Post 2
Here follows what I think is a good illustration of why I don't want to guess at what happened in centuries not so familiar to me, in parts of India not well-known to me (i.e. the context of SB's composition, rather than the context in which it was set):
Meluhhan, if you can, look up a book called "Stories of Vikramaditya - Simhasana Dwatrimsika" published by Bhavan's Book University, where one V.A.K Aiyer translated
If you read it, consider how much you recognise of it: specifically how the social aspects therein compare to
- what you know of Ramayanam and Mahabharatam contexts,
- the period ascribed to SB's composition (a version of SB was to already be referred to in the Matsya Purana, which is said to be at least 4th century CE and possibly earlier. But that version of the SB is to have been somewhat different from the current version. The latter has been estimated to have been last concretised in the 6th century CE.)
- the period of Tulsidas (15th or 16th century apparently). I myself know practically nothing of Tulsidas' context.
For instance, one of the book's opening stories has Ujjain's King Vikramaditya marry a princess while under the guise of a fabulously rich merchant. He had only initially attended the princess' swayamvara "as a silent witness to the function", but because she's so "beautiful" - and every female character he ends up marrying has that description - he employs a mantra on her during her swayamvara so that she is compelled to pick him, since he's not actually there as one of the suitors (not being his royal self) and she wasn't therefore even contemplating on picking him. After garlanding her, the princess then faints. Her royal father and the other princes gathered are aghast that she garlanded a "merchant", but she's convinced her choice must be royal despite his appearance as a merchant. And Vikramaditya himself "felt that, if he did not make his identity known soon, his stay in the palace would become impossible. For, no commoner, however exhalted, can hope to get an unreserved respect in a royal household."
Note that the king did not kick the man out for being an apparent merchant whom the princess chose, but respected the outcome of the swayamvara (though Vikramaditya had manipulated this). However, the fact that no one was totally pleased with the princess' chosen husband being a merchant seems to nevertheless indicate to me that this was not a rule and not anything people would have readily allowed in the normal course of events. (C.f. in the Ramayanam context at least, Rajas could have a Vaishya wife. In the Mahabharatam too, one raja married a fisherman's daughter.)
In the collection of translated folktales about Vikramaditya, the picture it paints is that
=> the royal women do seem to have their own apartments, though they may not be confined to it. In any case, female characters do seem to be able to go out and about a lot. And more than that: both the men and the women - at least the married ones - seem to have intimate relationships rather easily.
=> Further,
- there's a story of a queen who has an affair with her stableboy. As a result her husband (married to 360 women, of which the unfaithful queen was the primary wife) is tired of it all and decides to become a sannyasi
- there's a story of a merchant woman who says out loud that one should not get caught at infidelity, and whom Vikramaditya marries to test if she meant what she said (but he doesn't seem to consummate his marriage to her). Eventually, she spends an entire night in the company of a washerwoman's son who became infatuated with her. Then Vikramaditya marries her off to the washerwoman's son and makes them king and queen of somewhere.
So
- the women don't just marry upwards (or have upwardly mobile affairs), as seen in the above examples
- and not all the women are all that loyal to their husbands either. Nor are the men. Or at least, except for courtesans, kings seem to marry whichever princess they want to next sleep with. And then we don't hear about that woman (usually princess) ever again. Kinda like James Bond - a different woman every movie - but limited to Indian women. Not that the female characters particularly appealed either. Sure, they were all described as "beautiful", and some had motivations or ulterior motives of their own, but there was nothing I particularly admired in either the females or males.
=> Various male characters visit various courtesans. (And one courtesan thought nothing of contemplating the infanticide of a baby should it turn out to be a boy: but girl babies were perfectly acceptable. The woman who was tasked with killing the baby thought that the crime would bring evil, and so she refused to kill it. Still, where's the outrage when there's deadly discrimination against boy babies? I suppose it doesn't fit the larger narrative one regularly hears about how unconverted India is anti-women and that women are oppressed etc.)
- Many if not most characters are adulterers - and the ones these cheat with, often have their own secret lovers in turn. One adulterer had a bad ending (got killed for infidelity) while many have a happy ending - they get to run off with their lovers (courtesy of Vikramaditya & co.'s generosity).
I don't know that the above descriptions are limited to just the 11th-13th century (which is before Tulsidas and after SB), because apparently even Nagarjuna's background is IIRC supposed to be - as per Buddhist hagiography I'm guessing - that he used to chase after women and sneak into princess' bedrooms and make one uh "romantic" conquest after another, before he had his Ashoka-like 180 degree change of heart, turned Buddhist and is then to have penned celebrated Buddhist tracts about how women are hateful/bad news. (Some people seem to blow hot and cold. How about being on neutral?) Nagarjuna is to have lived in the 2nd to 3rd centuries CE, and the alleged females he encountered in the days of his amorous adventures were clearly more "out-going" (in many ways) than what ISKCON claims of the palace women in SB.
