The explanation lies in the representations of the status of son and daughter, and therefore that of husband and wife, in Hindu tradition. According to this tradition, a man is born with three debts – to the gods, to the rsi (the original sages or seers, who ‘saw’ the Veda) and to the ‘fathers’. A man therefore owes sacrifices to the gods, owes study of the sacred texts to the seers, and owes descendants, above all a son, to the fathers. Over his lifetime, little by little, through sacrifices, study and engendering a son, the man frees himself from his original debt. In addition, a man must engender a son for himself as well, for it is a son that must perform the funeral rites when his parents die and thus enable them to enter the world of the ancestors. It is a son who will then continue to make offerings to the family ancestors for the rest of his life. In India the birth of a son is therefore a source of joy and an occasion for rejoicing.
This is not the case for the birth of a girl, for she is a woman, and according to the classical texts, women have an evil nature. She is inherently evil. Her insatiable sexual appetite is a danger to men and society. Her body is a source of pollution through the menstrual blood that periodically flows from it. Furthermore, the woman is considered unfit for reflective thought – and therefore incapable of independence. She must always submit to men, whose duty it is to guard her, ‘even from herself’, to guide her but also to protect her. ‘Her father protects (her) in childhood, her husband protects (her) in youth, and her sons protect (her) in old age; a woman is never fit for sva tantra (independence).’32
A father’s duty is therefore to keep his sons and to marry off his daughters as soon as they reach puberty or even before. The Sanskrit word for marriage, vivaha, contains the idea of dissociation (vi) and the transfer of the daughter from her father’s house to that of her husband. But it is also the rule that if a certain time is allowed to elapse after a girl reaches menarche, she is then no longer under her father’s authority and can choose her own husband – but she then loses all right to a dowry. Nevertheless, she can choose to go ahead without incurring any blame, since her father and the members of her group will be regarded as the ones responsible for not having found her a husband in time. They will be the ones censured by public opinion and not the woman or her husband. For the father, this social condemnation will be accompanied by the ancestors’ wrath, since, for a Brahmin, not to marry a daughter in time is considered to be as serious as murder, the gravest crime one can commit.33 The ancestors may even be so angry that they thirst for the girl’s menstrual blood as an offering.
It is with these philosophical-religious representations of the woman as a potential and constant source of defilement in a social and cosmic order organized around the opposition (at multiple degrees) between pure and impure that we must begin our attempt to understand why, in India, wife-takers are superior to wife-givers, as well as why the gift of a pre-adolescent or an adolescent girl who has never had sexual relations with a man (nor, they add, with a woman) is regarded as a disinterested gift, and at the same time as a religious act. But a piece of the puzzle is missing. For the gift is disinterested in the sense that the wife-takers do not reciprocate with either women or bridewealth. And yet it seems that at another – immaterial, religious and cosmic – level, the wife-takers do reciprocate with a counter-gift. They take upon themselves the responsibility of dangerous fertility, source of the pollutions occasioned by this menstruating girl. They, and no longer the girl’s father, will be responsible for the ‘bad omens’ entailed in these occasions for pollution, which the bride carries with her, in her body by her very nature. And it will be up to them to transform this dangerous fertility into a source of life, through marriage and procreation.
To celebrate the marriage of a girl is therefore at the same time to transfer from one family to another – from the givers to the takers – the dangers carried in this girl’s sexual body. These dangers are infinitely greater still if she has had illicit sexual relations with men or women before her marriage. A woman thus contains within her body the possibility of ‘bearing’ her family’s rank and status, of bringing them honour or shame. Her virginity is the means and the stake. In addition to being a virgin, she must also testify to her family’s wealth, prestige and standing. This she does when she arrives with her dowry, decked in her jewellery and accompanied by the goods given to women when they marry and which are already their inheritance. These are personal goods, for in India real estate such as land and houses is traditionally reserved for the sons and is divided among them on their father’s death.
That the gift of a virgin with her dowry has never been entirely a one-way, non-reciprocated gift, and that this counter-gift takes place on a level other than that of women and material wealth, has been largely confirmed by the results of detailed ethnographic studies, such as those conducted by Gloria Goodwin Raheja on marriage rites and payments in the dominant caste of a North Indian village. In an acclaimed book entitled The Poison in the Gift,34 she showed the importance of a set of ritual acts by which the wife-takers act with the explicit intention of ensuring the well-being of the givers by taking responsibility for the inauspiciousness that accompanies the transfer of a woman into their family and which is connected with the fact that the families’ ancestors and gods attend the wedding and mingle with the guests to ensure that the rules have been respected. Among the Gujar – but this is not the case everywhere in India – the groom’s family in turn, through other rituals, transfers onto the Brahmins who perform the ceremony for the family some of the impurities and faults engendered by the act of receiving the gift of a virgin woman who has begun to menstruate (kanya dan). In the end, all the world’s impurities converge on the Brahmin, and for that he receives goods and prestations.35
Giving a virgin with dowry to a Brahmin is, according to the Dharma-sastra, the second of the four forms of dharmya marriage that are a sign of virtue and a source of merits for the girl’s father and her family. This marriage is called daiva, a word derived from deva, meaning ‘gods’, and consists, for a rich man who has embarked upon a cycle of major sacrifices, of giving one of his daughters to the Brahmin who performs these sacrifices for him. The gift of his daughter is added to the material gifts and prestations normally given a priest for fulfilling this role.
Without suggesting in the slightest that the forms of marriage practised in India today correspond to the eight forms listed and ranked by the Laws of Manu, it is still worthwhile examining these forms briefly in an attempt to glimpse a cultural and social world with which we are not automatically familiar. They are listed in descending order starting with the first, which we have described, the so-called Brahma marriage, from the name of the great god of all the worlds. The second form is Daiva. The third is named Arsa, from the term that designates the rsi, or seers, the sages of old. In this type of marriage, the father gives his virgin daughter but receives in exchange from his future son-in-law a few head of cattle for ritual use. The fourth form of marriage is called Prajapatya, from the name of the god of procreation, Prajapati. It differs from Brahma in that the gift of the girl is solicited.
Next come the four forms of marriage placed under the sign not of the gods but of the demons or spirits inimical to the gods. Asura – a term designating spirits that personify evil nature spirits – by which a man requests the gift of a woman and makes a marriage payment (sulka) to her family, and gives the woman herself goods which constitute a sort of dowry. The Gandharva marriage – from the name of the heavenly musicians who play dance music for the nymphs – is the union of a man and a woman who desire each other and marry without their families’ consent.36 Rakasa – from the name of the highly dangerous nocturnal demons (raksas) – is marriage by the forcible abduction of the girl from her family.37 And last of all, in Paisaca – from the name of the carnivorous demons that haunt cremation grounds – a man has sex with a woman he has found in an inebriated state or asleep and makes her his.
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