Abstract
Traveling through the social networks of Hindu women residing in Portugal, i developed a story of life stories.
The story highlights the instrumental education received by women, whose main purpose is to maintain ethnicity, while creating symbolic ethnic borders through maintenance and crystallization of identity and religious feelings.
The education of women is crossed by differences of class and caste but serves as a base for the integration and cohesion of the Hindu group, enabling in a plural society, the membership of a common religious and ideological collective: being Hindu.
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Notes
- 1.
See “The Anuários Estatísticos da Província de Cabo Verde (1932–1970)”.
- 2.
Cantineiro was an expression used to popularly define those merchants who opened their shops in the woods, near the villages of African populations. The largest number of cantineiros was found among Hindu and Muslim Indians. Despite the negative opinion of Portuguese rulers about the effect that Indians had on commercial traffic, totally contradictory to the economical interests of the state, their influence was extremely important. The presence of such populations was instrumental in diffusing monetary economy among southern populations and influenced spontaneous migratory flows to the new mining centres in South Africa. The cantineiros sought to establish themselves strategically close to the borders with South Africa, profiting from the huge traffic of African miners returning to their villages.
- 3.
The word Hinduism only entered the English vocabulary during the seventeenth century, becoming synonymous with those who professed the Hindu religion and had not converted to Islamism. Hinduism is not the translation of a word and in India it still cannot represent a religious union, being rather a form of identity in view of the other ethnic and religious groups that inhabit the same territory. To be Hindu “(…) is not a primordial identity that can be changed nor made infinitely flexible. It is not dependent on will. It is an identity acquired through social practice and constantly negotiated in changing contexts” (Vertovec 2000, p. 7). In that sense, Hinduism is a phenomenon of multiple definitions. To be a Hindu does not merely mean belonging affectively to a common religious collective, it constitutes a habitus with implications in all areas of individual and community life.
- 4.
The concept of dharma is associated with the idea of ritual purity. The purity/pollution duality has become a principle that organizes space and social relationships in Indian society, “a principle recognized in the dharmasastras which sees social ethnicity as the maintenance of order and of limits between groups and genders, governed by degrees of purity and impurity” (Flood 1996, p. 57).
The hierarchical vision of Indian society recommended a different dharma for each human group and for each sex. Female socialization categorically imposes obedience to the dharma, this being an absolute imperative that cannot be mistaken for divine will or for individual conscience.
Dharma is above all a form of social control which leads towards the cohesion of social groups, in order to maintain a certain (ideal) social order for the whole of man’s most important needs.
The female dharma expressed in the sacred books also implies a dedication to the artha (made up of material interests, wealth and success in undertakings) and the kama (which includes sensation and the pleasure of the senses).
Kama appears (in the ancient texts) as the feminine svadharma. No woman will find her place in society without fully assuming her role as a sexual companion. Within that domain they are considered as being complementary to their companions. One’s dharma affects the other’s dharma. If every Hindu man’s moral and religious obligation is to fulfil his dharma, then the woman’s consists of expressing her service to her husband, as to a god, to whom she must respond in amorous terms.
- 5.
The Prativratya ideology considers that female spiritual salvation is rooted in total devotion and subordination to the husband.
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Sant’ana, H. (2012). Educational Processes and Ethnicity Among Hindu Migrants. In: Bekerman, Z., Geisen, T. (eds) International Handbook of Migration, Minorities and Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1466-3_37
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