Hinduism

The history of gender and sexual ideologies in Hinduism is complex. In thinking about the topic as it relates to the ancient world, one must consider both ideal relations between gods and goddesses, ideal relations between men and women described in legal, narrative, and philosophical texts, in addition to facts on the ground about actual practices that can be discerned from these texts. In thinking about the topic in the colonial and postcolonial world, one must consider the distortions of the colonial accounts about gender and sexual practices, as well as the complexity of the postcolonial situation, where anxieties about the global status of Hinduism and its gender ideologies compete with feminist discourse, inspired by both Western and secular Indian sources.

This survey begins with what can be gleaned from the ancient world. It is widely known that the Indus Valley civilizations of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, in what is now present-day Pakistan, used seals and figurines that featured women prominently. While it is impossible to ascertain without doubt whether these were goddesses, their postures and proportions suggest that the society placed a great deal of emphasis upon fertility.

The Vedic period, spanning roughly from 1500 bce to 200 ce, includes evidence from the very oldest texts of the Vedas, and their ritual philosophical texts (the Brahmanas) as well as the ritual manuals (the Sutras). It is known that gender roles were symbolically coded in the form of sacrificial performance. Whereas many other gender ideologies in the ancient world do see women as a repository of both sexuality and fertility, the Vedic sacrificial world also involved a public assertion of the necessity of the woman's role in the working of the cosmos. No patron of a sacrifice could perform a ritual without being married and his wife being present. The model householder tended the domestic fire, and recited mantras at home that his wife was also required to recite. No sacrifice was complete without both a woman and a man present. In addition, many Vedic rituals required the sacrificer's wife to participate in some symbolic offering or in a staged dialogue.

It is also well known that in the early period, women were able to participate in the practice of renunciation and meditation, as well as in elite debates. These debates are depicted in texts called the Upanishads, where smaller schools of renunciants who had removed themselves from the bustle of society were able to practice meditation and reflect upon the power behind the sacrifice, called Brahman. These women were probably the exceptions to the rule, but worth noting nonetheless. The stories of Maitreyi and Gargi in the Upanishads show the women as thoughtful participants in the discussion about the power and nature of Brahman, who challenge husbands and rulers alike. There are also brief references to brahmavadinis—or women who speak about Brahman.

In addition, the Vedic world involved certain goddesses who, while not as prominent as the other male gods, were powerful agents within the sacrificial world. Agni, the god of fire, and Soma, the god of intoxicating and eloquence-inducing drink, and Indra, the warrior god, were understood as some of the main actors in the divine world during this period. In addition to minor female deities, such as the goddesses of Night and Dawn, abstract qualities, such as Medha (intelligence), and concrete ideas, such as Ida (the sacrificial offering itself), were understood as female powers.

But by far the most important female deity in the Vedas was Vac, the goddess of speech. Vac is seen as the creator of the world who inspires the sacrifice. In later texts of the Brahmanas, she is seen as the consort of the creator Prajapati. Indeed, in the numerous accounts of creation found in the early Indian texts, the symbolism of the male and female principles working in concert with each other is prominent. Sky and Earth, for instance, combine as male and female principles to create the world as we know it.

From late Vedic domestic manuals called the Grihyasutras, women's rituals relating to menstruation, marriage, and study were described as part of the ideal life of the person who was twice-born—the three upper castes who were initiated (born again) into the study of Vedas. Marriage rituals involved a series of symbolic statements about harmony in marriage, the producing of sons, and the auspiciousness of the wife as a fertile and faithful keeper of the household. Once married, women were able to recite some mantras having to do with domestic life, and one Grihya-sutra (Ashvalayana) mentions that the older married women in the community are the ritual experts concerning marriage and fertility, and should be consulted whenever there is doubt in these matters.

While there are intriguing ways in which ancient gender representations included women's participation in the public sphere, it should not be assumed that women were understood as equal to men or having rights in the contemporary sense. Indeed, gender roles were circumscribed; men were the main performers and agents of sacrifice, and women were understood primarily as sources of auspicious fertility.

