Let us now turn to Young's analysis of women according to the smrti texts, a vast category of Hindu Sanskrit scripture whose authority is, in theory, secondary to the sruti texts of the Vedas. Smrti includes the great epic poems such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Puranas, Tantras, and codes of proper behaviour (the Dharmasutra and Dharmasastra). Woman in these texts are seen as living their lives for the sake of husbands and their children. As a result of being excluded from education during the period of the Brahmanas, women were often rebirth oriented. They were reduced to seeking the spiritual through their husbands, who had knowledge and knew the rituals. Indeed, Hindu women seem to have viewed their husbands as gods or, at least, as channels to the Divine. This tendency, according to Young helps us account for the Hindu woman's ideal of devotion to her husband. According to Young, a woman's devotion to her husband included her offering of well-cooked food, her aesthetics of pleasure, and her production of children. This self-sacrifice of a woman for her husband was understood as a religious offering like that given to the gods. This allowed a woman to spiritualize the mundane aspects of her life. Sometimes a woman would make a special vow (vrata) between herself and a god. In such a vow, the woman would voluntarily deny something to herself (e.g., food) in exchange for some favour from the god for her husband (e.g., good health). Through such techniques as vows, women appropriated yogic principles of self-denial into the family setting. The purpose of yogic self-denial of a woman was not direct union with the Divine, as was the case with male yogis, but union with her husband understood as God. In this way, the ascetic ideals of yoga were integrated into the domestic religion of Hindu women.
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Turning from Young's discussion of feminine ideals in the Ramayana, let us sample the Mahabharata and the Laws of Manu for ideas relating to purity and the body. In the Mahabharata, a son is a man's own body, while a daughter is bitterest woe. Daughters can attain happiness in heaven only through their sons. A young girl is portrayed as filled with shame on experiencing her first menstrual flow. The Laws of Manu strongly reinforce this negative view of menstruation. According to Manu, a menstruating woman is unclean and her presence leaves a noxious stain. The Mahabharata XIII.127.13 even suggests that, should a menstruating woman look at an object, the gods will not take it in sacrifice. Nor can she be in the neighbourhood of the ancestral offering or the forefathers will be unappeased for thirteen years. If a menstruating woman looks at some food, it is unclean and fit only for the demons This uncleanness associated with the uterus is carried over into the process of conception. According to the Mahabharata XII.213.3ff conception is brought about by seed and blood, is moist with excrement and water, and fouled with the products of blood. These are the constituents of the web of samsara or rebirth which desire and the bodies of women spin out. Indeed the very term rajas seems to be used in the Epic both for menstrual blood and for desire. The act of intercourse itself is also described by the Mahabharata as unclean. Not surprisingly, the sojourn in the mother's womb is seen as nauseating and gruesome and is described in Mahabharata XII.215.7 as hell's pit (narakagarta).
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In the Hindu view, all death results in pollution for the members of the dead person's family. If there is a widow, this death pollution is focused on her and is removed from the human world by her immolation. For the sati to be fully efficacious in removing impurity, it was important that the widow be in as pure a state as possible. Thus there were strict injunctions against sati by widows who were menstruating or in a state of birth pollution, for, in these cases, the pollution level of the widow was already such that it would not allow the death pollution to be reduced. Also, before sati, the woman's purity was accentuated by a ritual bathing and dressing in new clothes.
According to Hejb and Young when the sati state is compared with that of the widow, many similarities emerge. The sati engages in a controlled, yoga-like act in entering the fire. In the act of sati, she not only burned away her own bad karma but also the pollution surrounding the death of her husband. Thus, she purified herself and her family and produced good karma for the next life. Her equanimity at the moment of sati revealed her yogic attainment. Her act was said to radiate benevolence, not only on the family and those present, but on generations to come. Thus, both the sati and the widow perform tapas which purifies the pollution of the husband's death and the wife's bad karma. The woman choosing sati is more auspicious because she instantly reunites herself with her husband. The widow, thinking more of herself, has to use the rest of her own life to put herself back into the state of purity required of being a good wife (sati). In addition, the act of sati ensured that the couple would be reunited in heaven, while widowhood left open the destination to earth, heaven or hell. Thus, according to Hejib and Young, while the result of sati was clear, ambiguity tormented the widow.
