Male guardians of women's virtue: a dharmasastric theme and its Jain variations.

• Author: Stuart, Mari Jyvasjarvi
• Position: Report

If there is one dharmasastric passage that finds its way into even the most cursory overviews on the subject of women in ancient India, it is quite probably this one:

pita raksati kaumare bharta raksati yauvane | raksanti sthavire putra na stri svatantryam arhati II MDh 9.3 Her father guards her in childhood, her husband guards her in her youth, and her sons guard her in her old age; a woman is not qualified to act independently. (1) This verse from the Manava-dharmathstra (MDh), like its numerous parallels elsewhere in the corpus of dharma literature, declares women to be categorically unfit for independent action, and assigns them to the care of a triad of guardian males--father, husband, and son. Even before MDh, the "doctrine" of women's lack of independence is asserted in the dharmasutras (VaDh 5.3; GauDh 18.1; BauDh 2.3.44-46). It is put in the mouth of Bhisma in the Mahabharata (13.46.13), and makes its way into other major dharmasastras, such as Yajnavalkya, Narada, and visnu. In their curtailment of women's independent agency and their assertion of men's prerogative to act as agents on their behalf, such passages have made the dharmasastras a convenient site for mining textual examples about patriarchal oppression of women in ancient South Asia. As a result, the Brahmanical communities that produced these texts have tended to be singled out as the bastion of such oppression, as more restrictive of women than any other community.

What has sharpened such a characterization is the contrasting portrayal of Indian Buddhism and Jainism as offering greater freedom for women. Pioneering scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the tone with their rather romanticized portrayals of Buddhism, in particular, as a haven for women who broke free from the constraints of patriarchy. (2) Even though more recent scholarship generally acknowledges the degree to which Jain and Buddhist texts and institutions, too, have been systematically shaped by androcentric assumptions and patriarchal interests, the motif of the independent Jain or Buddhist woman--contrasted with the Brahmanical woman guarded by her male relatives--still persists and slips into the prose of even the most careful scholar. We see this when, for example. Katherine Young argues that Buddhist and Jain nuns were "an example of independent women in the society" that caused Brahmanical families to guard their women even more strictly (1987: 71). Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar state that nuns, along with courtesans, "were the only women in ancient India who could move freely throughout the entire social system" (2002: xiv). Susan Murcott makes the same equation between these two groups of women who possessed an "unimaginable" degree of independence: "Neither had active male guardians; both moved relatively freely in the public sphere" (1991: 123). Patrick Olivelle, in turn, counterposes MDh's famous guarding verse to what he perceives to be a different kind of ethos in Buddhism and Jainism: "Here are Buddhist and Jain nuns exercising a daring freedom of choice, living lives in female communities outside direct male control, and taking control of their own sexuality" (1997: 442).

Yet, if we examine what is said about nuns and their way of life in the monastic texts of the Buddhist and Jain traditions themselves, a very different picture emerges. In fact, we find little evidence that supports the above characterizations of a life of radical independence. Both in the canonical monastic codes, and in the later commentaries, nuns' movement outside of their lodging is strictly regulated. Although they do live in communities of women, these communities are by no means independent of the supervision and control of male authorities. Nor is it the case that monastic authors trust nuns to be fully in charge of their own sexuality.

It is true that these monastic texts are normative, prescriptive texts composed or compiled by male authors, not transparent descriptions of how the women in the authors' communities in fact lived. Then again, the same could also be said about the dharmasatras. The complex question of how prescriptive texts can be used as historical sources is beyond the scope of this essay, particularly as I have discussed it elsewhere (Jyvasjarvi 2011). What deserves closer examination here, instead, is the way in which the asvatantrya doctrine--shorthand for women's lack of independence and the consequent imperative that they should be guarded by men--has been so easily and unproblematically aligned with some religious communities and not others.

