History of India 1

HISTORY

Subject : History
(For under graduate student)

Paper No. : Paper - II

History of India

Topic No. & Title : Topic - 10

Early Medieval Social Structure

Lecture No. & Title : Lecture - 2

Gender relations in early
medieval Indian society

Script

Gender relations in early medieval Indian society

Any discussion on gender relations in early Indian history

has to start with the Altekar paradigm, as that perhaps
provided the starting point of debate on the subject. Writing
in a nationalistic context Altekar’s portrayal of woman in
The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization has been
heavily critiqued by contemporary and later scholars. In this
seminal work which was published in 1938 Altekar viewed
women as mere passive recipients, their ‘status’ and
History of India 2

‘position’ changing only in relation to circumstances

controlled by a patriarchal ideology. In other words, they
were not seen as actively participating in historical
processes. Woman and family—the latter being seen as the
institution which defined her position in society—were seen
as essentially monolithic entities, and any variation within
them was not explored. In recent years these are some of
the chief issues which have triggered a vast number of
studies on gender relations; I am going to touch upon some
of these in my discussion on the early medieval period.

B.N.S. Yadav almost echoes similar views as that of Altekar,

and so does Ranabir Chakravarti. Both situate ‘the position’
of ‘woman’ in a rigid patriarchal set up, following Altekar in
generating a homogenized understanding of woman and
family. Chakravarti argues that it is difficult to find ‘a
prominent and honourable position for women’ within an
overall patriarchal framework and a jati-varna order. There
was little scope for their formal or vocational education, at
least among the elite sections. The ideal in the kali age (as
the early medieval period was referred to in many works)
was that of the sadyovadhu (newly married). There was a
History of India 3

growing emphasis among the lawgivers on lowering the age

of marriage of girls, here Yadav is ably supported by
Chakravarti in their reading of the sources. The latter
mentions that Medatithi, the ninth century commentator on
Manu’s Dharmashastra, was in favour of marrying off the
girl at the nagnika or pre-puberty stage. The idea of
svavarna or same-caste marriages was lauded, while
adharma types of marriages like raksasa and gandharva
were deplored as they were believed to have given rise to
the innumerable antyaja groups. However there were
several exceptions to this, which both Yadav and
Chakravarti mention. Chakrabarti further adds that in the
Nagarakhanda section of the Skandapurana two hitherto
unknown forms of marriages were included, over and above
the eight well-known ones, the pratibha and the ghatana.
This possibly points to a regional variation of the institution
as the Nagarakhanda section was composed in western
India.

Marriage was considered to be indissoluble in legal

literature, there existed a sastric injunction on divorce and
nullity excepting under exceptional circumstances of loss,
History of India 4

death, impotency and renunciation of the husband. This

brings us to the question of remarriage of widows. The term
punarbhu appears in legal literature meaning a remarried
widow, however this could have given rise to complications
in the upper strata of society, according to Chakravarti, as
this would have implied transference of the family property
to the family of the new husband, therefore this was
severely reprobated by the theorists. The lower jatis are
unlikely to have observed any restriction on this. The
practice of niyoga, i.e., the cohabitation of a sonless widow
with her brother-in-law for a male progeny was also not
favoured much in a situation of growing complexity in
property laws and problems associated with the divisibility
of the joint family property.

At this juncture we need to turn to the proprietary rights of

women, if there existed any in early medieval society. We
come across two notions of property rights during this
period. According to Jimutavahans’s Dayabhaga prevalent
in Bengal and northern India the son could not demand a
partition of the landed property from the father who was
regarded as the paterfamilias. Yadav interprets this as a
History of India 5

