Book Review: Kumkum Roy,ed.,Looking Within,Looking Without: Exploring Households in the Subcontinent Through Time,Essays in Memory of Nandita Prasad Sahai

This is an important collection of essays that emerged out of a conference on the household in South Asian history, organised by Kumkum Roy and Nandita Prasad Sahai at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2011. After Sahai passed away tragically in 2013, Roy has edited the volume and dedicated it to Sahai’s memory. While the history of households in South Asia has attracted some attention recently, ¹ it remains a relatively neglected and under-researched area. As with many other themes in South Asian history, a discussion of long-term histories of the household and of comparative contexts has also been constrained by an exclusive focus on region and periodisation, both treated as bounded entities. This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the literature, bringing together as it does essays covering a very long period—from the mid-first millennium bce to the eighteenth century ce.

The authors tap a wide range of sources: archaeological excavation reports, inscriptional evidence, the epics and Puranas, the normative dharmasastra literature, fable literature from the Pali canon, medical treatises in Sanskrit, didactic texts, textualised compositions in devotional traditions, sculpture and painting, origin legends of religious shrines, sectarian hagiographies, and judicial and revenue records from the early modern era and the early colonial era.

In her introductory essay, Roy raises several key questions, reiterated and elaborated by different contributors to the volume. For one, how were households constituted and sustained, and how did they reproduce themselves across generations? What was the relationship between membership of the household through ties of kinship, whether ‘real’ or ‘fictive’, on the one hand, and co-residence, on the other? What analytical gains does a focus on the household bring to an older and more established scholarship on the history of kinship and family? How were the porous boundaries between households and other institutional contexts created, and how did those boundaries shift and evolve over time? As Roy suggests, a focus on the household allows us to think of histories of the quotidian, of the mundane, and, crucially, of histories of affect, as these intersect with the concerns and questions of a more well-worked political and social history.

Two essays stand out for their methodological innovation. One is the essay by the archaeologists Supriya Varma and Jaya Menon on the households of ceramic producers between 200 bce and 500 ce, at the site of Indor Khera in the upper Ganga plains (northeast of contemporary Mathura and Aligarh). The essay, the first chapter in the collection, is useful for its terminological clarity—that the family is based on kinship, whereas the household is defined by relationships built on shared activities amongst its members. The authors also provide a succinct history of the field of household archaeology, very useful to non-specialist readers like this reviewer. Most strikingly, however, drawing on the insights of the household archaeology of the classical Greco-Roman world, Varma and Menon are able to point out the pitfalls of an excessive reliance on the textual evidence alone in reconstructing the social history of pre-modern India. They point out how the fact that potters’ households were at the edge of the settlement in Indor Khera had parallels with crafting households elsewhere; and that the particularity of location had more to do with the spatial needs of craft production than with the socio-ritual status of craftsmen that one might assume from contemporaneous, normative textual traditions such as the dharmasastra literature.

The other essay that departs from using textual evidence as its primary source base is Monica Juneja’s article ‘The Breastfeeding Mother as Icon and Source of Affect in Visual Practice—A Transcultural Journey’. Drawing on visual evidence from a very wide range of contexts, Juneja distinguishes between three main attributes of motherhood: childbearing, breastfeeding and upbringing, and points out how these roles were customarily shared between different persons. She is able to show us how the female breast evolved in the visual culture from a sign of luxuriance and fertility to an emphasis on its nurturing dimension in early modern court cultures. And she argues that this visual evolution has to be understood in terms of transcultural links between South Asian and the Islamic world since the twelfth century, and in terms of its imbrication within specific family networks, codes of kinship and understandings of motherhood. Like the archaeologists, the art historian also warns us about disjunctions between the textual and the non-textual evidence. Juneja points out that while, in the textual corpus, ‘references to different kinds of kinship formed by bodily fluids—blood or milk—abound, yet these notions are infrequently translated into visual media’ (p. 121). Taken together, these two essays offer a welcome caution against our tendency to rely exclusively on the evidence of the written word as we attempt to reconstruct the history of the household over the longue durée.

