Page 107 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

82 Karine Bates

the ideology of the good wife, or pativrata, as demonstrated in the
following subsection.
Legal Records in Maharashtra during the Nineteenth Century

In his article on the conception of the role of wives and the patterns
of behaviour of the members within the household towards them in
nineteenth-century Bombay city records, Jim Masselos (1998) demon-
strates how the courts used the shastric concept of the ideal wife and
how women resisted this view. This article is useful in understanding
the history of women’s court claims in Maharashtra as it shows that,
over the course of the nineteenth century, the courts tried to implement
the shastric ideal more so than under the Peshwa’s courts. It is also an
interesting contribution to the study of women’s positions (especially
concerning their roles as wives), which have never been uniformed or
uncontested.
In nineteenth-century Bombay, the ideal wife, termed pativrata,
was defined as ‘the devoted wife whose entire existence is dedicated
to her husband’ (Leslie 1989: 1); a wife whose ‘only duty’ and ‘main
purpose in life’ was service to her husband (Kapadia 1968: 169). The
long-lived stereotype is found in early puranic texts, the laws of Manu
and Kautilya’s Arthashastra, as well as in subsequent Hindu commen-
taries such as the Stridharmapaddhati written by the Brahman author
Tryambaka. The influence of the latter persisted in the legal cases
of the early nineteenth-century. As pointed out by Sir Gooroodass
Banerjee in his Tagore Law Lectures of 1878, early nineteenth-century
case-precedents re-affirmed the applicability of Hindu Law on the
position that ‘a woman’s husband is like unto her god, and she must
remain obedient to his orders and conform to his will’ (Banerjee 1915:
119–20). It is true that the husband was directed to ‘honour the wife’
but as Banerjee pointed out: ‘No system of law has ever surpassed our
own in enjoining on the wife the duty of obedience to the husband and
veneration for his person’ (ibid.: 120). The same norms existed among
Hindus, Muslims, Parsis or Indian Christians (Masselos 1998: 126). 8
Articulated norms of society, entrenched in customs and precedents,
included this concept of the perfect wife and of the behaviour deemed
appropriate for her. The courts often enforced this view. For example,
in the case of elopement it was the husband of the guilty woman, rather
than the guilty woman herself, whom the courts tried and punished.