support for the joint family system. On the other hand

Vijnanesvara’s Mitaksara, a commentary on the
Yajnavalkyasmrti lays down that the son could demand a
partition of the ancestral assets from the father. Yadav
believes that this could be indicative of the weakening of
the familial and kinship ties. In terms of proprietary rights
of women Jimutavahana allowed every right to the woman
to give, sell or enjoy independently her Stridhan. Stridhan
refers to gifts that she obtains as a maiden, or at marriage,
or after marriage from her parents or from her husband and
her family (except immovable property). Jimutavahana also
states that if the owner of the stridhana does not bestow
her property at her own will to her chosen person (s), the
property will devolve equally upon the sons and the
unmarried daughters. Although there are some differences
between this position and that of Vijnanesvara, it is clear
that stridhana is regarded by both authorities as something
over which a woman could exercise her rightful claims.
Incidentally stridhana never meant a direct inheritance of
her father’s property, thus there were no anomalies about
it. But much ambivalence and contradiction is noticed in the
sastras regarding a woman’s natural right to succeed her
History of India 6

father’s property directly, which happened automatically in

the case of her brother’s.

The question of a daughter’s inheritance could arise only

when the father was sonless. But even here the Smrtis and
their commentaries were not unanimous. Katyana, an
important authority of this period allows a sonless widow to
become the sole owner of her husband’s property, but this
stand is not maintained in all the Smrtis. The Dayabhaga
holds that the widow of a sonless member of a joint family
is entitled to have a share of the property while Mitaksara
allows absolute ownership of the widow over the movable
property of her deceased husband. The Smrticandrika
recognized women’s right to inherit property of her male
relations, it also laid down that the widow, if chaste and
sonless could inherit the entire estate of her dead husband.

Therefore, to sum up, a woman’s/widow’s natural rights to

her father’s or husband’s property was fraught with
contradictions, in most cases these were likely to have been
severely restricted. There was no definitive or uniform code,
these rights varied from region to region, depending on
History of India 7

whether local usage subscribed to Mitaksara or Dayabhaga.

The legal texts are unanimous about the woman’s
unquestioned claim over her stridhan.

While the question of a woman’s subjection to a patriarchal

ideology was perhaps a truism in some aspects, recent
studies are cautioning us about a homogenized
understanding. Kumkum Roy (1999) points to two things,
first, that there are multiple definitions of ‘woman’, and,
second, there are regional variations in gender relations.

Here, one could do well to draw examples from the south.

Vijaya Ramaswamy has drawn our attention to the fact that
the texts on the basis of which many conclusions on gender
relations were drawn by earlier scholars in South India were
essentially texts composed by male elite members of
society in the early medieval period. Most of these canonical
texts laud the birth of a male child; exclude women from
acquiring formal education; prescribe pre-puberty
marriage; abound in references to women being sold,
bartered or made use of; extol Sati; give details of the
sufferings of socially out cast widows. These sources, argue
History of India 8

Ramaswamy, reflect only the lives of the upper caste or

Sanskritised social groups. They also give rich accounts of
the Devaradiyar or the women who performed services in
the temple, including singing and dancing before the deity.
The texts, supported by some inscriptional sources throw
light on the high status of these women that deteriorated in
the late-medieval times with the loss of royal patronage and
decline in temple-building.

For information about women belonging to the grass roots

one has to explore ‘alternative’ sources in folk traditions,
especially folk songs, occasional depiction in sculpture and
literary sources like the composition of the seventh century
woman saint Andal in her Tiruppavai. These highlight
diverse categories of evidence related to several
marginalized groups. Women’s participation in agricultural
activities, in pastoral economy, in domestic industries like
spinning, washing and bleaching cloth, in liquid distilling, in
pot making, gold smithy, in basket weaving and mat
making are mentioned as well as their presence in the
unorganized sector where they worked for daily wages in
History of India 9

temples and at construction sites. Parisam or bride price

and divorce were prevalent among the lower castes/classes.