As a result, it seems to me to be very difficult to draw any consistent picture of what was OK and not OK for even royal women (or for that matter, men) at various periods in Indian history. I'm not even sure I find much consistency. Of course, folktales may merely be fanciful - the aforementioned ones about Vikramaditya (having him live 2000 years) certainly have elements that indicate they're just tales even to the teller and the audience, even if many of the "magical" elements are a bit like what is claimed of tantra and/or are consistent with more serious earlier native narratives (visits to Indraloka, etc).
Perhaps various social norms may have prevailed at different periods in India, or in different parts of India at different periods. Though I personally find the ISKCON spin of Indian palace women being restricted from contact with men to be less likely, considering the picture painted by such 11th-13th century folktales as above, or instances such as of Nagarjuna's backdrop (which has an earlier context), or the picture that the Kamasutra paints of the amount of licence in its period. (I note wackypedia very generously still dates the Kamasutra to 4th century BCE - 2nd century CE; a generosity not extended to Hindu texts that are very clearly far older, showing more of the anti-heathen prejudice in western dating of heathen texts versus ones found to be sufficiently secular.)
I certainly never got the feeling that Indian women were restricted - or peculiarly restricted on account of their gender - in coming across such materials.
Privately, I've always preferred the character of the natives as in the itihAsas and the pauranic narratives I've heard retold (not ISKCON interpretations, obviously). It always seemed to me that there was sufficient freedom coupled with self-regulation there. Also, people choosing to be sensible seems to me to be infinitely better than controlling their actions to conform to what is deemed sensible by societal norms. That way one can better evaluate their actual characters too.
Also, I find that the characters of the females in the itihAsas to Kumarasambhava are often more fully-rounded and likeable, like the male ones: the women are not left at being described as merely extraordinarily "beautiful" etc (which in later literature just seems to translate into "good to sleep with"; sadly I have little better to say on that class of Indian literature), but they have actual characters and moreover have characters that people can relate to or identify with. Characters that seem like rational, real persons, rather than being trophy prizes or props in some story or in somebody's poem.
Here follows what I think is a good illustration of why I don't want to guess at what happened in centuries not so familiar to me, in parts of India not well-known to me (i.e. the context of SB's composition, rather than the context in which it was set):
Meluhhan, if you can, look up a book called "Stories of Vikramaditya - Simhasana Dwatrimsika" published by Bhavan's Book University, where one V.A.K Aiyer translated
Quote:"the stories of Vikramaditya ... among the oldest collection of folk-tales centering round the personality of King Vikramaditya of Ujjain. First written in Sanskrit, a number of slighty different versions are extant in all the major languages of India".
"The original authorship of these stories is unknown, even as their date; but they are generally believed to have originated during the period 11th to 13th centuries."
If you read it, consider how much you recognise of it: specifically how the social aspects therein compare to
- what you know of Ramayanam and Mahabharatam contexts,
- the period ascribed to SB's composition (a version of SB was to already be referred to in the Matsya Purana, which is said to be at least 4th century CE and possibly earlier. But that version of the SB is to have been somewhat different from the current version. The latter has been estimated to have been last concretised in the 6th century CE.)
- the period of Tulsidas (15th or 16th century apparently). I myself know practically nothing of Tulsidas' context.
For instance, one of the book's opening stories has Ujjain's King Vikramaditya marry a princess while under the guise of a fabulously rich merchant. He had only initially attended the princess' swayamvara "as a silent witness to the function", but because she's so "beautiful" - and every female character he ends up marrying has that description - he employs a mantra on her during her swayamvara so that she is compelled to pick him, since he's not actually there as one of the suitors (not being his royal self) and she wasn't therefore even contemplating on picking him. After garlanding her, the princess then faints. Her royal father and the other princes gathered are aghast that she garlanded a "merchant", but she's convinced her choice must be royal despite his appearance as a merchant. And Vikramaditya himself "felt that, if he did not make his identity known soon, his stay in the palace would become impossible. For, no commoner, however exhalted, can hope to get an unreserved respect in a royal household."
Note that the king did not kick the man out for being an apparent merchant whom the princess chose, but respected the outcome of the swayamvara (though Vikramaditya had manipulated this). However, the fact that no one was totally pleased with the princess' chosen husband being a merchant seems to nevertheless indicate to me that this was not a rule and not anything people would have readily allowed in the normal course of events. (C.f. in the Ramayanam context at least, Rajas could have a Vaishya wife. In the Mahabharatam too, one raja married a fisherman's daughter.)
