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235 14 Two Critiques of Women’s Vows JACK E. LLEWELLYN When the editors told me about their collaborative study of vows in South Asian religion, I automatically found myself working backward from English to the South Asian language that I know best, Hindi, substituting vrat, which would be the most common translation of the word “vow.” And when I thought of vrats, I naturally thought of the role that they play in the popular Hinduism of contemporary Indian women. This led me to read a book that I had been meaning to read for some time, Mary McGee’s study of just this popular practice, “Feasting and Fasting,” a book that is a veritable vrata-vishva-kosha, an encyclopedia of vrats. While McGee’s dissertation is in many ways a masterful work, applying great erudition to the analysis of the religion of ordinary women, there is still something about it that bothered me. This is a chapter about two critiques of the practice of vrats, one provoked by my reading of McGee’s important book and one that I found in the writings of Arya Samaj women. The second critique is different from the first in a way that only serves to highlight the normative questions involved. My Critique of Vrats Let me state my own prejudice as baldly as possible, just to stimulate a reaction from my reader. Aren’t vrats a bad thing?1 Aren’t they a part of a religion in which women are supposed to sacrifice their own needs and aspirations on the altar of their families? Aren’t they a reflection of a social system where a wife’s sphere of influence is limited to the home, while a man’s sphere includes the home but ranges into the world beyond, in which a wife turns herself inward 236 Jack E. Llewellyn toward her family, while a husband faces out toward the world, turning his back on his family? Aren’t vrats practices in which women mortify their own bodies for the good of others—a sacrifice no one is making for them? Now, maybe things aren’t all that bad. Certainly the practice of vrats is something that many contemporary Hindu women find liberating, not only affording them a pretext for spending time with other women, but also giving them access to some power, temporal as well as spiritual. But while I have made too strong a case against vrats in the preceding paragraph, I think that Mary McGee makes too strong a case for them in “Feasting and Fasting.” This was brought home to me especially as I finished the book. The concluding paragraph (before the lengthy appendices) reads: The words of Lord Krsna, more familiar to the women than those of Manu, perhaps speak more directly to the balance between women’s duties and desires as we have witnessed in our study of votive rites, when he says, “It is by taking delight in one’s assigned duties that a person attains to final perfection.” (McGee 1987: 608, quoting Bhagavad Gita 18.45a) It is noteworthy that the author (or authors) of the Gita is not dealing primarily with gender in this context, but with caste. Verse 41 argues that the actions (karma) of each of the four castes are appropriate to it. In her translation of this verse Barbara Stoler Miller says that these actions “are apportioned by qualities born of their intrinsic being” (Miller 1986: 149). R. C. Zaehner’s translation of the Gita makes the connection between caste and duty even more inexorable, saying that the deeds assigned on the basis of caste “arise from the nature of things as they are” (Zaehner 1969: 393). The three verses interposed between this one and the verse that McGee cites continue with the caste theme, with 42 and 43 spelling out the virtues of Brahmans and Kshatriyas, respectively, and 44 detailing the modes of livelihood of Vaishyas and Shudras. So, when the Gita says that “taking delight in one’s assigned duties” leads to “final perfection,” it is talking about the duties assigned on the basis of caste. I would not argue that McGee can’t quote the Bhagavad Gita in this way with respect to the duties of women, because what that book is talking about is really caste. Actually the Gita doesn’t say much about gender one way or the other. But I tend to agree with her that the Gita’s teaching on caste might...

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