A second group of essays, the largest in the collection, uses textual evidence from a variety of genres—including medical texts, normative code literature, narrative literature such as the Jatakas, the epics and the Puranas, devotional verse traditions, shrine origin legends and sectarian hagiographies. Selby’s subtle reading of the Charaka Samhita and the Susruta Samhita, both composed in the early centuries of the Common Era, recovers for us the figure of the woman knowledgeable in the workings of the female body, the apta or anukula, the sympathetic, experienced, older woman, who was experienced in childbirth. Selby thus argues persuasively that an exchange of knowledge occurred between what she terms as ‘domestic medicine’ and the ‘classical humoral medicine’ of South Asia, in matters related to childbirth and childrearing. Selby’s reading also recovers the figure of the dhatri, the wet nurse, as the medical texts specify that she should not just be free from ‘slovenly habits’, but also be of the same class as the family whose child she was to nurse, a stipulation essential to any transactions in bodily substances. If Selby shows us how medical texts acknowledged domains of relative female competence and incorporated that knowledge, Sally Sutherland Goldman points out how the epic and Puranic traditions went to great lengths to avoid natural depictions of both insemination and birth. The impregnation, pregnancy and parturition of Sita in the Ramayana represent an exception. As Goldman shows, however, the exception proves the broader norm of excision and exclusion—Sita’s giving birth to twin sons is merely narrated second-hand, and the children are reared, not under her supervision in the ashram in the forest but under male supervision in Rama’s royal household.

Several of the authors in the collection—Juneja, Goldman, Selby, Tyagi and Mahalakshmi—pay close attention to the semantic fields of relevant terms. Thus, Tyagi points out that grha connoted, in particular contexts, household, house, residence and domesticity. Similarly, Mahalakshmi in her essay on the sixth-century didactic Tamil text, the Tirukkural, points out that the terms for family in common Tamil usage, kutumpam and parivaram, actually referred to somewhat different formations—with parivaram referring to retinues in early medieval Tamil inscriptions. In that sense, the contributors to this volume perform the invaluable service of disentangling terms that have been naturalised as virtually synonymous in scholarship on the modern period: terms such as home, family and household.

Jaya Tyagi’s essay traces the changing nature of the household along with the changing preoccupations about the household within the normative textual tradition over the course of roughly two millennia, 1000 bce–1000 ce. She shows us how an early text like the Atharva Veda depicts both short-term and long-term mating bonds, multiple partners and a variety of conjugal relations. She argues that these early texts were engaged in a classificatory and taxonomic project, to name and organise the different kinds of sexual and conjugal relations actually being practised. It was in the last centuries bce that the role of households in providing patronage, and in managing and dispensing wealth and resources, began to be discussed. Tyagi thus provides the important insight that the normative textual traditions were not concerned with describing intimate familial relations. Instead, they were preoccupied with defining proprietorial rights and the categories of claimants within kinspersons. Thus, Manu’s concern was essentially to define and categorise progeny and property in the context of the household. In the kinds of households that the Manava Dharmasastra was concerned to regulate, and in its preoccupations, Tyagi shows how the text was directed to elite households where polygyny was common and where different modes of the incorporation of women were prevalent. Thus, there now emerged, around the turn of the Common Era, a clear connection between the kind of marriage and the consequent degrees of rights of women in such marriages to property; similarly, progeny were marked differentially in terms of status and entitlements, by virtue of the kinds of marriages (or not) that they emerged from. As Tyagi argues, another shift in perspective can be gleaned from the textual tradition by the mid-first millennium ce. In sharp contrast to the Manava Dharmasastra, in the Puranic corpus, legends attached around rituals legitimised independent religious activity on the part of women, as the proliferation of such rituals (vratas) suggests. Tyagi’s essay thus highlights the evolution of what we might call regulatory anxieties about the household in the normative textual tradition. Uma Chakravarti’s essay on the Mahabharata provides a complementary lens on the same social world. Through her focus on figures regarded as occupying a socially marginal status in the epic, such as Karna and Vidura, Chakravarti traces the limits of Kshatriya willingness to be flexible about lineage reproduction and the nature of Kshatriyas’ special claims to kingship. In the new dharmic order that the Mahabharata was seeking to put into place, Chakravarti argues, Kshatriyas and Brahmans were the only social groups entitled to privileges. The epics in their finished form were addressed to the same social groups whose households the normative Brahmanical texts were intent on regulating.

