical living. Women in many-hued saris and men in pants and pastel shirts splash color on the dignity of labor and work. Rather than apathetic, India explores the vicissitude of life. The caste system, once established as a means to govern life, has mutated, and although a disparity of privilege is still evoked by pervasive attitudes toward some, women are considered equal to men in education, marriage, property rights, and law. Women in India have gained in status and control of their personal lives, yet the ideal symbolic nature of womanhood, first taught through the classical literature and worship of female gods remains intricately woven into the patterns of social order and the infinite within the self. However, this ideal paved the way for the breakdown of the Indian caste system and the result of women's independence.
Tracing the origins of India as a nation enables an understanding of the roots of
Hinduism, yet traditional Indian point of view differs from the Western historians' standard
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view. Western historians teach an Aryan invasion theory stating that the highly organized
cultures of the Indus Valley and the villages in other parts of the subcontinent were gradually overrun by nomadic invaders from outside India. The original civilization, extending from about 2500 BCE to the Indio-European migrations at around 2000-1500 BCE, show remnants of technologically advanced cities, the plumbing and aqueducts equaled only by the ancient Romans and the Mesopotamians of the modern world. While these early cities contained no obvious temples, an elaborate bathing system uncovered by archeologists suggests ritual purification. "Enigmatic religious motifs appear on many of the seals and small art objects that have been found; these suggest a mother goddess..., phallic gods, sacred bulls, and...a deity in perhaps a yogic meditation posture" ( Ellwood and McGraw 61). But by 1900-1500 BCE, the Indus Valley civilization experienced its decline and the cities fell into ruins at the hands of the Aryan cow herders who have been ascribed with the early roots of Hinduism, and through the Laws of Manu (c. 100 CE), helped to establish the system of caste.
Conversely, the Hindu nationalists reject this theory as they refuse to believe that their religion is foreign-born, but rather the product of an indigenous people, who first received the Vedas in the oral tradition c.8000-6000 BCE (Fisher 82-83). The extent of this debate rests in the fact that "[b]efore the first millennium CE there is no historiography in the south Asian cultural region and texts are not dated" (Flood 20). This leaves dating of the found texts problematic, as ones with prior reference must be placed in sequential order, but precise dating remains impossible. Also, "[o]ne of the clichés about Hinduism has been that it is ahistorical and sees time as cyclical rather than lineal, which has militated against the keeping of historical records....The earliest writing of history in the South Asian region occurs in the fourth century CE with the chronicles written by Sri Lankan Buddhist monks. Myths and genealogies have been
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recorded primarily in the Hindu Epics and texts called Puranas, reaching their present form in the mid first millennium CE." (20-21)
In spite of the vagueness of its origins and antiquity, the sacred hymns of the Vedas can be examined. These were written in four parts that appear to have been developed over time. The earliest is the Samhitas, hymns of praise in worship of deities. These were followed by the Brahmanas which include directions about performances of the ritual sacrifices to the deities. The third part of the Vedas, the Aranyakas or "forest treatises," include reclusive meditations, and the latest of the Vedas, the Upanishads, contain the teachings from highly spiritualized masters and explain the experience of personal transformation from participating in the rituals. Each of the Vedas are thought to be god-breathed and recorded by the sages who first heard their messages, although they were not initially committed to writing but transferred through careful study in the oral tradition.
In the earliest Vedic scripture, the Rig Veda, the establishment of the family as the central component of religious worship is found. In this text women are highly revered in the social structure as wives and mothers and are brought into the center of worship. Believing that the family is blessed as a collective, many families, even in the current era, keep their worship out of the temple and at home, where the mother remains attentive to the family ritual of meditation.
With the appearance of the Brahmanas, the purity of the Vedas was kept by the Brahmins or priests, who became established as a peculiar class of people assigned to keeping the sacrificial rites. The focus of their study was on Brahma as the god of creation, whose words and sacrifice made the world, and they came to believe that by their words and sacrifices the gods could be controlled. "Thus, the sacrifices controlled the gods, and the brahmin priests controlled the sacrifice, becoming like higher gods
themselves....For the sacrifice was nothing less than "making the world" and
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calling into life the gods who rule over it; the purpose then was to meditate on
what the cosmos is like and to make adjustments to it in such a way as to keep it on course or direct its power in desired destinations." (Ellwood and McGraw
65-66)
The Brahmins retained the authority of class as those who became priests were born into that service. "It is a characteristic of class-organized societies that rights of ownership are the prerogative of minority groups which form privileged elite. The capacity of the upper-class minority to 'exploit' the services of the lower-class majority is critically dependent upon the fact that the members of the underprivileged group must compete among themselves for the favors of the elite" (Leach 5-6). The Brahmins then became the highest class and maintained superiority of the caste leadership even though those they served were from the wealthy caste. Because it was expected of the Brahmins to become well educated in the techniques and rituals, especially in public worship, gender and purpose became the focus of education. Most women of the upper caste lost their privilege to become educated, and some significant focus of family worship shifted from mother leadership.
