Anthropology

The low status of women in traditional Indian society is something well recognized today. According to the myths of classical Hinduism, the process of menstruation in women is due to their assumption of some of the guilt from the god Indras killing of a Brahmin named Visvarupa (Prabhupada 2005).
Female dowry is often cited as the primary practical reason why boys are so much more preferred to girls in Indian society. Parents are obligated to arrange their daughters marriages and a considerably large dowry is traditionally demanded of them by the grooms family. As a result families have to save up a substantial amount of money in order to marry off any of their daughters and consequently daughters are seen as a burden. Sons, on the other hand are seen as blessings because they add considerably to their familys fortunes in the form of their wifes dowry, when they get married. In modern time the Indian government has passed legislation prohibiting the grooms family from demanding dowries. However this sort of legislation has no more than symbolic significance since it is next to impossible to impose. The demand for huge dowries and its attendant problems go on unabated in Indian society. Often the demand for dowry does not cease after the woman is married, the phenomenon of married women being set on fire by their in laws in connection with disputes over dowry and their subsequent deaths being blamed on stove explosions is a common story in modern day India (Menski 1998).

As a result of the widespread notion that girls are a burden to their parents, female infanticide was common in some parts of India during the pre-modern era. In the modern times infanticide has mostly been replaced by female feticide. Lacking the religious prohibition against abortion, there has been a widespread adoption of the practice of selective abortion of the female fetuses in the Hindu community. In certain provinces of India, the ratio of female to male births is up to 11 less than the natural ratio (Tandon  Sharma 2006).

In the traditional Hindu society, it is common to marry off pre-pubescent girls to adult men. This practice results many women becoming widows in their youth. Widows are looked down upon in the Hindu religion. They are considered the bearers of misfortune and inauspiciousness and are obliged to wear white clothes and to refrain from attending many types of social gatherings. Traditionally Hindu widows do not have the option of remarriage but have to live out their whole lives being considered pariah by the society. In previous times it was common for widows to e burned along their husbands on their funeral pyres. This practice was banned by the Mughal, the colonial British and the modern day Indian governments but a few incidents of widow burning still happen from time to time (Leslie 1992).

The Hindu community of India is deeply stratified by the caste system. If a woman marries or has sexual relations with a lower caste man, her kinsmen take it as an insult upon their honor. It is often believed that the insult can only be satisfied by killing both the woman and her paramour or husband. In addition in some areas it is taboo for a man and woman of the same village to marry and if they do so they are liable to be killed. These murders are often carried out with the general consent of the community and are thus never reported to the police, as a result there have been few prosecutions for these honor killings and even fewer convictions (Denyer 2008).

In colonial times, the issue of the status of the women of India was seized up by the British intellectuals to advance the interests of imperialism. This was perhaps done cynically or as a method of assuaging their own guilt and of justifying to themselves the brutal policies of the British colonialists. In post-colonial times, criticism of the status of women in India often comes from those who are prone to Western triumphalism. Criticizing a third world nations treatment of their women is the sort of political argument that is designed to appeal to both sides of the general political divide in the West It appeals to the Liberals because they are in favor of feminism and womens rights and it appeals to Conservatives because, coming from the mouths of Western intellectuals, it becomes an expression of the superiority of Western civilization to other civilizations, and by extension, the superiority of those who were responsible for the creation of the Western civilization i.e. White people to the others.

Criticism of the way women are treated in various countries has also been used as a pseudo-justification for military invasion and occupation of those countries. The argument that military invasion and occupation of a nation is justified by the alleged mistreatment of a nations women by that nations men is a false argument because military occupation of any nation is an act of violence and oppression against the whole nation men, women and children. Acts of oppression by one section of a nations population against another section of their population do no justifying oppression against the whole nation.

Criticism of another country or culture for how they treat their women is therefore fraught with danger, on one side there are cultural mores and behaviors that, from a Western point of view, appear to be entirely oppressive toward women. In case of Hinduism some cultural practices such as Sati (widow burning) appear entirely indefensible and completely alien to the culture of the West.
Appealing to the work of Western educated Indian intellectuals is not much help either. Some of the Western educated Indian intellectuals are obviously affiliated with the of the Hindutva movement and their works can be classified as belonging to the genre of Hindu Apologetics, others such as V. S. Naipaul are often charged with a slavish adoration of Western culture and a form of racist self-hatred. Some others seem to be as puzzled by how to deal with the problem of womens inequality in Hindu society and prevent one from falling into cultural imperialism at the same time. One such writer sarcastically refers to the anti-Sati laws imposed by the British as White men are saving brown women from brown men while noting that the justification offered by Hindu apologetics The women wanted to die is rather less than convincing (Spivak 1999).

In addition, it is not clear that Western educated individuals can be much help in portraying the Hindu point of view at all, given their cultural distance from those who actually engage in activities such as Sati. This includes those intellectuals who are a part of the Hindutva movement, in fact early Western educated Hindutva leaders such as Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya advocated an end to many of the most anti-female practices of classical Hinduism such as the ban on the remarriage of widows on the grounds that it caused women to abandon Hinduism and marry Muslim men (Gupta 2002).

The question of whether the Indian womens primary site of oppression is their homes is a loaded question, on one hand it seems obvious that traditional Hinduism oppresses women in many ways, including in their homes and on the other hand if our answer is yes then what is the way to get Indian women out of this oppression, should we advocate a massive international military intervention in India to liberate Indian women from their men Should the Indian women take all girl children into custody All these solutions are impractical and, quite likely to result in greater misery for Indian women. Anyone perturbed by the plight of Indian women should keep in mind that at the end, Indian women and Indian men have to live with each other. Any changes in the status of Indian women can only come about gradually, in a process spanning many generations.