Would such involvement of women in different professions

suggest any kind of economic self-sufficiency?
Ramaswamy believes that this picture is highly fragmented
and complex. The folksongs show the patriarchal
stranglehold over property, possibly the lower caste/class
women suffered wage discrimination as well as
economic/property-related discrimination. Inscriptional
evidence from Tamilnadu refers to several kinds of property
transactions involving dowager queens, queens and
princesses of the imperial dynasties and the old temple
dancers. These transactions cover gifts to temples, sales,
and assignment of property and/or land revenues to the
temple dancers for their services. The temple was the focus
of social and economic life of the locality, and therefore was
the beneficiary of major patronage from the royal houses.
Women of the royal houses were actively involved in the
construction and maintenance of the temples. Again, the
extent to which women could exercise her rights depended
on local usages. Among the well-to-do land was given as
History of India 10

stridhanam to the daughter on her marriage. However,

there are instances when widows were forced to sell their
land by their male relatives, as seen from a thirteenth
century inscription. While the rights of the women of the
royal family were not questioned, these were not equally
accepted or protected among the middle classes.

Shifting from proprietary rights to the public domain we see

that there are representations of women as militant
warriors like Rudramma Devi belonging to the Kakatiya
dynasty of Warangal in modern Andhra Pradesh, who ruled
for twenty seven years (1262-89 AD). Rajatarangini informs
us of similar instances of ruling queens in 10 th century
Kashmir while the Orissa Bhaumakara dynasty of the ninth
to the eleventh centuries also produced at least six female
rulers. Although belonging to different regional traditions
these examples highlight how certain classes of women
created a space for themselves within a patriarchal
structure, assuming roles, traditionally considered a male
reserve. This phenomenon has been recently explained by
Cynthia Talbot in terms of kinship relations. In all three
regions women could assume this role as this was the only
History of India 11

option seen to ensure the retention of the throne within the

immediate kin group. This surely contradicts the patrilineal
model of kingship prescribed in the Brahmanical law books.

There are other areas of gender relations which need to be

addressed to, according to Roy (1999) and which have
been, too, in recent years, like reproduction. Roy has
shown, on the basis of brahmanical literature how biological
reproduction was structured where the wife was constructed
as only an instrument of procreation which was ritualized
through a variety of rituals. In her more recent writings Roy
has addressed various issues connected with biological
reproduction in a larger context.

This obviously brings us to the question of sexuality and to

what extent it was determined solely by the institution of
marriage. Despite the lawgivers’ prescription of marriages
in the pre-puberty stage for the girl, the image of an
unmarried woman in the full bloom of her youth continued
to occur in literary texts which on many occasions coincided
with the image of a ganika or a prostitute. Prostitution as
an institution has attracted considerable attention in recent
History of India 12

years. While we look at the institution per se we would also

like to understand the extent to which a prostitute could be
seen as a victim of the patriarchal system in early medieval
Indian society.

Prostitution has been associated with the rise of urbanism,

as shown by Sukumari Bhattacharji, one of the foremost
Marxist Feminist historians whose study of prostitution has
been lauded in recent years. While giving a general survey
of this institution from the very earliest times of its
existence, Bhattacharji suggests how women could have
been drawn into prostitution in a variety of situations, thus
focusing more on the historical context. Marshalling a
wealth of material she shows how a courtesan or a
prostitute was defined in literary sources. Various names for
courtesans occur in these Sanskrit texts like, kumbhadasi or
a slave woman who was assigned the duty of fetching
water; paricarika or female attendant; kulata, an unchaste
woman; Svairini or a sexually promiscuous woman; nati the
actress; silpakarika, a female artisan; prakasavinasta, the
woman who leaves her family to become someone’s
History of India 13

mistress; rupajiva or the one living on her beauty; and the

ganika the regular courtesan.

According to Bhattacharjee these references signify the

social and financial status of the various categories of
courtesans, among whom she considers the ganika to be of
a superior social status. The ganika and sometimes the
rupajiva received training in various arts and sciences. A
sixth century Jain work gives an exhaustive list of the
ganika’s attainments covering a wide range like writing,
arithmetic, singing, playing on musical instruments, instant
verse making, proficiency in the science of perfume making,
knowledge of the signs of good and bad men and women,
horses, fighting, fencing, shooting arrows, ability to
interpret omens, the total list coming to seventy two. Thus
the ganika became a picture of versatility and coveted
much attention, often demanding fees which may have
been prohibitive. At the same time they had to pay taxes to
the state, the twelfth century text Nammayasundarikatha
says that the state received 25 to 30 per cent of the
prostitute’s income. Many outstanding ganikas were
mistresses of their own property, but the same cannot be
History of India 14

said for all. The Kuttanimata, a major text on prostitution

abounds in references to the pitiable condition of prostitutes
in their old age when they had no guarantee about the
safety of their lives. However, institutionalized prostitution
under which the ganika fell offered better prospects for the
old and retired courtesans.

