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Page 7 of 7
Getting to know the past better
By Romila Thapar
(cntd)
Historian Romila Thapar
But the equally important aspect of new work in
social history is gender history: the demonstration that women are central
to the organization of society - that women cannot be dismissed or made
marginal, and that the structure of society cannot be discussed without
considering the role and function of women. Despite what the prescriptive
texts may say there is much evidence to indicate that women of all groups
were subordinated, although the degree may have varied. The question to be
asked is why this was so. The answer lies in many facets of life, one being
that the subordination of women permitted a social control over marriage
alliances and these were and are, crucial to the way in which a society is
organized and what powers vest with whom. This also relates to the question
of inheritance where laws were drawn up to consolidate property. Such laws
were often detrimental to the status of women for when they were applied the
laws did not always uphold the status of women.
In this connection historians are now beginning to listen to the voices of
women. What I mean by this is that there are texts and documents that
capture, as it were, the views and feelings of women. Let me give you two
examples: in the Buddhist tradition, women were permitted to become nuns.
Some among them composed hymns and poems as did the monks. The Theri Gatha,
put together at the turn of the Christian era, is a large collection of
hymns composed by them. It is somewhat amazing because they write in a
forthright manner about the world that they have come from and its joys and
sorrows, they tell us why they have become nuns, and what it means to them -
not as a formality but in a personal way. Such statements are now being
analyzed as sources for the history of women. Similarly among the Bhakti
teachers, the hymns of some of the women who preached and sang, such as
Andaal in the Tamil area and Mirabai in Rajasthan, are also being seen as
the legitimate perspectives of women on the world of their times.
Another method of assessing the status of women involves a fresh approach to
creative literature. Literature may be fictional, but can be analyzed as an
artifact of history, indicating this status in an indirect way. I have tried
to do this with the well-known narratives about Shakuntala: a young woman
who lives in the forest and is met by the king one day when he is out
hunting. They fall in love and he proposes a marriage by mutual consent. He
returns to the capital and when she arrives some time later bearing his
child he rejects her. But ultimately the matter is resolved and the story
ends happily.
In the first version of the story which occurs in the Mahabharata, the young
woman makes the marriage conditional to his recognizing their son as his
heir to which the king agrees. When she takes the child born thereafter to
the king's court he rejects her. But she stands her ground and there is an
exchange of choice abuse. She is a spirited and independent woman. She
finally decides to leave her son at the court and to go back. At this point
a heavenly voice proclaims that what she has said is correct. The king, true
to type, says that he wanted the legitimacy of his son to be established and
now that that had been done, he accepts her.
The story recurs in a much better known version in the famous play by
Kalidasa written a few centuries later and called Abhijnana-Shakuntalam. The
core of the story remains the same, but it is no longer for recitation among
a society of epic heroes. It is now a drama to be performed at the royal
court. Consequently, Shakuntala becomes a reserved and shy woman, conforming
to the romantic ideal. When she is rejected by the king she is desperate,
and her prayers for help lead to her being whisked away by her mother. This
story plays on the idea of a lost ring and a loss of memory. Finally, there
is a resolution to the problem and they come together, but the treatment of
the woman is different and one sees it as partially, the difference between
the ethos
of the court and of the heroic society of the epic, each constituting a
different audience.
And then, in the 18th century, a version of the story is told in Braj bhasha,
which as a language gradually improved its status from being a popular
language to being used in some of the courts of northern India. Shakuntala
in this version is more akin to the Shakuntala of the epic and expresses
herself through a dialogue which is quite racy. She treats the king as she
would an ordinary man. The social context is again different as is the
attitude of the author to the woman. The history of the story becomes even
more interesting because the Kalidasa play is translated into English and
then into German. It becomes a symbol of German romanticism in which
Shakuntala is projected as the child of nature. Then in the 19th century,
when the British colonial authors and scholars take it up, they are
disturbed by the marriage being a marriage by mutual consent and not a
formal marriage. So there are objections to the moral and erotic aspects of
the play, which are disapproved of. The point that I am trying to make is
that in each case, the woman is treated differently by the different set of
authors or commentators. What we are becoming conscious of now is that
although this is fiction and has no historicity, nevertheless, the versions
of the narrative reflect a series of historical moments and locations, and
each of these indicates a change in the way in which particular social
groups perceive the role of women.
Let me conclude with a few remarks on another aspect of history which has
become important in contemporary India: regional history. The visibility of
regional history was brought into focus by two developments in particular.
One was that the view of Indian history, the subcontinental history, moved
away from the Gangetic valley and began to be looked at from a regional
perspective. The other was that the search for new data - texts and
artifacts - required a study of regional history in greater depth than
before. The artifacts suggested the need to look in detail at more localized
cultures. The texts were not always in Sanskrit or Prakrit and more often
were in early forms of the regional languages. These provided a fresh
perspective of the history of the region, as well as some reorientation of
sub-continental history.
But regional history has also gradually become the history of the
present-day states of the Indian Union, with their contemporary boundaries.
The state tends to be imposed on the region. There have been attempts at
tracing state boundaries back to earlier times. Historically, this is an
anachronistic exercise because present day boundaries are, in fact, the
result of a long historical process which culminates in the present, and
consequently, one cannot talk about present-day states having existed in the
past; they exist only in the present.
History makes it clear that boundaries of states are not static. Boundaries
change sometimes from decade to decade, sometimes from century to century,
and they change together with the changes brought about by historical
events. Attempts to trace current boundaries to earlier times seem futile.
The more significant question concerns the defining of a region. It hinges
in part also on the nature of the states that have preceded the present. In
the 1950s, the nation-state of India re-organized the boundaries of the
constituent states on the basis of language or what has been called
linguistic states. The boundaries are relatively recent and historically
there has been some overlap and some fading into neighbouring areas.
(Keynote address at the inauguration of the
Karachi International Book
Fair on December 7, 2005)
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