"Ein Ungluck ist die Tochter": Zur Diskriminierung des Madchens im alten und heutigen Indien.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book Review

"Ein Ungluck ist die Tochter": Zur Diskriminierung des Madchens im alten und heutigen Indien. By RENATE SYED. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2001. Pp. 248.

The title of this volume is borrowed from the well-known statement in the Aitareyabrahmana (7.13 [33.1]): sakha ha jaya krpanam ha duhita jyotir ha putrah parame vyoman. More than eighty years ago Moriz Winternitz published Die Frau in den indischen Religionen, Band I: Die Frau im Brahmanismus. According to Syed the subject was in need of being treated again, first, because she was able to collect a far larger number of Sanskrit texts than those that were known to Winternitz, and, second, "angesichts der Situation vieler indischer Madchen in jungster Zeit" (p. 9). This binary approach to the subject accounts for the composition of the book: the five chapters in part one are each divided into two sections, "das heutige Indien" and "das alte Indien," part two deals with the traditional foundations of discrimination against girls, and part three is entitled "Indiens Tochter heute."

The numerous Sanskrit and allied texts, in the original and in translation (with exact references to the sources; bibliography, pp. 225-31), discussed in this volume constitute a valuable and comprehensive source of information for anyone, with or without Sanskrit, on any aspect of the status of women in classical India. The dates assigned to each text, which in some cases appear rather speculative, "erfolgte auf Wunsch des Verlages." Like all of us who work with Sanskrit texts, the author herself knows that "[a]llerdings ist die Datierung altindischer Werke schwierig, es konnen meist nur ungefahre Daten angefuhrt werden" (p. 23).

For the information on women in modern India the author draws on a vast array of recent books, articles, statistics, etc. (bibliography, pp. 231-48). Yet, here it occasionally shows that she is less immediately familiar with modern Indian sources than she is with the classical texts. To be sure, in a passage that is meant to explain the rise to power of daughters (rather than sons) such as Indira Gandhi and Benazir Butto (p. 21), the phrase "Jawaharlal Nehru hatte keine Tochter" is an obvious misprint for...