The essays by R. Mahalakshmi, Vijaya Ramaswamy and Umesh Kadam continue exploring the same set of thematic concerns, in the context of poetic traditions, epigrammatic in the case of Valluvar in early medieval Tamil country and devotional in western and southern India in the essays by Kadam and Ramaswamy. While Mahalakshmi’s essay points to the absence of women as subjects in Valluvar’s work, Ramaswamy and Kadam point to the fraught relationship between the mundane and heavenly households—they are imagined in terms of each other, but also in opposition to each other. It is in these contexts that one misses most the inclusion of comparative scholarship on the treatment of similar themes in Sufi devotional poetry. While Ramaswamy cites Richard Eaton’s early essay on women’s songs while grinding and milling flour, the chakkinama, there has been more recent work on Sufi mystical love poetry, which would have provided for a fascinating counterpoint. The work of Christopher Shackle and Shyam Manohar Pandey, along with the more recent work of Aditya Behl and Thomas de Bruijn, suggests close parallels in terms of discourse about the mundane household and its shackles, the quest for a transcendent love that is also transgressive, and in terms of the bending of gender norms. ²

Essays by Pius Malekandethil, Kumkum Roy, Leslie Orr and Ranjeeta Dutta move the discussion from discourses of the household and of desire to the relation between lay households and religious orders, and the closely connected question of lay households and religious patronage. Malekandethil recovers a history of Syrian Christian women in Kerala who managed petty trade and the business of intermediate markets between the pepper-producing hinterland and the large markets that fed the international pepper trade. He also recovers origin legends for particular churches in the community that recollect women as having founded them. Again, Malekandethil’s findings trigger comparative questions between this context and that of the early modern Islamic and Islamicate world, in which, again, elite women were involved, in particular, in the construction of religious shrines, and in the patronage of both shrines and religious orders. ³

Roy’s essay is a sensitive reconstruction of the quotidian routines of women’s experience in the sangha—of the difficulties of begging and the treatment of hunger, for example. Roy also poses questions for us about the nature of the affective and social bonds within the monastic community, the monastic household as it were and about its relation to the lay household, both in everyday relationships of patronage and in its internal organisation. Those questions are relevant in helping us to glean something of the motives of female renunciants in joining the sangha, the monastic community. Ranjeeta Dutta delineates a very different kind of renunciant order, that of the Srivaisnava mathas from the fourteenth century on—that consciously replicated the organisation and affective bonds of the household, and just as consciously, she shows, drew normative Brahmanical households into their orbit of spiritual authority—an authority consolidated through gift-giving from devotee to the renunciant order and to its head. Between Roy and Dutta, then, we get two different permutations of the relationship between monastic/renunciant order and household. In both the Buddhist and the Srivaisnava instances, the lay household is the source of patronage for the renunciant order. However, in the Buddhist instance, the sangha was defined partially in opposition to the organisation of the household. Whereas, in the Srivaisnava instance, a millennium later, the matha replicated and incorporated the pattern of relationships in the lay elite household. Both Roy and Dutta then offer a vision of spiritual communities underpinned by the deliberate systematisation of community structure, to use Dutta’s words, that is at odds with the powerful self-representation of individual poets within such traditions in terms of spontaneous devotionalism—the kind of devotional community delineated by Ramaswamy and Kadam in this volume. At one level, it is clear that the difference in the depictions of these varied spiritual communities owes to the very different genres of sources used, particularly, by Dutta on the one hand and Ramaswamy on the other. At the same time, each essay poses key methodological questions for the other—how would our understanding of both the household and the spiritual community in each of these contexts be altered, were the authors to consider both genres of sources at once?

