Wives and Households

As the story unfolds, the true drama of the household tale begins with the arrival of a bride. Who is the Witch and who the Princess depends on whether the bride or the groom's parents, particularly his mother, is put at the center of the story.

While elder sons remain in their parental household, and younger sons may remain (and ideally should remain, permanently if possible) at least for a while after marriage as long as circumstances of economy, space, and temperament permit, daughters must marry out into other households. They enter these households as young wives. This sharp transition from daughter in one's "own home" (tha chen [n ]) to wife has both general South Asian features and some special Newar emphases. For it is in relation to a daughter's marriage that traditional Newar culture resisted, as it were, the imposition of Indian forms and conserved some Himalayan patterns. This is most evident in certain of the rites of passage of girls, particularly the Ihi or mock-marriage ceremony and in related modifications of menarche ceremonies (app. 6), in the nature of the close continuing relationship between a wife and her natal home, and in the lack of the hypergamous implications of marriage characteristic of Indo-Nepalese groups, which we will discuss in a later section of this chapter. These differences are significant in the contrast of the Newars to neighboring groups, but from a non-Hindu perspective the married woman's situation is quite characteristically Hindu.

When a young woman becomes a wife, one of the more dramatic discontinuities of situation and role that are so characteristic of Bhaktapur is produced. A Pa(n)cthariya man describes in an interview how his seventeen-year-old bride changed in the early days of their marriage.

Before marriage she was like a bird, natural, but once she got married her behavior changed, because the environment changed. She didn't talk freely any more, she couldn't talk freely and frankly with everyone [in the household] and her face seemed very serious and complicated. And she was shy. Before that she was never shy. But after marriage she became shy with everybody. And her work was difficult. During her girlhood she didn't have to work. Now she has to work. She didn't have any practice before but she has to practice [i.e., learn how to do things] in my house. It was always like an experiment for her, and she was always distressed when she was working. If her cooking [for example] was not good, there would be trouble. She always has doubt in her mind, her life was complicated. And she became nervous.

An unmarried young woman from the Kumha:, potter, thar describes the duties of a young wife in the household:

She gets up early in the morning, sweeps everywhere throughout the house. Then she goes to bring water [from the well or public tap]. After that she bows down to her father-in-law and her mother-in-law, and then she bows m her husband. Then she prepares the meal, whatever it is that is going to be served, and serves the meal to her father-in-law, mother-in-law and husband. Only after that can she eat herself. Then she does whatever work is necessary, like the sewing of clothes, or whatever her mother-in-law gives for her to do. Later in the day she again has to fix the noonday meal and serve it to her father-in-law, husband, and mother-in-law. Then she cuts up the vegetables, cleans them and cooks them. Then she has to get water again for dinner. Then she cleans the kitchen and prepares the rice [the supper meal]. She feeds her mother-in-law, father-in-law and husband and only after that is finished can she eat. Then she cleans the dishes and the cooking pots. After she has finished the kitchen work, she massages her father-in-law, mother-in-law, and husband with oil. Then she goes to sleep.

This is, at least, what a "good" wife does. If she is lazy or ill and doesn't do her work it is hard, the informant says, for the mother-in-law.

As elsewhere in India in such households the young husband and wife are not supposed to show any special interest, let alone affection, for each other. They rarely have a conversation in front of other members of the household. Often, however, in the secrecy of their room the husband may give the bride a small secret present, often some sweets or rich foods that he bought in the bazaar. Some women recall this as their first stirring of love for their husbands, and of the knowledge that he cared about her. This must be hidden from the household. The new wife "belongs to the household"; she is a threat to its closed, self-protective secrecy, and she is potentially divisive. If her husband cares for her more than for the household, she can, through him, stir up trouble between brothers or between parents and the son, and lead to a division of the household. Any obvious affection or concern shown to her in public by her husband would be a sign that he is vulnerable to this threat of a shifting loyalty. And any material present that he gives her privately is a diversion of household income.

