International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

Family and Gender: A Critical Study of Manusmrti 
                                                                  

Gender asymmetry in role formations and relationships around the institution family is the central problem that has been addressed in detail in the present study. The study is an attempt to draw an erudite attention into the phenomenon called ‘family’ that seems to be taken-for-granted in every locale of the human lives. It is at one level a study of the conceptualizations and theorizations on family and gender. The introduction of gender into the concepts of marriage and kinship that constitute the family has happened recently by the feminist theoretical interventions. As the family and the individuals involved in it are the basic constituents of the society and in view of the fact that it is the battle field of the sexes through interpersonal relationships, its interpretations may be fitting well with the areas of social theorization and social transformation. Gender as a category of analysis endows greatly in this study and it interlace with various disciplines. 

The gender coldness of the family as an institution is a universal phenomenon irrespective of religion/caste/class/ethnicity. The family concept in the present Indian social context seems to be reflecting the model in the ancient text Manu-Smrti and so the analysis of the text turns to be crucial. Various writers in modern India has been quoting and criticizing the verses of the text in terms of its agenda to develop difference and power structure in the social order. A feminist reading of the text and an analysis on the discourses influenced by the concepts of the text is critical, as the gender asymmetries are socially produced and reproduced. 

Understanding the conceptualization and function of family, and analyzing the gathering of gender as a category in it, compile the main objectives in this study. These aspirations engross the exploration for answering some basic questions.  How the behavioral or habitual differences between sexes come into existence with influence of the existing social norms and why relations between women and men regularly seem to involve domination and subordination are the main questions that may be coming under concern of this study. To proceed with such a search entails the understanding of some basic metaphysical problems starting from, ‘what is a woman’¹ , ‘what is a man’, ‘what is family’ and ‘what is gender’. Not only such metaphysical and ontological points are concerned but the epistemological views are also concerns for this study. This is precisely because a woman friendly research differs from the mainstream epistemology which has been operating with the illusion that knowing is universal and perspectiveless.²  

Conceiving family as a gendered and gendering space, this study tries to sharpen the understanding of the interface of normative images of family. Any person consciously ‘being-in-the-world’³ can see the family system and man-woman roles existing within modern Indian ‘law and order’ are more or less a copy of that prescribed by the ancient brahmanical text Manu-Smrti that was written around the beginning of Christ era.⁴  Manu, the accredited author gives the picture of the concept of `family` and ‘gender’, by the description of the household, householder, wife and son, and their roles etc. in the text. Even though he didn’t use the terms family and gender, these accounts give rise to the hypothesis that the ‘gendered/gendering family’ exists almost in an analogous form in the contemporary India. This study is with the postulation that the nature and structure of the family system has not changed much favorably to women, even with the weight of all kinds of socio-economic, cultural developments and the philosophical, political upheaval of the last centuries, in the region latter on termed as India. 

This study is basically a conceptual analysis and follows various analytical ways such as textual analysis, discourse analysis, deconstruction and reflexive methodology at assorted stages. And a methodology of gender could be traced through out the program as a totalizing framework. This is with the conviction that an interdisciplinary research would not be able to confine into one single method. But it underlies the positions involved in the newly emerged feminist philosophy. With the unique approach of feminist theory there might be unique difficulties and challenges that are also characteristics of doing philosophy within a particular tradition. The enterprise of philosophy in this study is not of homogenizing and evolving a single system and the interdisciplinarity would not mean a consensus.  

With the lenience obtained from a survey on the theorizations on family and gender, present study enters into the content analysis of the verses in the ancient text Manu-Smrti in terms of its prescriptions around household. This is to read how the misogynistic nature and structure of household and the concepts of man, woman and family are constructed through such verses. It is also a main concern to analyze the construction of ‘woman’ merged with the power relations between the male and female members of the household described by Manu-Smrti. As Iravati Karve has pointed out, the Sanskritic legacy in the kinship practices is a unitary factor in the Indian subcontinent.⁵ The influence of the text in the structuring of family in modern Indian context is also interpreted through the discussion on the discourses of religion, culture, caste, class, politics and jurisprudence.  

The social actions are based on ontological conceptions of human beings that are gained either by religious or cultural influences. So the clarification of the metaphysical and ontological conceptions is imperative in the case of a study on the family and gender as they play vital role in every-day life embedded in religion, culture and language. And the ancient text Manu-Smrti which is under analysis is in one way seen as a symbol of discourses on family and gender. The text integrates a mode of social life and thus generates some facts behind the construction of gendered family and particular social actions.  

Masculinity and femininity are pertinent features as implied in Manu-smrti’s model of family.  The understanding and interpretation of such a text would elicit the discussions around the identity and sexuality of woman in the contemporary Indian context. While the study goes into the analysis of family, it would have to necessarily make an effort to know how the behavior, attitude, expectations, roles, relationships and other aspects of daily life of an individual is determined by gender and how those aspects manipulate gender divisions. Such an analysis would necessarily be informed by the discourses on culture, religion, caste, class, law, politics and power. The socially constructive effects of discourse and its indoctrination of new identities are taken into account in this study.