Regardless of how they lived or died, one impurity that was inescapable throughout life for the Hindu woman was the pollution of menstruation. Menstruation seems to be regarded as more than a simple physical pollution. In India, menstrual blood has been closely linked with notions of conception. In many texts, there are injunctions to the effect that monthly periods must not be misused that a women's menstruation must be transformed into a fertile result. Some Indian women believe that after ten months of blood is collected, a child is born. Thus fathers who do not provide husbands for their postpubertal daughters are held to commit embryo murder at each menstruation. Husbands also have a duty to have intercourse with their wives at the proper time so that the blood will be used in child production and not issue as menstruation. On the other hand some texts reflect the view of many Hindu women that menstruation is a purifying process. One text says, ''Women possess an unrivaled means of purification; they never become entirely foul. For month by month their temporary uncleanness removes their sins." The dominant Hindu view, however, is that menstruation is a pollution.
In the Classical Brahmanical Hindu view, women are assessed and given value in terms of purity. In worldly life, women are seen as existing on a continuum from the most pure as being a prepubertal virgin to the most impure as being a menstruating widow. Since almost the whole of a woman's life seems to caught up in tamas or pollution, it is perhaps not surprising that Brahmanical society felt that the desired condition of purity could only be achieved by the imposition of rigorous controls. There is also the concern that the purity of women be maintained to raise the status of their men.
The above discussion has focused on the worldly life picture of Hinduism in which dharma is the goal and purity is the means. The pure is noumenal and is symbolised in the sadhu or renouncer. The impure is inextricably involved in the cycle of life and death, especially in the case of women. In this impure world, the role of the priest or Brahmin is to help his client maintain or enhance purity. Thus the Brahmin is the exemplar of purity in the world of the nonrenouncers and, as such, sits atop a social hierarchy based on relative purity. As we have seen, this has had a doubly unfortunate effect on the lives of Hindu women. On the one hand it has led to the perception that during menstruation, childbirth, and widowhood they are a major source of pollution, comparable perhaps with that associated with untouchables. In this light, women are seen as of low spiritual value and little social worth. On the other hand, paradoxically, women are also held up as symbols of purity and spiritual power (e.g., Sita of the Ramayana). Such women reflect honour upon their menfolk. In a sense, they combine the worship of a pure virgin with that of the reproductive mother.
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The Constitution not only attempted to reject these negative attitudes based on the classical view of purity, it also forcefully opposed them by strongly stating the rights to freedom for all as including freedom of speech, of assembly, of movement, of settling, of holding property, and of practising and profession.
In his study of the Constitution and the secular India it seeks to establish, D. E. Smith observes that the above provisions constitute a revolution in the traditional conception of religion in India. The revolution that the Constitution introduces is nothing short of a new standardization of Hindu personal law on the basis of equality rather than on the classical view of karmic purity. On the new basis of equality, women are no longer to be seen as inferior to men by virtue of their greater bodily impurity. Nor are people who eat meat or engage in sex and worldly pleasures to be judged as inferior to the ascetic yogis by virtue of the impurity of their lifestyles. Indeed, the very idea of ordering society in terms of levels of purity and impurity, which, in part at least produced the caste system, is ruled out by the new Constitution. These equality provisions of the Constitution have also provided the basis for legislation opening Hindu religious institutions to all classes and sections of India. Harijan temple entry laws have been enacted by many state legislatures. "The central Untouchability (Offenses) Act of 1955 provides inter alia that any attempt to prevent Harijans from exercising their right of temple entry is punishable with imprisonment, fine or both." Court interpretations of the equality provisions of the Constitution have quashed attempts of a religious community to excommunicate one of its members, thus highlighting the clash between the role of the state and its equality provisions with the internal autonomy of a religious denomination. While excommunication in the West is mainly a matter of religious belief, in India excommunication exists much more on the social level as an act of removing a person from a particular caste group or baring the entry of others into a particular caste. The roots of such discrimination are found in the classical views of religious purity as sanctification. The outlawing of excommunication by the courts is a dramatic example of the clash between the egalitarian philosophy of the Constitution and the elitist (by one's own efforts) approach of Hindu karma and guna theory. What the Constitution does not address, of course, is whether the provision of equality is true and just, whereas the Hindu distinctions made on the basis of karmic purity in search of moksa are to be overturned as untrue and unjust. The basis of the ancient Hindu views of purity are found in the sruti and smrti which, for the Hindu, have the status of revelation. What makes the modern situation especially ambiguous is that the Constitution sees itself as providing freedom of religion, on the one hand, and yet removes that freedom when the basic revelations of the religion are found to contravene the Constitution's premise of equality. The courts of India have the difficult task of having to arbitrate this fundamental clash.
~~Hindu Ethics : Purity, Abortion, and Euthanasia -by- Harold G. Coward, Julius J. Lipner, Katherine K. Young
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