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Uma Chakravarti Ancient India
Uma Chakravarti Ancient India
Beyond the Altekarian Paradigm: Towards a New Understanding of Gender Relations in Early
Indian History
Author(s): Uma Chakravarti
Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 16, No. 8 (Aug., 1988), pp. 44-52
Published by: Social Scientist
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517507 .
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NOTE
BEYONDTHEALTEKARIANPARADIGM 45
46
SOCIALSCIENTIST
BEYONDTHEALTEKARIANPARADIGM 47
the upper castes did not have access to the public domain by the early
centuries of the Christian era, and that Manu and other law givers
recommended early marriage for girls. Sati itself was associated with
women of the ruling classes, as is evident from the seventh century
account of Harsha's early career. The structure of institutions that
ensured the subordinationof women was complete in all essentialslong
before the Muslims as a religious community had come into being. The
Muslim bogey was a convenient peg to explain the origin of all
oppressive practices. It was particularlyconvenient for those who did
not wish to see the structural framework of institutions that governed
gender relations in early India mainly because it was the same
framework that governed women even in contemporary society. The
term 'patriarchy'was hardly used and even when it did stray into an
occasional historian's writing it was a neutral term, completely
divested of the power factor inherent in it; successfully depoliticized
thus it lost its real import.
The cultural encounter between England and India in the nineteenth
century, which was the context for the emergence of nationalist
historiography,shaped the focus and the thrust of writing on women in
early India. The injury to the Hindu sense of superiority resulting from
the unfavourable comparison between Hindu women and western
women, which was common throughout the cultural encounter, was so
marked that it led frequently to an inversion of the Vincent Smith
syndrome. Vincent Smith's position was a general contempt for
everything Indian. If he was faced with visual and incontrovertible
proof of something worthwhile in Indian culture he would
immediately attribute it to Greek influence. Historians writing on the
position of women in ancient India reversed the argumentby invariably
trying to point out that nowhere else in the ancient world were women
held in such high regard as in the India of 3000 years ago. They
specially revelled in comparisons with Greece and Rome as in the
passage below:
The historian of India who has studied the literature of the
ancient Hindus will have no hesitation in asserting that never in
the most polished days of Greece and Rome were women held in
such high regard in those countries as in India three thousand years
ago.3
Similarly Altekar surveys the condition of women in ancient Greece,
Rome, and Palestine, and then reiterates that the position which
women occupied at the dawn of civilization during the Vedic age was
much better.4
The need of the nationalist historians to resurrect examples of the
lost glory of Indian womanhood has led to a selective focus on certain
aspects of the ancient texts. This has often resulted in a sanitized
interpretationof events, best illustrated by the nationalist rendering of
48
SOCIALSCIENTIST
BEYONDTHEALTEKARIANPARADIGM 49
50 SOCIALSCIENTIST
BEYONDTHE ALTEKARIANPARADIGM 51
unfortunately lost and popular prejudice takes over. Like the ancient
Brahmanicallaw givers he appears to have a horror of Sudra women,
as in this passage:
The introduction of the non-Aryan wife into the Aryan household
is the key [italics mine] to the gradual deterioration of the position
of women. .. The non-Aryan wife with her ignorance of Sanskrit
language and Hindu religion could obviously not enjoy the same
religious privilegesas the Aryan consort [italics mine]. Association
with her must have tended to affect the purity of speech of the
Aryan co-wife as well. Very often the non-Aryan wife may have
been the favourite one of her husband, who may have often
attempted to associate her with his religious sacrifices in
preference to her better educated but less loved Aryan co-wife.
This must have naturally led to grave mistakes and anomalies in
the performance of the ritual which must have shocked the
orthodox priests.... Eventually it was felt that the object could be
gained by declaring the whole class of women to be ineligible for
Vedic studies and religious duties.12
This facile argument was, in Altekar's view, the key factor in the
decline of the status of women. Altekar is completely obtuse to other
historical explanations. The possibility that the Sudra woman, whom
he regards as a threat, could have contributed to a more dynamic and
active kind of womanhood for Hindu society would not even occur to
Altekar because his focus is on Aryan women (regarded then as the
progenitorsof the upper caste women of Hindu society) and in his racist
view Sudrawomen counted for nothing. The most importantconsequence
of Altekar's limited repertoire of biological and psychological
explanations was that the logic of the distorted social relations
between men and women is completely obscured. The kind of
explanations offered by Altekar might appear to be astoundingly
trivial to us today but it is important to remember that, by and large,
nationalist historians were content to restrict historical explanations
to cultural factors while writing about ancient India. This was in
contrast to their focus on economic and social factors while discussing
British rule in India.
In summing up nationalisthistoriographyon women in early India we
might draw attention to the fact that the Altekarian paradigm,
though limiting and biased, continues to nevertheless influence and
even dominate historical writing. In essence what emerges from the
mass of detail he accumulated is the construction of a picture of the
idyllic condition of women in the Vedic age. It is a picture which now
pervades the collective consciousness of the upper castes in India and
has virtually crippled the emergence of a more analytically rigorous
study of gender relations in ancient India. There is thus an urgent need
to move forward and rewrite history, a history that does justice to
52 SOCIALSCIENTIST
UMA CHAKRAVARTI
Department of History
Miranda House, Delhi University