Female Ascetics in Hinduism

2. The Woman Who Is Not a Householder: Widowhood, Unmarriageability, and Female Asceticism

41 2 The Woman Who Is Not a Householder Widowhood, Unmarriageability, and Female Asceticism Having considered the religious life of the ideal woman as properly married householder, I turn to those women who, through no choice of their own, are not householders, those who are involuntarily women-without-husbands. This category consists of three types: widows, girls and women who for various reasons are unmarriageable, and women who have rejected marriage. In this chapter I discuss only those whose having no husband is not self-willed: widows and the unmarriageable. The woman who refuses to marry, or a wife who leaves her husband, presents a special case. A number are found in asceticism, and subsequent chapters will discuss factors that allow a woman to reject marriage, and the conditions that might dispose her to asceticism. Here I wish to discuss only those whom one might justly characterize as casualties of the prevailing socio-religious order, those who would prefer the properly married status of g®hin¥, a woman householder. For all of these women, institutionalized asceticism is a potential alternative. In fact, earlier writers suggested a direct causal relationship between one of these conditions, widowhood, and entry into asceticism (Oman 1905, 245; Ghurye 1964, 222–23). My research indicates a somewhat more complex pattern and cautions against a theory that sees all the women who undertake formal asceticism as doing so out of social duress. However, we are still faced with the fact that the female 42 Female Ascetics in Hinduism ascetic world is composed predominantly of women who have been denied full participation as wives and mothers in the propitious world of householdership, and who are thus not g®hi£¥s The identification of proper womanhood with householdership poses a serious problem for those who cannot enter or remain in that status. Householdership is the norm against which even women ascetics as a group are assessed. Most householders, and certainly all the female ascetics I know, are very aware of the fact that though some ascetic women achieve an enhanced ritual status and occasionally even economic independence, and though the ascetic robes alone entitle them to respect, they are still in some profound sense aberrant. This cannot but affect their attitude toward themselves as well as the perceptions and attitudes of the larger society. In order to understand the female ascetic’s self-definition, and in order to make sense of the socio-religious processes at play in the relationship between the life of woman-as-g®hi£¥ and the life of woman-as-sådhu, we must clarify the position of those women who are neither. Out of the forty ascetic women in Benares who are thirty-five years of age or older, more than two-thirds are widows. The community also contains women or girls who for a variety of reasons have never been married at all. Less than a dozen of these chose asceticism rather than marriage. For the majority, marriage was not possible in the first place and so, like widows, they are involuntarily without husbands. To clarify the peculiar status of these girls or women who before taking initiation were doomed to remain outside the householder åßrama, through widowhood or other factors not of their own making, this chapter is divided into three parts. The first focuses on widows and the conditions of widowhood in the sectors of high-caste society from which the women ascetics of Benares come. The second clarifies the category of “girls and women who are unmarriageable.” The third identifies the difficulties faced by all those who are involuntarily without husbands and shows how the transition from the problematic status of a woman who is outside householdership into a woman within institutionalized asceticism can radically alter their lives. WIDOWHOOD: GENERAL RESTRICTIONS ON VIDHAVADHARMA In the earlier discussion of the textual definition of women’s religious duties, I noted that the Str¥dharmapaddhati gives careful The Woman Who Is Not a Householder 43 attention to vidhavadharma, the way of life appropriate to a widow (45r.5–48v.6; Leslie 1989, 298–304). In this text, marriage is a sacrament lasting for a woman’s lifetime: even after his death, her husband remains her god, she must be strictly celibate, and her daily life should demonstrate continued remembrance of him. Because the widow’s regime is designed to eliminate all passion, she is prohibited...