In the collection of translated folktales about Vikramaditya, the picture it paints is that
=> the royal women do seem to have their own apartments, though they may not be confined to it. In any case, female characters do seem to be able to go out and about a lot. And more than that: both the men and the women - at least the married ones - seem to have intimate relationships rather easily.
=> Further,
- there's a story of a queen who has an affair with her stableboy. As a result her husband (married to 360 women, of which the unfaithful queen was the primary wife) is tired of it all and decides to become a sannyasi
- there's a story of a merchant woman who says out loud that one should not get caught at infidelity, and whom Vikramaditya marries to test if she meant what she said (but he doesn't seem to consummate his marriage to her). Eventually, she spends an entire night in the company of a washerwoman's son who became infatuated with her. Then Vikramaditya marries her off to the washerwoman's son and makes them king and queen of somewhere.
So
- the women don't just marry upwards (or have upwardly mobile affairs), as seen in the above examples
- and not all the women are all that loyal to their husbands either. Nor are the men. Or at least, except for courtesans, kings seem to marry whichever princess they want to next sleep with. And then we don't hear about that woman (usually princess) ever again. Kinda like James Bond - a different woman every movie - but limited to Indian women. Not that the female characters particularly appealed either. Sure, they were all described as "beautiful", and some had motivations or ulterior motives of their own, but there was nothing I particularly admired in either the females or males.
=> Various male characters visit various courtesans. (And one courtesan thought nothing of contemplating the infanticide of a baby should it turn out to be a boy: but girl babies were perfectly acceptable. The woman who was tasked with killing the baby thought that the crime would bring evil, and so she refused to kill it. Still, where's the outrage when there's deadly discrimination against boy babies? I suppose it doesn't fit the larger narrative one regularly hears about how unconverted India is anti-women and that women are oppressed etc.)
- Many if not most characters are adulterers - and the ones these cheat with, often have their own secret lovers in turn. One adulterer had a bad ending (got killed for infidelity) while many have a happy ending - they get to run off with their lovers (courtesy of Vikramaditya & co.'s generosity).
I don't know that the above descriptions are limited to just the 11th-13th century (which is before Tulsidas and after SB), because apparently even Nagarjuna's background is IIRC supposed to be - as per Buddhist hagiography I'm guessing - that he used to chase after women and sneak into princess' bedrooms and make one uh "romantic" conquest after another, before he had his Ashoka-like 180 degree change of heart, turned Buddhist and is then to have penned celebrated Buddhist tracts about how women are hateful/bad news. (Some people seem to blow hot and cold. How about being on neutral?) Nagarjuna is to have lived in the 2nd to 3rd centuries CE, and the alleged females he encountered in the days of his amorous adventures were clearly more "out-going" (in many ways) than what ISKCON claims of the palace women in SB.
As a result, it seems to me to be very difficult to draw any consistent picture of what was OK and not OK for even royal women (or for that matter, men) at various periods in Indian history. I'm not even sure I find much consistency. Of course, folktales may merely be fanciful - the aforementioned ones about Vikramaditya (having him live 2000 years) certainly have elements that indicate they're just tales even to the teller and the audience, even if many of the "magical" elements are a bit like what is claimed of tantra and/or are consistent with more serious earlier native narratives (visits to Indraloka, etc).
Perhaps various social norms may have prevailed at different periods in India, or in different parts of India at different periods. Though I personally find the ISKCON spin of Indian palace women being restricted from contact with men to be less likely, considering the picture painted by such 11th-13th century folktales as above, or instances such as of Nagarjuna's backdrop (which has an earlier context), or the picture that the Kamasutra paints of the amount of licence in its period. (I note wackypedia very generously still dates the Kamasutra to 4th century BCE - 2nd century CE; a generosity not extended to Hindu texts that are very clearly far older, showing more of the anti-heathen prejudice in western dating of heathen texts versus ones found to be sufficiently secular.)
I certainly never got the feeling that Indian women were restricted - or peculiarly restricted on account of their gender - in coming across such materials.
Privately, I've always preferred the character of the natives as in the itihAsas and the pauranic narratives I've heard retold (not ISKCON interpretations, obviously). It always seemed to me that there was sufficient freedom coupled with self-regulation there. Also, people choosing to be sensible seems to me to be infinitely better than controlling their actions to conform to what is deemed sensible by societal norms. That way one can better evaluate their actual characters too.
Also, I find that the characters of the females in the itihAsas to Kumarasambhava are often more fully-rounded and likeable, like the male ones: the women are not left at being described as merely extraordinarily "beautiful" etc (which in later literature just seems to translate into "good to sleep with"; sadly I have little better to say on that class of Indian literature), but they have actual characters and moreover have characters that people can relate to or identify with. Characters that seem like rational, real persons, rather than being trophy prizes or props in some story or in somebody's poem.