The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  In the Mahabharata, Nala becomes an addictive gambler only after he has been possessed by the spirit of the Kali Age, an indication that addiction in general was perceived as coming from outside the individual. There is no idea here of an addictive personality; the vices, rather than the people who have them, are hierarchically ranked. The gambler is not doomed by birth, by his character; he has somehow fallen into the bad habit of gambling, and if he made an effort, he could get out of it. Free will, self-control, meditation, controlling the senses: This is always possible. So too there are no alcoholics, just people who happen, at the moment, to be drinking too much. Anyone exposed to the objects of addiction is liable to get caught. Sex is the only inborn addiction: We are all, in this Hindu view, naturally inclined to it, exposed to it all the time, inherently lascivious.

  Manu sums up the shared underlying attitude toward the addictions:

  The ten vices [vyasanas] that arise from desire all end badly. Hunting, gambling, sleeping by day, malicious gossip, women, drunkenness, music, singing, dancing, and aimless wandering are the ten vices born of desire. Drinking, gambling, women, and hunting, in that order [i.e., with drinking the worst], are the four worst, and, though they are universally addictive, each vice is more serious than the one that follows (7.45-53).

  Elsewhere (9.235 and 11.55), Manu equates the vice of drinking liquor with the three major sins of Brahmin killing, theft, and sleeping with the guru’s wife. Those verses assume a male subject, however; drinking by women, by contrast, Manu associates with the milder habits of keeping bad company, being separated from their husbands, sleeping, living in other people’s houses, and aimless wandering (9.13).

  The Artha-shastra basically agrees with Manu: “Four vices spring from lust—hunting, gambling, women, and drink. Lust involves humiliation, loss of property, and hanging out with undesirable persons like thieves, gamblers, hunters, singers, and musicians. Of the vices of lust, gambling is worse than hunting, women are worse than gambling, drink is worse than women (8.3.2- 61).” All this is clear enough; in the Artha-shastra, as in Manu, drink is the worst vice of lust, women next, then gambling, and hunting the least destructive. But then Kautilya adds, “But gambling is worse than drink—indeed, for a king, it is the worst of the vices (8.3.62-64),” changing the order of vices for a king: Now gambling is the worst, then drink, women, and hunting last.

  There was room for an even wider divergence of opinions: A Sanskrit text composed just a bit later (in the fifth or sixth century CE, in Kanchipuram) satirizes both the Artha-shastra and Manu: A young man whose father had banished him for bad behavior encouraged the king to engage in all the vices; he praised hunting because it makes you athletic, reduces phlegm, teaches you all about animals, and gets you out into the fresh air, and so forth; gambling makes you generous, sharp-eyed, single-minded, keen to take risks; kama is the reward for dharma and artha, teaches you strategy, and produces offspring (here assumed to be a Good Thing); and drinking keeps you young, uproots remorse, and gives you courage.45

  WOMEN

  WOMEN IN THE DHARMA-SHASTRAS

  Though women are not the worst of all the addictions, they are the only universal one, and the authors of the shastras apparently found them more fun to write about than any of the others. Manu, in particular, regards women as a sexual crime about to happen: “Drinking, associating with bad people, being separated from their husbands, wandering about, sleeping, and living in other peoples’ houses are the six things that corrupt women. Good looks do not matter to them, nor do they care about youth. ‘A man!’ they say, and enjoy sex with him, whether he is good-looking or ugly (9.12-17).” Therefore men should watch women very carefully indeed: “A girl, a young woman, or even an old woman should not do anything independently, even in her own house. In childhood a woman should be under her father’s control, in youth under her husband’s, and when her husband is dead, under her sons’. She should not have independence (4.147-49; 9.3).”

  This lack of independence meant that in Manu’s ideal world, a woman had very little space to maneuver within a marriage, nor could she get out of it: “A virtuous wife should constantly serve her husband like a god, even if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities. A woman who abandons her own inferior husband . . . is reborn in the womb of a jackal and is tormented by the diseases born of her evil (5.154-64).” And she is not set free from this loser even when he dies:

  When her husband is dead, she may fast as much as she likes, living on auspicious flowers, roots, and fruits, but she should not even mention the name of another man. Many thousands of Brahmins who were chaste from their youth have gone to heaven without begetting offspring to continue the family. A virtuous wife who remains chaste when her husband has died goes to heaven just like those chaste men, even if she has no sons. She reaches her husband’s worlds after death, and good people call her a virtuous woman (4.156-66).

