Book review: Sahgal Smita,Niyoga: Alternative Mechanism to Lineage Perpetuation in Early India: A Socio-Historical Enquiry

Sahgal’s book on Niyoga, or the practice of levirate, in ancient India, is a culmination of passionate and painstaking research and is a useful addition to the growing number of monographs on the ancient Indian social history that looks at social customs from a gender perspective. The book’s chief strength is a fairly comprehensive compendium by the author of references to Niyoga in Indian textual tradition ranging from the Vedic to as late as Dayananda Saraswati’s Satyartha Prakasa.

While the author has made a few tentative references to Niyoga in epigraphs and sociological data (e.g., references to Nair women’s sambandham relations and its practice among lower castes such as Teli and Chamara), these are areas that will need more sustained research, perhaps by the author herself, at some future date. Another interesting area of inquiry might be references to Niyoga or Niyoga-like customs in Indian Folk traditions, such as banna-banni songs.

Sahgal has tried to analyse her exhaustive textual data by posing some pertinent questions. Was Niyoga only a strategy of heirship, or did it overlap with widow remarriage and polyandry? Was Niyoga a largely caste-based phenomenon, or did it transcend caste exclusivity? How did the women who were involved in Niyoga alliances view this practice? As a sexual alliance, did it legitimize carnal desire at all, and more so women’s desire in the union? How were the progeny of this alliance received in society, especially if they were girls? Above all, what led to the Niyoga practice being classified as a kalivarjya? Of all these posers, the question of caste is important because this is one area where asymmetries can throw some interesting light on social complexities.

While referring to Niyoga in Jaina Acarangasutra, Sahagal points out that Jaina sramanas were also sometimes sought as impregnators for lay women of the community. This is unlike the Brahmanic tradition, where there was no enthusiasm for it. This is an observation which she needs to explore at greater length. After all, a sramana as an ascetic renouncer would not be in the same position as an ordinary Brahmin who was not constrained by vows of renunciation that includes sexual renunciation.

The author has devoted an entire chapter to the practice of levirate in non-Indian contexts, where she has marshalled evidence for this practice among ancient Zoroastrians, Jews and also early medieval Europe where archaic Christian church rejected it as a pagan practice akin to incest.

Sahgal has also tried to locate the institution of Niyoga in the context of discourse on the ancient Indian masculinity. While it was a male strategy to overcome an apparently emasculated existence, it was also simultaneously an acknowledgement of his impotency. Yet levirate, as a deputation of husband’s right to beget progeny with his wife—whether within the larger patrilineal family or the ‘appropriate’ male outside—nonetheless remained essentially a power discourse of a patrilineal/patriarchal society. While men could resort to this alternate mechanism of lineage perpetuation, an ‘infertile’ woman had no such recourse. For a woman, it was the beginning and end of her own family and had no power to beget. Such a woman could only be abandoned or saddled with co-wife/wives.