In the classical and epic period of early India (200 bce onward), there was a gradual shift in gender ideologies. Women's roles became far more circumscribed within the domestic sphere, and their access to traditional Vedic education became far more limited. Male priests oversaw worship (puja) in the newly emerging temples that were replacing Vedic sacrifice; men understood this leadership as their exclusive domain. In the legal texts called the Dharma-sutras, there is evidence for a large codification of women's roles and responsibilities in the domestic sphere. In the contemporary world, the most famous passages concerning gender roles are from the laws of Manu. In it, there are several different kinds of statements about women; they are extolled as the source of great auspiciousness and reviled as uncontrollable forces that need to be curtailed at all times by men.

In addition, these legal texts show a clear patriarchal point of view in marriage. While the most auspicious kind of marriage is where the families negotiate and the woman consents, there were also forcible marriages as well as marriages of mutual consent of the partners without the participation of the families. In each of these cases, it is clear that the marriage contract could be based on either social standing or desire, but social standing was the preferred mode. Moreover, it is also clear that forcible taking of a woman was not an unthinkable option. In these early legal and later texts, it is clear that dowry was practiced among high caste Hindus, as well as patrilocal marriage. As early as the Vedas, and quite pronounced in the classical texts, the idea of a woman leaving the home to go to her husband's family was a crucial part of the life cycle of a woman.

And yet gender ideologies are not simply to be understood as patriarchal oppression. Epic heroines such as the Ramayana's Sita and the Mahabharata's Draupadi are both described as the dutiful wife who takes her husband as a god. That both heroines exemplify the wife's faithfulness and ability to undergo great suffering on behalf of her husband (or husbands) is quite sharply forgrounded. However, to understand this as simple patriarchy would be erroneous. In the Ramayana, for example, Sita explicitly argues with her husband Rama before his exile in the forest, and insists on going with him. In that passage, she makes her case as if she were an expert in dharma, citing texts and challenging his masculinity. Throughout the Mahabharata, Draupadi engages in similar argumentation. Indeed, through her use of wit, remarkably used at the height of a public humiliation, she is able to save the Pandavas, her husbands, from complete ruin. Moreover in other passages, she explains her great strength and control over the Pandavas' kingdom of Hastinapura, and this competence is part of a very complex gender ideology in which strength and mental prowess matter greatly; women's weakness and submission are only part of the equation.

During the first few centuries ce, the classical Hindu pantheon emerged, which involved: Shiva, the god who alternates between being an ascetic and being a householder; Vishnu, whose earthly forms come into being in specific cases where the world needs to be saved; and Brahma, the creator god who is somewhat removed from the daily goings-on of the universe. In the first few centuries ce, the Devi Mahatmya was formed as a significant text in this classical pantheon.

The story of the goddess in that text narrates how the buffalo demon Mahisha was tormenting the world, and none of the gods could stop him. The gods got together and emanated their very essence to create a being powerful enough to conquer the demon. As a result, the goddess was formed, and emerged seated on a lotus, with the great weapons of all the gods in her hands. She then went on to conquer the demon in battle. Some traditions say that the demon, at the moment of being killed by the goddess, became her devotee.

There are many other legends of the goddess in addition to this basic one. From her very ancient and pluralistic history, the goddess goes by many names and has many forms: Durga rides on a lion or tiger and is fierce in battle; Kali is the protectress who is also terrifying in form; Gauri is the beneficent "golden" one who is often seen as a "consort" figure to the gods. Lakshmi is also the consort of Vishnu, and is present with him as he rests between the yugas, or cyclical ages of the universe. Many would argue that there is no "singular" goddess as such, but rather that she has her origins in local female deities, such as the goddess who presides over a cross roads, or at the meeting of rivers in a forest. What is more, many would see her origins in the female figurines of the Indus Valley, the civilization which existed and probably co-mingled with the Aryan one from approximately 3500–1700 bce.