  Not only may she not remarry, but her reward for not remarrying is that she will be her husband’s wife in the hereafter, which, “if he behaves badly, freely indulges his lust, and is devoid of any good qualities,” may not have been her first choice.

  The good news, at least, is that Manu does expect her to live on after her husband dies, not to commit suicide (suttee) on her husband’s pyre. Yet Manu’s fear that the widow might sleep with another man was an important strand in the later argument that the best way to ensure that the widow never slept with any other man but her husband was to make sure that she died with him. The man of course can and indeed must remarry (4.167-69). All that there is to set against all of this misogyny is Manu’s grudging “keep the women happy so that they will keep the men happy” line of argument: “If the wife is not radiant, she does not stimulate the man; and because the man is not stimulated, the making of children does not happen. If the woman is radiant, the whole family is radiant, but if she is not radiant, the whole family is not radiant (3.60-63).” Well, it’s better than nothing. I guess.

  But we must not forget the gap between the exhortations of the texts and the actual situation on the ground. The records of donations to Buddhist stupas offer strong evidence that contradicts the dharma-shastras’ denial to women of their rights to such property.46 In this period, many women used their personal wealth to make grants to Jaina and Buddhist orders. Hindu women too could make donations to some of the new Hindu sects, for they received from their mothers and other female relatives “women’s wealth” (stri-dana), what Wemmick in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations called “portable property,” and they were often given a bride-price on marriage, the opposite of dowry (Manu is ambivalent about this), and their children, including daughters, could inherit that (9.131, 191-5). Most often women’s wealth consisted of gold jewelry, which they could carry on their bodies at all times. This one claim to independence made Manu nervous; he warns against women hoarding their own movable property without their husbands’ permission (9.199).

  Manu is the flag bearer for the Hindu oppression of women, but the shastras are just as diverse here as they are on other points. The Artha-shastra (3.2.31) takes for granted the woman with several husbands, who poses a problem even for the permissive Kama-sutra (1.5.30). Kautilya is also more lenient than Manu about divorce and widow remarriage; he gives a woman far more control over her property, which consists of jewelry without limit and a small maintenance (3.2.14); she continues to own these after her husband’s death—unless she remarries, in which case she forfeits them, with interest, or settles it all on her sons (3.2.19-34). Thus Kautilya allows women more independence than Manu, but both of them greatly limit women’s sexual and economic freedom. Though men controlled land, cattle, and money, women had some other resources. Diamonds have always been a girl’s best friend.

  WOMEN IN THE KAMA-SUTRA

  Control of the senses was always balanced by an appreciation for the sensual, and if we listen to the alternative voice of the Kama-sutra, we hear a rather different story.

/>   The Kama-sutra, predictably, is far more open-minded than Manu about women’s access to household funds, divorce, and widow remarriage. The absolute power that the wife in the Kama-sutra has in running the household’s finances (4.1.1-41) stands in sharp contrast with Manu’s statement that a wife “should not have too free a hand in spending (4.150),” and his cynical remark: “No man is able to guard women entirely by force, but they can be safely guarded if kept busy amassing and spending money, engaging in purification, attending to their duties, cooking food, and looking after the furniture (9.10-11).” And when it comes to female promiscuity, Vatsyayana is predictably light-years ahead of Manu. Vatsyayana cites an earlier authority on the best places to pick up married women, of which the first is “on the occasion of visiting the gods” and others include a sacrifice, a wedding, or a religious festival. More secular opportunities involve playing in a park, bathing or swimming, or theatrical spectacles. More extreme occasions are offered by the spectacle of a house on fire, the commotion after a robbery, or the invasion of the countryside by an army (5.4.42). Somehow I don’t think Manu would approve of meeting married women at all, let alone using devotion to the gods as an occasion for it or equating such an occasion with spectator sports like hanging around watching houses burn down.