The young bride is expected to relate herself primarily to her mother-in-law, whose "support" she is. She acts toward her husband with the same respectful gestures she uses to other senior members of the household. In strict and upper-status houses she will walk behind him, some ten feet or more, on the town streets, when they are going somewhere together. She and her husband call each other by neither their given names nor relational terms of address; circumlocutions must be used. A husband, for example, may be reduced to such devices as calling to his

wife on the floor above, "The person who is upstairs, come down." Jyapus sometimes refer to their wives by the name of the neighborhood they came from. The young wife finds herself treated as a low-status, potentially polluting, and potentially trouble-causing outsider. She is, as we will see, at the bottom of the family's hierarchical food-giving system as the symbolically salient low thar s—Jugi and Po(n)—are in the macrostatus system. Like them, she is polluting.

If there are family disputes, and particularly if there are schisms within the household ending up with one or more of the brothers establishing their own homes, one or more of the new brides is often blamed. People say such things as the separation is caused by a phunga ki , a pillow insect, the wife's talking in bed at night, and that if a man listens to his bride's opinions, "everything will be over." This is often scapegoating; it is easier for the household to put blame on the outsider, but in fact a tactful and skillful young wife can be very helpful in helping the household deal with the problems stirred up by her addition to the family, and some husbands are grateful about this when they later think about the early stages of their marriage.

As elsewhere in South Asia, the shift comes with the birth of the new wife's first child, particularly her first son. Now she becomes, in a phrase that is used repeatedly, the "supporter of the lineage (kul )." She has now a new relationship to the household through the child. She may refer to her conjugal family now as "my child's father's house." She begins to develop, often, and especially in households where the daughters have already married out of the household, warm relationships with her mother-in-law and father-in-law. Now that her relationship to the household is fully legitimate, her sexual and personal relationship to her husband is much less suspect. The father-in-law's relationship to his daughter-in-law is often warmer than that to his own daughter, and apparently in the majority of households warm working and personal relationships develop between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law after the birth of children. Often the birth of a second child augments this relationship, for the mother-in-law would take over much of the care of the first child at this point. The birth of a child binds the young wife to the household in another way. The child "belongs to the household" and for the wife to break up the marriage entails the risk of losing her children. The young wife becomes related to the inner life of the household, that which goes on within the walls of the house. In farming families she helps out with the farmwork and with supplementary crafts such as weaving, and in lower thar s women may be involved with the specialized activities of the thar (although mostly with

supplementary activities). In upper-status families she would not (this is changing in recent years) be involved in the family trade or shop. She does not shop in the bazaar; this is a male activity. Her main duties are the care of the household and its internal maintenance and economy.

For the young wife the main time out of the household in the course of a day is when she goes to the river, well, or public tap to gather water, a time when she can chat with other young wives (fig. 5). She (and the older women) will also leave the household in connection with religious activities—visits to temples, community festivals, and to the households of kin for feasts associated with calendrical festivals, special household events, and rites of passage of the extended patrilineal family. During such events she will meet with the wider circle of her husband's kin.

She will also go to feasts involving the kin of her natal home, and as frequently is the case in South Asia, she often returns to her natal home after the birth of a child, usually one month after, and she and the child may remain there one, two, or even more months.^[6] A wife is also expected to return to her parental house for special feasts, nakhatya , which are associated with many festivals^[7] and all rites of passage, including, importantly, the end of mourning sequences immediately following deaths in her natal household.

And, finally, as her children grow and as her mother-in-law and father-in-law age, the wife's security, prestige, and authority in her husband's household gradually increase and now either in her husband's natal household, or if there has been fission, in her own new household, she becomes in her turn another daughter-in law's mother-in-law.

Much of this is the usual Hindu family pattern. The Newars share it. What is diffierent is the contrast in a wife's relations to her own home, as well as in aspects of the meaning of marriage in general, which contrast with the Hindu social patterns of the Newar's neighbors. Also peculiar to the Newars in this contrast is the nature of the way the family is related to the larger kin group. We will return to this after first saying something about the household hierarchy, in which, in fact, the young wife has a peculiar position.