What kinds of gender ideologies do stories from the classical Hindu world represent? Some have argued that, unlike the male gods, the goddess is split in her affinities, either as a powerful virgin prone to anger, or a domesticated female consort who is more benevolent. This analysis may not truly be the case when it comes to the actual ritual worship of gods and goddesses. Frequently, the more terrifying form of Kali is understood as a protectress and a crusader against evil, whether it be the evil of illusion or the more concrete evils of attackers or demons. In addition, recent fieldwork has shown that many women as well as men identify their earthly female power with Shakti, the divine power that resides in and through the goddess. Shakti is a very pervasive idea in Indian myth and ritual. Shakti resides in men, women, animals, and plants—particularly the tulsi plant, which in many contemporary rural festivals is seen to the incarnation of the goddess.

There is a frequent Western misconception that shakti is equivalent to female political empowerment and the so-called liberation of women from confinement to the domestic sphere. While the concept is used even in medieval philosophical systems, it does not necessarily follow that those who worship the goddess or praise the power of Shakti automatically have some kind of protofeminist gender ideology.

It would be remiss in an article about gender ideology and Hinduism not to mention tantra, the practice in different strands of Hinduism that became fully emergent during the classical period. Tantra inverts the established rules of sexuality, purity, and social hierarchy. Some tantric practices involve explicit sexual symbolism and sexual practice, where copulation becomes a means of union with the divine. The male and female principles are embodied in the male and female partners, and together in coitus they represent a kind of cosmic coincidence of opposites. The question of Hindu tantra has been widely controversial in the colonial and postcolonial era, where Hindu nationalists have protested what they perceive to be a practice that exists outside of the Hindu norm.

In the classical premodern period, when this ideology of the goddess was established, there is very little evidence for the large-scale empowerment of women as most would conceive it in the early twenty-first century. Certainly there is some evidence for individual holy women, whose exemplary devotion made it possible for them to be freer of certain kinds of roles. Also there is some inscriptional evidence in the medieval period for women patrons of South Indian temples. Finally, evidence exists of courtesans and temple dancers who dwelt in and near temples, and whose ritual roles in the worship of the temple gods also gave them a certain ability to own property, choose their partners, and develop abilities in the arts.

The early modern and colonial periods involved very protracted debates about women's role and gender ideologies, which continue in their postcolonial form to this day. It is important to remember, however, that while the colonial and postcolonial frames of analysis are helpful and give more data about gender than the precolonial period, precolonial forms of law themselves were not fossilized, but had their own flexibilities and forms of internal debates about gender.

The Moghul period is a good place to begin. Once they had established rulership, the Muslim emperors (between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries) tended not to interfere in Hindu practices of worship, marriage, and domestic arrangements. Some rulers even made alliances with Hindu princesses. But the British rulers and Christian missionaries engaged in a very different modality of governance, in which issues of gender played a central role.

First and foremost, debates about four different practices involving women emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: widow remarriage; child marriage; the status of devadasis, or temple dancers, and sati, or the immolation of the widow upon her husband's funeral pyre. In each of these cases, the British attempted both to make use of and undermine traditional Indian law codes. In the complexity of the colonial scene, Hindu elites, missionaries, local rulers, and British administrators all played different kinds of roles.

The issue of widow remarriage was essentially concerned with rules and regulations about whether widows were inherently polluted, and marginal to society, once their husbands died. This practice was particularly difficult for the child who had been promised to someone before puberty, and whose betrothed husband died before she reached puberty. In that case, many young girls were permanently confined to widows' homes or to lesser accommodations within the joint family system. Women gained the legal right to remarry in the 1856 Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act; one hundred years later, women gained inheritance rights through the Hindu Succession Act of 1956. In some areas of India these rights are fully utilized and realized, whereas in other parts, there are different views within communities about the roles of widows. The practice of sati spawned a large debate in the early nineteenth century between reformers and traditional Hindus, and was outlawed by the British in 1829. Extremely rare and controversial cases have occasionally surfaced in the intervening centuries.

The related issue of child marriage concerned the legal age that a girl could be betrothed, and have sexual relations with, her husband. Despite the British's attempt to present themselves as noninterfering in the arena of Hindu custom, the Age of Consent Bill was nonetheless passed in 1891, which made marriage or forced sexual relations with a woman under twelve an act of rape. While many upper caste reformists championed it, some Hindu nationalists protested this move greatly, and argued that it neither protected children nor honored the Indian male.

