Sthree Dharma

[Husky]

You're right-- in societies that practice some form of gender separation, the elites are better able to implement it than the common people, because non-elite women have to interact with men as a matter of economic survival.

That's not what I said or meant. Nothing to do with economic survival. It is that "regular" people - very much including women - are known to interact with everyone: there are sufficient examples in Hindu texts and people can't argue otherwise. So even from the SB they can't argue there was some special law for Hindu women as a gender being hidden away from men (let alone that men forced them to be hidden away).



At most, ISKCON can argue it was so for royalty (if that) and not for other Hindus. That is, ISKCON and others can't universalise it to all Hindu women even were they to find some concrete example of such limitation on Hindu royalty or high aristocracy (the example ISKCON found was not concrete; *at most* it can be argued to imply something similar to what was seen among other nations before and independent of islam).



Also, why do you still speak of gender segregation? No gender segregation was proved.



[quote name='Meluhhan' date='23 February 2016 - 08:37 AM' timestamp='1456196392' post='117936']

I was a little confused when I read this part, until I realized that "public" in this context meant "part of the state". Generally, when something is "public", it is available to everyone. But even if we assume that these women were part of the ruling apparatus, does it make any sense to keep them sealed away? Surely they must be interacting with ministers and other state officials?

[/quote]Yes, public in the sense of not private persons. It is an established term. Even until relatively recently, the concept and the subsequent term was still in use.

Generally, when something is "public", it is available to everyone.

Royalty belong to the populace. But not "available" - in any dubious sense - to the populace.

The old definition is that royalty cannot make private choices on major matters - they have no private lives. For instance, even whom they marry is a public matter, and therefore cannot be a personal choice. (And one can see the truth behind this rule in the fatal personal decisions of certain heathen kings who married spouses of missionary religions.)

Royal households generally can't afford their royal daughters to run off with the chimney sweep, shepherd, gardener, jester or shoemaker. (I inserted that line as a throwback to the fewer number of fairy tales that show a cute exception.) Royal chambermaids are collateral: their living space and thus behaviour conforms to that of their mistress. Not all nations' chambermaids got married or even had the chance thereof - though there's several indications that Indian royal handmaids got married (at least arranged marriages, just like their mistress).



Only very rich people like royalty and high aristocracy can afford to set aside separate wings anyway - besides, they're usually the only ones that can afford a castle or palace or more.

Do you realize what you've just done? In your effort to criticize Islamic purdah, you've described something worse-- a system where women are not just prohibited from choosing their life partners, but are also prohibited from interacting with most of humanity.

You misunderstood:



I did not make/push the case for the Indian situation. Except for the reference to Indian royal handmaids possibly being allowed to marry (an instance of which I seem to remember someone bringing up), I only stated what is the known case with western society (which is where the fairy tale examples of exceptions like chimney sweeps etc come from) - something not just ISKCONites tend to overlook - and said that that's the worst case they can ever argue for the Indian context: that "it's the same". Note that I don't know at all that it *was* the same for Indian royalty. I merely allowed for it, providing the worst case scenario and said 1. it can't compare unfavourably to what is known to have existed in non-islamic nations and 2. that in heathen spaces like China and possibly Greece and Persia, it still can't compare with islam (i.e. still not purdah), because what can at most be reasoned as "etiquette" (or rather, privileged behaviour of the privileged or the rich) is not enforced on gender at large. And certainly not in India's case, as we know everyday women were out and about and readily interacting, even in the examples others choose to provide.



And the fact that neither females nor males among royalty were regarded as private people in most if not all countries, shows that special behaviour by royalty can't be made into a gender issue either, at least not in heathen nations. For that, they need to martial special evidence. At least a case can be made for ancient Greece and even Rome of certain restrictions on females, and some Chinese say it was not too different in ancient China (except that within Chinese families, the power structure was that the 1st wife rather had all the power, not the husband and not wives 2 to n). But poorer Chinese families did not have n wives and could only manage 1, so it's hard to make universal rules about the ancient Chinese situation either.



The point was that detractors can't make an argument that the Indian case as supposedly implied in the SB - where it was moreover restricted to royalty - was worse than what has existed in multiple other parts of the world. And if anti-Hindus want to attack Hindus for this - as many have tried independent of ISKCON's own interests in the matter - they have to attack themselves/their ideal (i.e. the west) first, where it is well-attested.



I say let them argue the worst case - as people already have and will continue to - and Hindus can still easily show that it was not a law against gender in India. Even in the rather poor and ambiguous example that ISKCON provided, considering for the moment that their case holds good for palace women, they still 1. factually can't show it was the case for all Hindu women and 2. I've not yet seen anyone be able to argue that this was moreover the case in ancient times. (SB is not as old as some other Hindu materials.) I don't need to look up anything until they give me concrete instances. Ambiguous excerpt from Tulsidas and from SB, can be argued away just as easily as they insist on one interpretation.



While I covered the worst case scenario, my own preferred interpretation - possibly limited by the little I'm aware of it - is simply the first one I gave (which is why I listed it first):

- the women go up to shower flowers on Krishna. Easier done from somewhere high up like balconies. The Devas are often shown (in the Hindu epic cinema of yore) showering flowers on earth-dwelling divinities and on Hindu heroes for having acted righteously from up in the sky too.

a system where women are not just prohibited from choosing their life partners, but are also prohibited from interacting with most of humanity.