For centuries the teachings of the Vedas were kept from the lower or working caste, and a great majority of the Indians, illiterate and provincial, were restricted from hearing the teachings directly. Eventually it was the teaching of the fourth part of the Vedas that opened opportunity for all to hear the message. The Upanishads tells that a person who finds his true Self, OM or AUM, experiences a sense of oneness with the universe-home and becomes a complete human being, understanding the inner delights and occult power of the inner world while living and working in the outer world. With this knowledge, a new mission becomes his, that of walking the world as a "holy man" and spreading his wisdom to the inhabitants of the other villages. Among these early teachers from the sixth
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century BCE was the founder of the Jain religion, still practiced in India today, and
Siddhartha Gautama, called Buddha.
In conjecture, Rudolf Otto wrote, "the liberation and salvation motif...was paralleled in Indian thought, when the Sankhya doctrine became detached from the Upanishad atmosphere. It propounded liberative 'knowledge', the spirit withdrawing from the realm of nature into serenity and inaction" (455). Here Otto describes the technique of spiritual concentration in the practice of Yoga, as it permits its users to receive balance, purity, wisdom, and peacefulness of mind. The practice of the Upanishads brought "[r]eligious emotion and the experience of salvation, liberation, the sense of ultimate release, [and] the continuance in a state of religious experience...into being" (452). These life attitudes encouraged recognition in the commonality of existence, especially among the lower caste, who found it necessary to share working responsibilities for the purpose of survival. They also paved the way for women to receive individual equality, when society became influenced by Gandhian thinking.
"[I]n India,...the oldest teachings held that human beings were destined to live without hope in a world that passed through immense cycles of decay and decline until it was finally destroyed and again remade. The reaction to this deeply pessimistic view eventually came in the form of the classic Eastern version of eternal return--the doctrine of rebirth, or reincarnation. We find it chiefly in the famous Hindu Upanishads....Seeing humanity as hopelessly enslaved by these endless cycles of nature, these teachers insisted that a path could be found to a purely spiritual release from history's triviality and terrors. They announced that the soul, or true self, could free itself from the body, which is its main tie to history, by struggling patiently through a long series of rebirths until finally a
purely spiritual escape was achieved. [This is] the doctrine of moksha, the soul's
final release from nature and history." (Pals 180)
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Within the classical Hindu tradition, wives worshipped their husbands as personal gods and believed that through sacrificially bringing comfort and beauty to the life of the spouse, the cyclical pattern for their own lives might be broken. The hope of the dutiful wife was that she would either spend her next life as a man or else be blessed with moksha. This was the pure focus of living out her worshipful duty.
The Laws of Manu initially systematized the Hindu society, beginning with the brahmins (priest-scholars), kshatriyas (rulers or warriors), vaishyas (merchants and craftsmen) and shudras (peasants). Metaphorically, each of these groups represent a part of the body: brahmins form the head, kshatriyas the arms, vaishyas represent the thighs, and shudras the feet. Those not included in this system, the harijans or untouchables, make up about twenty percent of the current population of India and rank among the poorest members of society. Gough suggests that the caste system outlines occupations. "Castes in Hindu India are ranked, birth-status groups. The caste...tends to be associated with an occupation. A caste is not a localized group, but comprises small local communities, often several miles apart. Local communities of different castes form administration units as multi-caste villages or towns" (11). Varying degree of caste within same caste communities forms itself superficially, but actually the real division of caste finds its basis in the principle of purity and impurity. One is made impure by contact with another from a lower caste, resulting in the need for ritual purification. This significant, innate attitude maintains separateness, even though the caste system has been legally abolished in modern India.
Edmund Leach, in his approach to the structure of a society, defines caste this way: "In a formal sense, the word 'caste'...should always be taken to have its ethnographic Hindu meaning" (1).
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"Caste conforms to the following criteria:
(1) A caste is endogamous.
(2) There are restrictions on commensality between members of different castes.
(3) There is a hierarchical grading of castes, the best recognized position being that of the Brahman at the top.
(4) In various kinds of context, especially those concerned with food, sex and ritual, a member of a 'high' caste is liable to be 'polluted' by either direct or indirect contact with a member of a 'low' caste.
(5) Castes are very commonly associated with traditional occupations.
(6) A man's caste status is finally determined by the circumstances of his birth, unless he comes to be expelled from his caste for some ritual offense.
(7) The system as a whole is always focused around the prestige accorded to the Brahmans" (Leach 2-3). Although each level meets the criteria for this study, what is most appropriate here is Leach's explanation of support in number four. In food, sex and ritual, a member of one caste may be polluted by a member of a lower caste.
From her work in a Tanjore Hindu village, Kathleen Gough maintains, "The formal
ranking of castes is defined in terms of the belief in ritual purity and pollution;
rules of social distance between castes issue primarily from this belief. Whatever