  Here we encounter the paradox of women’s voices telling us, through the text, that women had no voices. Vatsyayana takes for granted the type of rape that we now call sexual harassment, as he describes men in power who can take whatever women they want (5.5.7-10). But he often expresses points of view clearly favorable to women,47 particularly in comparison with other texts of the same era. The text often quotes women in direct speech, expressing views that men are advised to take seriously. The discussion of the reasons why women become unfaithful, for instance, rejects the traditional patriarchal party line that one finds in most Sanskrit texts, a line that punishes very cruelly indeed any woman who sleeps with a man other than her husband. The Kama-sutra, by contrast, begins its discussion of adultery with an egalitarian, if cynical, formulation: “A woman desires any attractive man she sees, and, in the same way, a man desires a woman. But after some consideration, the matter goes no farther (5.1.8).” The text does go on to state that women have less concern for morality than men have, and does assume that women don’t think about anything but men. And it is written in the service of the hero, the would-be adulterer, who reasons, if all women are keen to give it away, why shouldn’t one of them give it to him? But the author empathetically imagines various women’s reasons not to commit adultery (of which consideration for dharma comes last, as an afterthought), and the would-be seducer takes the woman’s misgivings seriously, even if only to disarm her (5.1.17-42). This discussion is ostensibly intended to teach the male reader of the text how to manipulate and exploit such women, but perhaps inadvertently, it also provides a most perceptive exposition of the reasons why inadequate husbands drive away their wives (5.1.51-54).

  Such passages may express a woman’s voice or at least a woman’s point of view. In a culture in which men and women speak to each other (which is to say, in most cultures), we might do best to regard the authors of most texts as androgynes, and the Kama-sutra is no exception. We can find women’s voices, sometimes speaking against their moment in history, perhaps even against their author. By asking our own questions, which the author may or may not have considered, we can see that his text does contain many answers to them, embedded in other questions and answers that may have been more meaningful to him.

  The Kama-sutra assumes a kind of sexual freedom for women that would have appalled Manu but simply does not interest Kautilya. To begin with, the text of the Kama-sutra was intended for women as well as men. Vatsyayana argues at some length that some women, at least (courtesans and the daughters of kings and ministers of state) should read his text and that others should learn its contents in other ways, as people in general were expected to know the contents of texts without actually reading them (1.3.1-14). Book 3 devotes one chapter to advice to virgins trying to get husbands (3.4.36-37), and book 4 consists of instructions for wives (the descriptions of co-wives jockeying for power could have served as the script for the opening of the Ramayana). Book 6 is said to have been commissioned by the courtesans of Pataliputra, presumably for their own use.

  Vatsyayana is also a strong advocate for women’s sexual pleasure. He tells us that a woman who does not experience the pleasures of love may hate her man and may even leave him for another (3.2.35; 4.2.31-35). If, as the context suggests, this woman is married, the casual manner in which Vatsyayana suggests that she leave her husband is in sharp contrast with position assumed by Manu. The Kama-sutra also acknowledges that women could use magicgo to control their husbands, though it regards this as a last resort (4.1.19-21).48 Vatsyayana also casually mentions, among the women that one might not only sleep with but marry (1.5.22), not only “secondhand” women (whom Manu despises as “previously had by another man”) but widows: “a widow who is tormented by the weakness of the senses . . . finds, again, a man who enjoys life and is well endowed with good qualities (4.2.31-34).”

  MARRIAGE AND RAPE

  The basic agreement of the three principal shastras, as well as their divergent emphases, is manifest in their different rankings of the eight forms of marriage that all three list.

  Let’s begin with Manu, who ranks the marriages in this order, each named after the presiding deity or supernatural figure(s):1. Brahma: A man gives his daughter to a good man he has summoned.

  2. Gods: He gives her, in the course of a sacrifice, to the officiating priest.

  3. Sages: He gives her after receiving from the bridegroom a cow and a bull.

  4. The Lord of Creatures: He gives her by saying, “May the two of you fulfill your dharma together.”

  5. Antigods: A man takes the girl because he wants her and gives as much wealth as he can to her relatives and to the girl herself.

  6. Centaurs (Gandharvas): The girl and her lover join in sexual union, out of desire.

  7. Ogres (Rakshasas): A man forcibly carries off a girl out of her house, screaming and weeping, after he has killed, wounded, and broken.