The debates about devadasis were also intense. In the colonial period, the practice of dedicating women to temples, and hence to the god of the temple in marriage, was protested by both Hindu social reformers and missionaries alike. The colonial rulers saw such practices as a thin guise for prostitution. However, the argument for maintaining such practices was that, traditionally, women have had more choice in the matter than many suppose, and have protections, artistic prestige, and independence that many married women do not.

These and other debates within the colonial period created a lasting legacy about masculinity within the context of colonial rule. Many recent scholars have turned their attention to the idea that the Indian male was understood as effeminate by the ruling class, and the British elite more masculine, and that much anticolonial Hindu rhetoric, and anti-Western nationalist rhetoric of the early twenty-first century is bound up with an attempt to restore a lost Hindu masculinity. Relatedly, Bamkin Chandra Chatterji (1836–1894) provided a great inspiration for the nationalist movement, whereby the concept of Mother India as a goddess was fully developed. Mother India, represented by the goddess Durga on a tiger, was an ideal that was to be protected at all costs, just as the Indian, usually Hindu, woman was to be protected at all costs. Much of the vernacular debates between reformists and traditional Hindus led to ironic situations, such as the wives of great Hindu reformers obediently submitting to being educated and liberated to please their husbands. Another important dynamic in these gender debates is the gradual transformation of a liberal Hindu elite into a nationalist one, where, over the course of a century, Hindu women's freedom became identified with national freedom.

The 1960s and 1970s sparked a larger conversation between Western feminism and indigenous Indian feminism. Much of the recent protests to practices of dowry, the rare incidences of sati, and female infanticide are taken up by secular feminists and social workers. Many of these thinkers and activists make their arguments not on the grounds of women's agency and individual choice alone, but on a deeper understanding of Indian values that tend to resist the imposition of Western categories. For example, many feminists are focused on women's leadership in the local village governments in rural India. To take another example, recent feminists have argued that abuses in the practice of dowry were not simply Hindu or Indian in nature, but exacerbated by changing economies and the stresses of colonial rule as well as postcolonial sociopolitical realities.

Many colonial debates continued in new forms. The question of whether Hindus or Muslims should have separate legal codes in India has been hotly debated, and could have great impact on the inheritance rights of women overall. To take another example, the colonial debate about devadasis was also taken up in the twentieth century, and the Devadasi Act was passed in 1982. The practice of temple prostitution was made illegal and punishable by fine and imprisonment. Yet the artistic forms of dance that may have originated in the temple have remained an integral part of secular and Hindu society in India and the diaspora.

While in contemporary India, social workers and women's rights groups tend to see themselves in opposition to Hindu practices, there are an increasing number of women who also write as Hindu feminists. They are attempting to reclaim much of the tradition of Shakti for contemporary empowerment of women within India as well as Hindu women more globally. In addition, there is a larger presence of the Hindu goddess in Europe and America as well as in India, and an appropriation of her by Western feminists that has made her a much more global figure.

In addition, female gurus are now taking center stage as teachers and leaders in both American and Indian Hindu communities. Finally, many more men and women are writing as openly gay and lesbian Indians, and searching for precedents within the ancient artistic and literary canons of Hindu as well as Muslim India.

In an age of Hindu diaspora, gender ideologies work themselves out in interaction with vernacular realities. The present generation of American Hindu women, for example, are concerned with the vulnerabilities of the diaspora minority community, and the ways in which gender ideologies might change as the generations pass. Feminists in India, by contrast, must focus on related, but distinct, sets of issues, where economic rights of women, abuse of dowry practices, and Hindu nationalism's views of women are much more in the forefront of political discourse. Technology provides each Hindu population much more access to the other global Hindu communities, and thus gender ideologies are shifting at a much more rapid pace. The political organization of Indian gay rights movements and movements against the discrimination of hijras, for example, have taken place as a result of active information exchange across continents.

see also Goddess Worship; Hijras; Kali.

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                                           Laurie L. Patton