Orr’s essay continues with an exploration of the same concerns—of relationships between households of different kinds, and shrines (Hindu temples) and religious orders (Jain monastic communities). For one, Orr’s evidence allows her to reconstruct the donations that religious women within the Jain community in Tamil country made to shrines. One of the strengths of Orr’s essay, as indeed of many of the essays in this collection, is that she alerts us to the need for caution with regard to the choice of English-language vocabulary in translating terms from the sources. Teasing apart the relationships distinctive to each category of servant/patron allows Orr to infer differences between the variously named servants in the inscriptional record. Thus, attention to the distinct kinds of affiliations (to temples rather than to kin), to the lines of transmission for skills and entitlements (matrilineal as opposed to patrilineal) and to the relations of patronage (between lords, women and shrines) allows Orr to delineate a distinction between ‘non-normative wives’ and ‘normative non-wives’. In the process, our understanding of who constituted a ‘wife’ and how in this kind of household formation comes to be transformed, de-naturalising the term ‘wife’ for all of the other contexts described in the entire volume.

A final set of essays in the collection deals with the early modern period—Peshwa territories in western and central India, Jodhpur and Bengal, all in the eighteenth century. In different ways, both Rajat Datta and Nandita Sahai are able to infer histories of mobility—typically seasonal—among agricultural and artisanal groups. Interestingly, Datta and Sahai present two differing perspectives on the consequences of such mobility. Datta is able to reconstruct a history of the expanded use of money in the eighteenth-century Bengal countryside. Increased monetisation then led to increased socio-economic stratification in the countryside, between households engaged in agricultural labour on the one hand, and the households of rural gentry on the other. In particular, Datta points to the comparable levels of conspicuous consumption in a female-headed household, that of Rani Janaki of Mahisadai in 1773, as well as the male-headed Burdwan zamindar’s household in 1777. If Datta draws inspiration from a new economic history organised around the building block of households, the work of Jan de Vries cited in his footnotes clearly offering a model of analysis, Sahai, on the other hand, builds on a new social history of caste and social mobility, organised around the reform of households—as exemplified in the recent work of scholars such as Sumit Guha and Rosalind O’Hanlon (see her contribution in this volume). ⁴

In the essays by Sahai and O’Hanlon, we glimpse the household as the focus of the regulation of caste by the state. Both authors, in fine-grained work, allow for an inflection of the Sanskritisation thesis—by recovering moments in which mobility was resisted (as O’Hanlon’s Malwa Brahmans’ reactions to injunctions from the Peshwa court in Pune suggests), or in which mobility involved the contesting of other people’s entitlements and status (Sahai’s sunars and their running battle with the merchants and traders of eighteenth-century Jodhpur state, the mahajans). We get a sense of the financial stakes involved in both essays. Through translations of poignant complaints from brides’ families preserved in the Peshwai archives, and of a remarkable set of injunctions from 1751, O’Hanlon points out how Peshwai injunctions against bride price, and the Peshwai insistence on marrying Brahman girls before the age of nine, led to the commercialisation of Brahman marriages to higher demands for dowry from the families of bridegrooms. For her part, Sahai is able to tell us that the monthly salary of an artisan such as a goldsmith working in a state workshop was ‘2 to 3. And she is able to cite evidence of sunars (goldsmiths) with such incomes, signing a collective bond of ‘400, and undergoing an ordeal, in order to assert the antiquity of customary practices that typically demonstrated either Rajput status or accepted claims of Rajput origins in the distant past.

Both O’Hanlon and Sahai also offer sensitive interpretations of the limits of the archive—of what gets reported and what does not, of what is taken to judicial proceedings in the courts of the state and what is resolved instead through community panchayats. We thus get new perspectives on the degrees of authority that community elders’ gatherings or the gatherings of scholarly experts in the dharmasastras wielded, in comparison to the law courts of the state. In the process, both authors here are able to demonstrate the centrality of the household, to both a community’s internal efforts to negotiate mobility, as well as to the negotiation of its mobility by other communities and the state. In a sense, it is fitting that this ambitious volume culminates with essays that successfully locate contests over the organisation and entitlements of the household at the centre of histories of caste and social mobility and histories of the state’s relationship with the caste order and with different caste communities at different historical moments.

