May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons Read Online Free PDF

more leisure and less fear of enemies, the roles of men and women become increasingly demarcated. Men tend to assume a superior position and women a secondary one. The “golden age” for women, a notion many historians believe was promoted by nineteenth-century Indian nationalists eager to find a utopian past, may have been nothing more than a stage in the development of Indian society. Manu may well have been a misogynist, but the society in general was probably motivated by other stresses. As the Aryans spread geographically, they came into contact with other cultures, particularly the darker-skinned Dravidian tribes of the south. In the opinion of Romila Thapar, a highly respected historian and a supporter of women’s causes in India, the oppression of women developed hand in hand with the idea of preserving caste distinctions. Manu’s code of law, which first set down the rules of caste in India, is in her view an illustration “of the need to rigidly define caste society,” to create rules that keep the outsiders, the people viewed as “pollutants,” in their place. Consequently, there are elaborate rules in Manu’s code governing precisely who may marry whom. “To avoid pollution, you must control birth,” Romila Thapar explains. “But you lose control over birth if you lose control over women.”
    The next historical decline in the status of women is popularly believed to have come at the time of the sixteenth-century Moghul invasions. Although there had been earlier Muslim invasions, the Moghuls brought Islam to India on a large scale, and with it, at least in the view of many Hindus, the regressive attitudes toward women that spread the practices of purdah and sati. Others are less sure of the Muslim role in the decline of women. Romila Thapar says there is evidence of the seclusion of upper-caste women and of sati before the Muslim invasions. Whatever the case, it was not until the nineteenth century, at a time when sati and purdah showed no signs of abating, that the first impetus for reform began among the middle class in Calcutta, at that time the capital of British India. The reformers were opposed to sati, purdah and child marriage. They promoted education for women, a wife’s limited right to property and the right of widows to remarry. This movement, which later spread to the western states of Maharashtra and Gujarat, was inspired by far-thinking male reformers like Rammohan Roy, who founded the Brahmo Samaj, a reform sect of Hinduism, and other men genuinely troubled by the conditionof women. Recent historians, however, have concluded that another major impetus for what is considered the first phase of the Indian women’s movement came from the desire of middle-class men to make themselves more socially acceptable to the British imperialists, who employed the men as junior administrators in the bureaucracy and as brokers in the East India Company. The woman in the Bengali middle-class household—unseen, uneducated, isolated—clearly did not conform to the English model of what, for the time, was considered a proper wife. She was not, for example, educated even to the extent of the colonial wives, who knew how to run competent households and assist at social functions in the furtherance of their husbands’ careers.
    Yet the reform movement, at least in the early part of the century, was a theoretical reform falling far short of revolutionary change, “a safe issue,” as the scholar Meredith Borthwick has written, “that did not present a vision of imminent social chaos.” The women were to be educated only to enhance their roles as wives and mothers. While the men argued the issues of reform, the women stayed home, most of them unaware that they were the subjects of so much debate. It was not until the second half of the century that some of the reforms were made law—widows were allowed to remarry in 1856; sati was banned in 1859—and even then, the laws had limited impact. What did