Sacrificed Wife, Sacrificer's Wife: Women, Ritual, and Hospitality in Ancient India.

• Author: Smith, Frederick M.
• Position: Review

By STEPHANIE W. JAMISON. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1996. Pp. xvi + 340. $55 (cloth); $22 (paper).

Stephanie Jamison has written an intelligent, engaging, and indispensable account of the role of women in ancient Aryan society, at least as depicted in the Vedic literature, and, to a lesser extent, in the Mahabharata. Her interpretations rely strictly on philological precision and textual exegesis, in time-honored Indological fashion. In other words, she does not resort primarily to extra-disciplinary "theory." Jamison proudly, but without arrogance or condescension, defends her method, which, not without reason, she sees as endangered. Indeed, she believes it holds great promise in explicating problems that are too often turned over to theorists with little familiarity with the native language(s). She asserts that the present project, including its methodology, is valuable not just for understanding certain Vedic texts and the role of women reflected in them, but for women's studies as a discipline. And about this she is surely correct, at least for understanding the history of women in India. As an unashamed classicist and Indologist she contends that the mastery of language, not just its casual study, is a tool of unchallengeable value in realizing this goal. In a statement which Indologists ought fully to support, swamped as they are with books by scholars less trained and careful than she, Jamison states: "To work only with translations, or to know only enough of a language to stumble through the text with a translation as crutch, is willfully to ignore the potentially more fruitful source of information about the forgotten and marginalized segments of society" (p. 12). About this she is also surely correct, because it is all too common to find studies in which an author has clearly worked with text in front, dictionary at the left hand, and previous translation at the right hand, all in the service of altering a word or two of a previous translation, thus avoiding the ignominy of actually quoting someone else, even if the previous translator, whose interpretative ideas might be outdated, really did know the language.

It comes as no surprise, then, that one of the great virtues of this excellent book is the translations: indeed, anyone with an interest in translating Vedic texts will profit immensely from studying the splendid translations presented here. Always providing the Sanskrit texts for ready reference, Jamison translates with fastidious attention to particle, upasarga, voice, and clause construction. The translations, on the whole, are presented in a lapidary, efficient prose that avoids paraphrase and those unwieldy and excessively technical renderings that all too often are more lifeless and baffling than the supposedly dead language from which they derive.

Jamison amply acknowledges problems in retrieving women's voices. She notes, for example, that we are often swayed by "idealized rules of conduct in the law codes and the idealized narratives in which dharmic principles are applied" (p. 7). Yet, countering the standardized misogyny of the male-authored text, which is handled dismissively or ideologically by many modern scholars, Jamison asserts that the "misogynist maxims" (p. 12) themselves express "areas of anxiety about women" (p. 15). It is these anxieties that she seeks to explore in this volume. The focus throughout most of the book is on one particular woman: the wife (patni) of the Vedic ritual patron (yajamana). The experience of the patni, as well as of other women depicted in the Mahabharata, demonstrates that such a woman, idealized but no doubt real, was married, a bearer of children, and purveyor of hospitality. As such, she "plays a crucial role in knitting together her community. By producing sons, she insures the linkage of generations and the continued veneration of the ancestors. By dispensing food and hospitality, she forges harmonious links between different segments of secular Aryan society. By her role in the srauta ritual (and by making such ritual possible), she links gods and men and allows the religious life of the community to proceed" (p. 254). But Jamison quickly adds that this rosy picture (which summarizes yet another genre of ideological writing about women in ancient India) "puts a deceptively positive spin on the conceptual position of this wife." In fact, she continues, "all the linkages just mentioned are perilous and anxiety producing. Allotting the woman important roles there essentially makes her into cannon fodder" (p. 254). She "incurs the risks of hospitality" in marital life precisely because she is "in essence a permanent 'guest,' almost a hostage to the proper hostly behavior of a set of functional strangers, her in-laws" (p. 255). In spite of this, however, Jamison seeks to rescue the woman from the caricature of her usual presentation.

Jamison's frame story is the myth of Manu's cups (MS 4.8.1; cf. KS 30.1/KapS 46.4, SBM 1.1.4.14-17), a fascinating, if highly compressed, tale of hospitality and transfer...