This collection of essays on the household in the pre-modern period—from the first millennium bce to the eighteenth century ce—raises significant questions for the scholarship on gender, kinship and the household in the modern period—the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For one, historical scholarship on the modern period has focused largely on the already-restructured household, in transition to its nuclear form and narrowly refocused around biological kin. Lives Within, Lives Without reveals the more capacious character of the household in the pre-modern period, as well as the ongoing evolution of key relationships within it, between the sexes and between the generations. While historians of the modern period have traced the continuing evolution of conjugality and the continuing evolution of kinship relations, the transition from wider networks of affiliation, service and loyalty—between kin and non-kin—remains relatively under-explored. ⁵ In other words, Lives Within, Lives Without illuminates how we lack an understanding of the histories of exclusion and amnesia by which the normative, nuclear, narrowly kin-limited, household came to be constituted in the modern period.

This volume also foregrounds the key issue of vocabularies of kinship and their own histories. If, for instance, the term ‘wife’ was not absolute but one end of a spectrum of possible relationships and entitlements between men and women, as so many of the contributors in this volume have delineated, then historians of the modern period need to revisit the question of vocabulary too. Through what contestations and transformations of practices did the term ‘wife’ come to be so naturalised as the affective centre of the reformed nuclear household now constituted as normative? The question becomes all the more pressing for historians of modern kinship, gender and the household when we consider the recent revisionist historiography of South Asian slavery as well. That scholarship has complicated the question of vocabularies of service, patronage, loyalty and affect, between kin and non-kin, to telling effect. ⁶ In short, we now have the outlines of a compelling history of pre-modern kinship and the household that points to the complex negotiations between ties of kinship and service, all negotiated on the terrain of affect that could either knit households together or tear them apart. It is for historians of modern kinship and the household to continue these threads of enquiry into the present so that modern history does not appear to be sundered from the pre-colonial past because of an arbitrary chronological delimitation.

Two lacunae remain, however, in this remarkable volume. With a few exceptions—most notably, the essays by Juneja, Orr and Chakravarti—the mutually constitutive relationship between kinship and service as they structured the household remains under-explored in this volume. In other words, what was the status of retainers, servants and slaves in the household in all of these multiple contexts? The question is particularly salient because, again, we are beginning to piece together a history where it was not only elite households—amply delineated in this volume—that had non-kin members but also artisan households. ⁷ What is also missing is discussion of Muslim households in the second millennium—the work of Sunil Kumar and Greg Kozlowski, among others, comes to mind. I urge this not merely from an ecumenical urge towards an inclusive scholarship, representative of the social diversity of the subcontinent. That absence has two particular consequences for the essays in this volume. First, the scholarship on Muslim households renders more starkly visible histories of adoption as a sustained strategy for lineage reproduction. Particularly, in a volume where several essays focus on the regulation of the household as a strategy for upward mobility on the part of caste groups, to render those histories of adoption visible would help to interrogate and historicise the narratives of pure, unmixed origins that are among the staple strategies for upward mobility on the subcontinent. Second, scholarship on Sufi contexts—whether in the context of spiritual chains of leadership, silsilah, or in the context of discourses of mundane and transcendent love—would help to create a more comparative analytical frame for the essays on both bhakti and the matha in this volume. Given that these themes have a deep resonance in the Sufi context as well, ⁸ one awaits the incorporation of Hindu and Muslim practices and discourses within a single frame of analysis, especially in the context of a historical sociology of the household such as this volume attempts. ⁹

Those lacunae aside, this is a major contribution to an emerging, revisionist social history of the subcontinent over the longue durée—and the contributors to this volume have demonstrated eloquently that no social or political historian can afford to neglect a consideration of the household for any period or region within the subcontinent.