In what follows, I seek to historicize the topos of men's guardianship of women in Indic texts by placing dharmasastric discussions on this topic alongside comparable passages in post-canonical Jain texts. My research on Svetambara Jain commentaries on monastic discipline suggests that, far from being the prerogative of Brahmanical texts alone, the asvatantrya doctrine was shared by authors across the boundaries of religious traditions in premodern South Asia. When discussing the appropriate conduct of nuns, Jain texts, too, assert that women are not fit for independent action, but must be guarded and supervised by male members of their community. They articulate this with passages paralleling--sometimes almost word for word--the above-cited MDh verse. The monastic context, however, raises complex questions about how the imperative for male guardianship of women is to be applied in practice. Upon joining the order, nuns are supposed to leave their families, including the male relatives whose task it is to guard them. Who, then, will guard the nuns? The solution that Jain texts offer is to entrust the monks with the task.

The reason why male authorities in various sectarian communities place such emphasis on men's guardianship of women. I suggest, is that they share a notion of collective honor in which women's bodies function as an index of the purity and status of their community. In many hierarchical, patriarchal societies, such as would have characterized much of premodern India, the honor of a community is dependent on the honor of its female members--understood specifically as demonstrable curtailment of sexuality on the one hand, and lack of displays of independent agency on the other. Men cannot remain indifferent about how women conduct themselves, as the perceived virtue of those women is inseparably bound up with their own esteem: the fact that the women with whom one is associated are "well-guarded" is what marks a man as authoritative, honorable, and manly. As far as the dharmagastras are concerned, such an interpretation may seem old hat. However, as I demonstrate below, we see a similar interlinking of honor-by-association even in Jain monastic communities whose male and female members are not connected to each other (at least not primarily) through kinship ties or sexual relations. Jain monastic authors are highly preoccupied with the guardedness and modesty of nuns because the nuns' conduct makes a statement about the uprightness of the monks.

Recent scholarship on Indian Buddhism has called attention to the fact that Buddhist monks were assigned at least some of the responsibilities of a lay patriarch. Liz Wilson, for example, cites the guarding verse of MDh 5.147 when discussing women's subordination to male authority in Pali Buddhist texts (Wilson 1995: 46). "The pseudofamilial structure of the sangha," she goes on to suggest, "subordinates the daughters of the Buddha to male authority figures, namely the Buddha as father and, in his postparinibbanic absence, the sons of the Buddha as the father's doubles on earth" (p. 48). As Ute Husken points out, the result is something of a conundrum for Buddhist monks:

It was clear to [the Buddha] that women belonging to no household would be deprived of protection. Transferral of this protecting role to the monks would have meant that they would have had to take on within the Samgha the very role which they had just decided to give up by joining the order to concentrate on their spiritual development. (Husken 2000: 61) However, to my knowledge, no attempt has yet been made to examine how this protective role is articulated in Jain monastic texts, and how exactly Jain monastic communities try to resolve the dilemma Husken describes. Namely, in order to be taken seriously as men in charge of their communities, monks have to fulfill the role of the male guardian and overseer for the female members of their order. As a result, they end up becoming involved, sometimes intensely, in the practical affairs of the nuns' community. Yet, such involvement with women is precisely the kind of worldly concern they supposedly left behind when renouncing family life. Moreover, monks cannot become too intimately involved with nuns, for that would also harm the public image of the monastic community by casting doubt on the strictness of their vows of celibacy.

It is precisely this dynamic that I hope to illuminate here through an examination of Jain variations of the guarding ideology in early medieval vetambara Jain commentaries on monastic discipline. I focus on the Brhatkalpabhasya (BKBh) and Vyavaharabhasya (VavBh) attributed to the late sixth-century C.E. Svetambara Jain exegete Sanghadasa. (3) These commentaries, written in Maharastri Prakrit verse, comment on the canonical Kalpa-sutra and Vyavahara-sutra respectively. They belong to the bhasya layer of the extensive body of Jain commentarial literature, representing an intermediate stage between the pithy, index-like niryukti texts and the expansive medieval vrttis and tikas.

While interesting comparisons can be drawn between these commentaries and contemporaneous Buddhist commentaries, the Buddhist material brings with it unique complexities to which I cannot do proper justice within the scope of this article, and which therefore deserves a separate treatment elsewhere. (4)...