  8. Ghouls (Pishachas): The lowest and most evil of marriages takes place when a man secretly has sex with a girl who is asleep, drunk, or out of her mind (3.20.21-36).

  Manu insists that the marriages of the ghouls and the antigods should never be performed and that for all classes but Brahmins, the best marriage is when the couple desire each other.gp

  The Artha-shastra defines marriages much more briefly, names them differently, and puts them in a different order:1. Brahma.

  2. Lord of Creatures.

  3. Sages.

  4. Gods.

  5. Centaurs.

  6. Antigods (receiving a dowry).

  7. Ogres (taking her by force).

  8. Ghouls (taking her asleep or drunk) (3.2.2-9).

  Kautilya regards the first four as lawful with the sanction of the father of the bride, and the last four with the sanction of her father and the mother, because they are the ones who get the bride-price for her (3.2.10-11). Here, as usual, where Manu’s hierarchy depends on class, Kautilya’s depends on money. The Kama-sutra never lists the marriages at all, nor does it discuss the first four, but it gives detailed instructions on how to manage the three that are ranked last in Manu: the centaur, ghoul, and ogre marriages (3.5.12-30).

  A dharma-sutra in the third century BCE lists only six forms of marriages;49 it was left for all three of the later shastras to add the two last and worst forms, rape and drugging, a change that signals a significant loss for women. By regarding these two as worse than the other forms of marriage, but not to be ruled out, the shastras simultaneously legitimized rape as a form of marriage and gave some degree of legal sanction, retroactively, to women who had been raped. The inclusion of rape in all three lists might be taken as evidence that a wide divergence of customs was actually tolerated in India at that time, thoug
h as we have already heard Vatsyayana explicitly state, the fact that something is mentioned in a text is not proof that people should (or do) actually do it. That is, where Manu tells you not to do it and then how to do it, the Kama-sutra tells you how to do it and then not to do it. But both instances are evidence that the shastras acknowledge the validity, if not the virtue, of practices they do not like.

  As for their differences, not surprisingly, the Kama-sutra ranks the love match (the centaur wedding of mutual consent) as the best form of marriage (“because it gives pleasure and costs little trouble and no formal courtship, and because its essence is mutual love [3.5.30]”), while Manu ranks it the best for all classes except Brahmins, and Kautilya, ever the cynic, ranks it with the bad marriages (though as the best of that second quartet). Clearly there was quite a range of opinions about the way to treat brides at this time, some hearkening back to the earlier freedom of women at the time of the Mahabharata, others anticipating the narrowing of women’s options in the medieval period.

  THE THIRD NATURE: MEN AS WOMEN

  One subject on which Manu and Vatsyayana express widely divergent opinions is homosexuality. Classical Hinduism is in general significantly silent on the subject of homoeroticism, but Hindu mythology does drop hints from which we can excavate a pretty virulent homophobia.50 The dharma textbooks generally ignore, stigmatize, or penalize male homosexual activity: Manu prescribes either loss of caste (11.68) or the mildest of sanctions, a ritual bath (11.174), in dramatic contrast with the heavy penalties, including death, for heterosexual crimes like adultery; the Artha-shastra stipulates the payment of just a small fine (3.18.4, 4.13.236). Most Sanskrit texts regard atypical sexual or gender behavior 51 as an intrinsic part of the nature of the person who commits such acts and refer to such a person with the Sanskrit word kliba, which has traditionally been translated as “eunuch,” but did not primarily mean “eunuch.” Kliba includes a wide range of meanings under the general rubric of “a man who doesn’t do what a man’s gotta do,” gq a man who fails to be a man, a defective male, a male suffering from failure, distortion, and lack. It is a catchall term that the shastras used to indicate a man who was in their terms sexually dysfunctional (or in ours, sexually challenged), including someone who was sterile or impotent, a transvestite, a man who had oral sex with other men, who had anal sex, a man with mutilated or defective sexual organs, a man who produced only female children, a hermaphrodite, and finally, a man who had been castrated (for men were castrated in punishment for sexual crimes in ancient India, though such men were not used in harems). “An effeminate man” or, more informally and pejoratively, a “pansy” is probably as close as English can get.