Hinduism

Religious Values and the Role of Mothers

One of the central tenets of the Hindu religion is a belief in reincarnation. An important relationship is the one between deceased ancestors, living family members, and future generations, all of whom are linked in a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. These elements of connection within families and spiritual realms are dependent on motherhood, as birth is [Page 486]vital to the cycle. Birth offers individuals an opportunity to work out their spiritual destiny based on karma, an accumulation of positive and negative spiritual values that are determined by actions in life. Mothers are also the source of both order and chaos through their fertility and procreative powers. Many Hindu traditions that regulate family formation are also structures that maintain social and ritual order. Birth and reincarnation link the idea of karma to the structure of a rigidly organized caste system. One's place in the stratified social order of religious, social, and political life is determined by destiny but activated by birth.

The Hindu religion is built around a number of gods and goddesses who represent creation, preservation, and destruction. The representation of male and female as complementary opposites in religious imagery confirm the symbolic importance of heterosexual reproduction in the ethos. Another opposition that structures values in the Hindu faith is purity and pollution. This opposition shapes the perspective on women's reproductive bodies, since menstrual cycles and childbirth are biological functions that are associated with pollution.

Family Politics

While women are revered as mothers, they often remain subordinate as marital partners and family members. In most Hindu families and communities, men are expected to be the heads of households and the economic and political decision makers in a household. Marital and family relationships are built around an ideal of protection; men are deemed to be physical protectors of women, and women are, ideally, supposed to protect the health and well-being of their husbands and family by nurturing and feeding them. This gendered division of family labor, while often influenced by the community and wider social context, is assumed to be natural by virtue of women's potential and actual motherhood.

Marriage in the Hindu tradition is often described as the unlocking of a woman's fertility. Marriage ceremonies are followed by a prayer called Garbhadana to encourage the couple to conceive a child immediately. Arranged marriage, while not universal, remains a common practice even outside of Asia. Second-generation immigrant children of Hindu families in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere sometimes adhere to the practice as a means of honoring their parents' heritage or reclaiming a cultural identity in the midst of increasing globalization and cultural heterogeneity. A woman's potential fertility—her potential to become a mother—is an important asset in the arrangement. Marriages are arranged in consultation with cosmological charts and religious guidance. In many circumstances, particularly in south Asian countries where Hinduism is most prevalent, women live with or are closely associated with their husband's family after marriage.

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