IB World Religions 4.2.4. Gender and Ritual: Women's Roles, Marriage and the Laws of Manu Notes

4.2.4. Gender and Ritual: Women's Roles, Marriage and the Laws of Manu

Purity rules and worship

1. Some purity rules apply to everyone. Achamana, the sipping of water three times from the palm, and a bath before worship are expected of men and women alike, and a woman performing the household puja does both.
2. Other rules apply to women in particular. In many Hindu households a woman does not enter the shrine room or the kitchen while menstruating, and does not touch the murti or prepare what will be offered.
3. Hindus explain the same rule in different ways. Some describe the state as a temporary ritual impurity like those caused by birth or death, while others present it as a period of rest during which a woman is released from ritual duties.
4. Observance is extremely uneven. Some families keep the rules strictly, many keep parts of them, and many urban and diaspora households keep none of them, so that grandmother, mother and daughter in one family may each do something different.
5. Temple rules have become a matter of public argument. The Sabarimala shrine in Kerala barred women of menstruating age until the Indian Supreme Court ruled the ban unconstitutional in 2018, and the ruling was met by large protests both from women who supported it and from women who opposed it.
6. No general rule about Hindu women and temples holds. Some shrines are served largely by women, some rites are performed only by women, and the practice of one district can be reversed in the next.

Women's ritual at home

1. Most Hindu ritual happens at home, and in most households it is a woman who performs the daily puja. She lights the lamp, offers water and flowers, and cooks the food that will be offered and returned as prasad.
2. The threshold is marked each morning with a drawn pattern, called kolam in Tamil Nadu and rangoli elsewhere. Hindus describe it as a welcome to the deity and to guests, and it is redrawn daily.
3. A vrata is a vow, usually involving a fast, undertaken for a stated purpose. Many though not all vratas are kept by women, for the welfare of the family, the long life of a husband, or the birth of a child.
4. Named vratas differ by region. Karva Chauth is kept by married women across the north, Vat Savitri in the west, Teej in Rajasthan and Nepal, and Varalakshmi Vratam in the south.
5. Women are the main transmitters of household ritual. Children learn the family's mantras, festival foods and observances from mothers and grandmothers, and a bride commonly brings her natal family's customs into her husband's household.
6. Marital status carries ritual weight. A sumangali, a married woman whose husband is living, holds an honoured place in weddings and other auspicious rites, and the same convention has often excluded widows from those roles.

Samskaras and gender

1. The samskaras are performed for both sexes, but the classical texts assign more of them, and the more elaborate ones, to boys. The pattern is one of unequal emphasis rather than of exclusion.
2. The clearest instance is upanayana. It was traditionally performed for boys of the twice-born varnas, so girls in most communities received neither the sacred thread, nor the Gayatri mantra, nor a formal training in the Veda.
3. Older texts nevertheless record learned women. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad has Gargi publicly questioning the sage Yajnavalkya, the tradition remembers Maitreyi for the same reason, and the word brahmavadini names a woman devoted to sacred study.
4. The later position is stated by the Laws of Manu, which say that for a girl marriage takes the place of initiation, service to her husband takes the place of study in a teacher's house, and household work takes the place of the fire ritual.
5. Reform movements reopened the question. The Arya Samaj has performed upanayana for girls since the nineteenth century, some contemporary families do the same, and a growing number of girls are taught the Gayatri mantra at home.
6. Practice at the family level is changing quietly. Many households now hold identical birth, naming and first-feeding rites for daughters and sons, and Hindu reformers have criticised the older asymmetry from within the tradition.

Marriage, dowry and widowhood

1. Marriage is arranged by the two families in most Hindu communities, with the couple's consent sought and, increasingly, a veto exercised. Families match jati, region, language, education and horoscopes, and marriage within the same gotra (patrilineal clan) is avoided.
2. A marriage the couple themselves initiate is commonly called a "love marriage", and the phrase marks it as the exception. Surveys of Indian households continue to report arranged matches as the large majority, with love marriages more common in cities and in the diaspora.
3. Indian law has run ahead of custom here. The Special Marriage Act of 1954 allows marriage across religion and caste without either party converting, though families in many communities still discourage such matches.
4. The wedding rite itself is gendered in its central act. Kanyadana, the father's giving of the daughter, treats the bride as passing from one household to another, and after marriage she commonly takes on her husband's family deity as well as his home.
5. Dowry must be distinguished from stridhana. Stridhana is property given to a bride that Hindu tradition treats as her own, whereas the dowry demanded from a bride's family by the groom's is a practice the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 made illegal and which nonetheless continues in many communities.
6. Widowhood has carried heavy ritual restrictions in parts of Hindu society. In communities that keep them a widow may wear undyed cloth, remove her ornaments and be kept away from auspicious ceremonies, though many communities never observed such rules and many families have abandoned them.
7. Remarriage and sati mark the two ends of the argument. The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856 legalised remarriage, which is now unremarkable in much of India, while widow burning, always rare and regionally confined, was outlawed in 1829 and again by statute in 1987 after a widely reported case in Rajasthan.

The Laws of Manu

1. The Laws of Manu, or Manusmriti, is a smriti text usually dated between roughly the second century BCE and the third century CE. It sets out duties by varna, by stage of life and by gender, and is the best known of the dharma texts.
2. Its status has always been advisory rather than legislative. Hinduism has no body able to enact law for all Hindus, and regional and caste custom often prevailed over what the text prescribed.
3. Two of its verses are quoted constantly, in opposite directions. One states that a woman should be guarded by her father in childhood, her husband in youth and her sons in old age, and is never fit for independence.
4. The other states that where women are honoured the gods are pleased, and that where they are not honoured no rite bears fruit. Scholars point out that the text is a composite work and that its internal inconsistencies are real rather than apparent.
5. British colonial courts gave the text an authority it had not previously held. Administrators treated translated dharma texts as a code of "Hindu law" to be applied in litigation, which fixed as legal rules what had been one voice among many.
6. Modern Indian statute has replaced it. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 and the Hindu Succession Act of 1956, amended in 2005 to give daughters equal rights in ancestral property, now govern these matters.
7. The text also became a target for reformers. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the jurist who later chaired the drafting of India's constitution, publicly burned a copy in 1927 as a protest against the social order it prescribed.

Female deities and gurus

1. Goddess worship stands at the centre of Hindu ritual rather than at its edge. Durga, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kali and Parvati receive daily puja in millions of households, and Shakta traditions worship the goddess as the supreme reality.
2. Festivals put goddesses at the front of public ritual. Navaratri and Durga Puja are built around the goddess, and the vratas women keep are very often addressed to a female deity.
3. Scholars who study Hindu communities caution against reading social conclusions straight off this. Reverence for goddesses in ritual has not translated automatically into ritual authority for women, and Hindus themselves debate the gap.
4. Temple priesthood has been the sharpest instance. Most temple pujaris have been men, and in many temples the role has been hereditary within particular families.
5. That is changing in specific places. Training programmes in Pune have taught women to perform weddings and household rites since the 1970s, some temples in India and the diaspora have appointed women priests, and women purohits are now hired for family ceremonies.
6. Female religious teachers have a long history and a visible present. Anandamayi Ma and Mata Amritanandamayi, known to followers as Amma, have led large movements, and the Brahma Kumaris have been headed by women since their foundation.