Women, Marriage and Property in Medieval Mithila

Detailed chapter description

Women’s social and economic history in medieval Mithila cannot be reconstructed by taking a single legal rule and treating it as a transparent description of life. The most articulate surviving materials are juristic: Sanskrit digests that classify marriage, gifts, inheritance, maintenance and household obligations. Those texts are indispensable because they preserve categories and arguments used by learned specialists, yet they are normative and selective. Genealogical records illuminate marriage relationships in the communities they document but usually privilege patrilineal continuity. Agrarian records and material history reveal the economy in which households functioned while often leaving women unnamed. Later colonial courts preserve a history of how “Mithila law” was read, but they belong to a much later evidentiary moment. This chapter therefore reconstructs women, marriage and property through a chronology firewall: every claim is tied to the kind and date of its source. The first difficulty is visibility. Medieval archives were not designed to answer modern questions about women’s work, autonomy or ownership. A jurist asked which rule applied to a dispute; a genealogist recorded descent and marriage eligibility; a grant recorded title, privilege or revenue; a literary text pursued aesthetic, devotional or political purposes. Women appear differently in each genre, and silence has different meanings. An unnamed cultivator’s wife in an agrarian record is not evidence that women did no agricultural work. A detailed rule on a widow’s succession is not evidence that every widow successfully exercised the right contemplated by the jurist. Historical reconstruction must therefore distinguish presence in the archive from presence in society. The chapter uses explicit statements where available and cautious structural inference where direct testimony is absent.