i) The Caste Structure

The subordination of women was crucial to the development of caste hierarchy. The higher the caste the greater were the constraints on women. It is observed that the development of gender division, based on the control of female sexuality, was integral to the formation of the social structure.

It might be relevant to ask: What was the need to control women’s sexuality? What was it that women’s power would endanger? How was it linked to material resources? For unravelling these questions it is important to understand the system of caste.

Historically, Indian society is categorized into thousands of sub-castes regionally known as ‘jatis’. However, the pan-Indian social hierarchy is based on the ‘varna’ hierarchy, which divides the Hindu population in four major groups: the Brahmin (priestly caste) at the top, followed by the Khatriya (warrior caste), then the Vaishya (commoners, usually known as trading castes) and at the bottom the Shudra (agricultural laborers and artisan). Some who are beyond the caste hierarchy were considered to be untouchables. The caste boundaries are maintained through strict purity – pollution principles, rules of commensality and endogamy, commitment to caste occupation and ascribed life-style. Ritual purity is in the nature of religious status but also coincided with economic wealth and social esteem. That is, the upper castes own more property and the lower castes are property less or have the least property. Over the decades the association of ritual status and economic status has undergone change. The concept of ‘dominant caste’ demonstrates this.

Three of the major signs of purity: vegetarianism, teetotalism and tight constraints on women, indicate that a significant degree of ritual purity comes through domestic activities. The control on women comes from two major aspects-

1. Women’s disinheritance from immovable property, removing them from the public

sphere and limiting them to the domestic sphere in the form of seclusion.

2. Far greater control is exercised by men over women’s sexuality through arranged marriage, child marriage, the prohibition of divorce, and strict monogamy for women, leading to sati and a ban on widow remarriage, including infant or child widows.

These strictures were enforced most strictly by the upper castes to maintain ritual purity, biological purity, caste supremacy and economic power. Lower caste groups attempting to achieve upward status mobility with improvement in economic power, also imbibe upper caste norms of constraining women’s freedom.

The ideological and material basis for maintaining the caste system was closely regulated by religious scriptures and the patriarchal, patrilineal and patrilocal family ideology.