But, and here I specifically do not speak of Hindu society: surely you're already aware that in many countries aristocracy and royalty DID practice segregation of aristocracy from the rest of humanity as a rule (albeit with exceptions), right? Not just women note. (Even aristocratic Roman households did not willy-nilly marry non-aristocrats, nor did Korean and Chinese aristocratic lineages.) But this became a proper and implacable apartheid under christianity. The worst excesses thereof are seen in what led to the revolution in Europe. To pretend it was anything other than extreme apartheid is naivete. And that was church-sanctioned by the way.



"also prohibited from interacting with most of humanity"

Admittedly Roman and Greek women did have some restrictions placed on them as to where they could go and what they could do. (Their husbands or male family members could tell them not to go to say, the circus, and they'd usually be expected to follow).

Again: I don't know that the same was the case with Hindu kshatriya women. And have rather come across instances that suggest the same was NOT the case in Hindu India. At least in the context of the Mabharatham.** I don't want to make hard and fast rules about it, as I don't know how things were in India at the time the SB was concretised or even during the earliest mentions to the text (also because the time frames for both are tentative). I don't know much about Tulsidas' context either: he lived in a time and part of India that I don't know that much about. I can't declare that at the time the SB or Tulsidas included the bits which others point out as "purdah" that there was no special treatment of palace women and no special local dress code being followed, respectively. I can only argue that at worst, it can be no worse than what we saw in Europe and many parts of Asia among royalty and high aristocracy, and that it was clearly not a universal law against women (as per the SB itself). Since the worst case is not quite terrible, despite your alarmed reaction, and certainly neither uncommon nor anywhere as oppressive as islam, I see no need to look up details in Hindu texts. If you want, you can read through SB or look up instances from MBh and Harivamsha to make the more positive case about royal women.

** I'd suggest looking up narratives about Satyabhama for instance. Some were IIRC listed as being from the "southern recensions" of the Harivamsha. But you can find it online.

a system where women are not just prohibited from choosing their life partner

Who said this was specific to women, let alone in India? Let alone universally true for all Indian women? (Having said that, arranged marriages - which exist in many Asian countries, India but also Japan and China - do "limit" the choice of both men and women, though it doesn't prohibit choice entirely. Why no protest? It's been ingrained in Indian society for some time too. Why is it evil? I like how my E Asian colleagues still try to matchmake for their classmates from childhood. They've already arranged several marriages and it all worked out well.)



And at least India had swayamvaras for its kShatriya royalty. (It existed in some European fairy tales, and some Japanese narratives too, indicating earlier precedent of swayamvara-like instances in both the last-mentioned regions.)



Also, endogamy exists all over the world, most notably (for this argument) in tiny communities in Africa. Why is it no longer a "prohibitive system" (imposed, say, by "Hinduism/the caste system") where Africa is concerned? More likely, endogamy is just an ancient way of identity-preservation that humanity evolved. As others have long argued, it is already seen in the more ancient societal systems of Vanavasis and other remote communities, and lingered in more recent settled populations.



Further, it's a modern notion - perhaps one can attribute it to James Bond, traipsing the world and sleeping with exotic women from all over - that people will readily marry anyone and everyone. Let alone that women will. (No, most women won't: they're factually far less universal about choice of mate than men are. Or to put it in superficial terms: men are more egalitarian. I may return to this point in a subsequent post.) Besides, even in western and far-eastern nations, the rules about marriage between aristocrats held good for both genders, so there's no need to only be offended at any special injury to women when the same applied to men. Granted, in some of these societies for some specific period of time there, men were allowed to have additional female slaves - not all of whom became mistresses - (e.g. ancient Greece, where they thought enslaving the women and children of subjugated enemy nations was better than killing them like they killed off the men, before the Romans then refused to do even that much), and concubines/nth wives (China) etc.



Endogamy isn't necessarily "evil". People are even endogamous in terms of language: it used to be the case that, except for very rare "love marriages" that tended to exist more in theory than in reality, Tamizh-speaking Hindus did not readily marry say Kannadiga-speaking Kannadiga Hindus of the same community (even if the former may perhaps more likely marry Kannadiga-AND-Tamizh speaking Tamizh Hindus, of which I know actual cases). It's not really discrimination against Kannadiga Hndus. And it's certainly not something uniquely contingent on women.



Also, unless some rule only applies to women - and all women in a society - there's no need to go the feminist route and get all offended about "injustices to women" by said society. It's hypocritical to ignore that often the same rules apply to men too (far-eastern and western aristocrats and royalty usually couldn't readily marry a commoner either, despite fairy tales of the farmer's daughter winning the hand of the king with her clever answers to his trick questions).





Note: Maybe I already implied this earlier, but in case I didn't, I want to make it clear -

"islamic" veiling already existed in christianity - which is why western and Middle-Eastern women of christendom had their heads covered even outside the church for most of the time. This covering of christian women is actually a spin-off of the biblical religion, not unique to islam. Islam just ran with it and made it into a full-body prisoner's attire.

All that has nothing to do with the Greek aristocratic veil, which from authentic depictions can be transparent apparently, and which is not imposed on all Greek women.