The prostitute household was one constituted of her

mother, referred to as kuttani in many sources, who was
the real authority and manager of the household. Besides,
her brothers, sisters and children along with the cultured
vita surrounded her, the latter being basically hangers-on.
It was to this household that provided her a supportive
structure in which her clients stepped in. No misbehavior
was tolerated and there are many cases of a client paying
heavy fines if such a situation arose.

Bhattacharjee believed that the prostitute was a victim of

the patriarchal system, in which she was seen as only a
commodity, she never had any option of refusing to sell
herself. Normally she chose her own customer, but a king
could also force one on her. She quotes several instances
History of India 15

from didactic texts which have nothing but contempt for the
courtesan. Some even went to the length of saying that the
murder of a prostitute is no crime. Her ‘deceitfulness’ is a
recurring theme in literature. Yet texts like Rajatarangini
record that king Lalitapida stated that ‘anyone proficient in
courtesan lore and clever at jokes would become his friend’
(Bhattacharjee 1999: 216). Descriptions in literary classics
like those of Kalidasa and Sudraka are totally uninhibited.
Bhattacharjee goes on to argue that society’s attitude
towards the prostitute was at best ambivalent. While she
remained an image of attraction for married clients who
flocked to her to escape from the drudgery of their lives,
she was seen as a necessary evil, her sexuality seen as
non-marital and non-procreative, and hence dangerous. The
patriarchal ideology divided women into virtuous women
and vesyas.

Bhattacharjee’s study throws up interesting questions and

also possibilities of further research. Recently Shalini Shah
has questioned her basic premise, that a prostitute was the
victim of patriarchal ideology. She argues that a prostitute
(here meaning the ganika, who accepted payment in
History of India 16

exchange of sexual favours) created her own counter-

culture with her own value system challenging the ethics of
the dominant patriarchal culture. To substantiate this, she
analyses classical Sanskrit literature from the seventh to
the thirteenth century and interprets the textual ostracism
leveled against the vesya as a reaction to her autonomy
and independence. She shows how this counter-culture was
created within the prostitute’s household where the mother
figure reigned supreme; how prostitute strategies were
subversive of the norms of a patriarchal system; how she
managed to acquire control over her own dharma and artha
unlike the kulabadhu; how the prostitute enjoyed greater
freedom of sexual expression as compared to the
circumscribed sexuality of women in patriarchy.

Interestingly Shah sometimes uses the same textual

sources which Bhattacharji analyzed from a different angle.
Perhaps both the approaches have an element of truism in
them. It is quite probable that most texts -- representing
the dominant male voice of the elite classes—were
threatened by this ‘counter-culture’ of the prostitute but
there is no denying that many in their old age were
History of India 17

victimized if we are to go by the descriptions appearing in

some.

Another domain in gender relations that has been variously

studied is women’s sacred space. Here one of the most
important works to date remains Vijaya Ramaswamy’s
analysis of women in Bhakti movement and women’s space
in the Virasaiva movement. Roy mentions another aspect of
gender relations and with which we shall end this
discussion—the multiple manifestations of the great
goddess. Histories of specific cults have been studied, but it
becomes extremely problematic when attempts are made to
translate or equate the ‘divine situation with the human.’
(Roy: 1999).

To sum up gender relations defy any kind of

homogenization. A woman or institutions like family and
marriage were not monolithic categories. Situations also
varied from region to region. Any study of gender relations
needs to be aware of this.