160 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
bore a direct reference to the reproductive powers of women in ensuring the purity of the lineage.
The status ranking of kula was based primarily on ritual consideration and applied mainly to upper caste Hindus. Any loss of face particularly in the context of a marital alliance was marked as a blot on the prestige of kula4 Women were therefore reared and guarded strictly as the fear of losing the honour of one's kula constantly haunted upper caste Hindus. In the nineteenth century patriarchal norms evolved in Bengal in response to these wider social anxieties concerning the maintenance of the brahminical moral order in general and the social prestige of one's own kula or vamsa in particular.
Due to the entrenchment of colonial rule, the period also witnessed a shift in the political economy. This led to a general devaluation of women's work. The gradual cheapening of labour and the creation of a labour surplus in the agrarian sector forced marginal and peasant households to depend more and more on participation of women and children in the procurement of subsistence. Since they were paid a lower wage compared to that of an adult male the women's contribution to the household was progressively devalued.5
The rise in prices of agricultural commodities and the reduction in wages made it easier for the middle peasant and trader to adopt seclusion by foregoing women's visible labour whether in the family farm or in selling the production of male members of the family.6 Since freeing women from outside labour implied an ability to dispense with their contribution to household income, dissociation from manual labour distinguished the gentlewoman—the bhadramahila from the women of the labouring poor—the dasi.
For secluded women the work adopted followed the facilities of work space. Inside the house, separated by a courtyard upper caste Hindu women had a private space—the andarmahal, constructed in contrast to the man's outer domain of the bahir mahal or kachhari. Women's invisibility or the notion of purdah was now inseparably identified with social and moral status. While poor women's visible and manual work was stigmatised by association with lower status, the appropriation of an increasingly wider range of women's productive activity within the household fed an ideology of domesticity.7 The gender and class identity of the Bengali Hindu woman depended upon her nurturing activities as mother and wife within the home. These were codified through a number of moral tracts.8 While the gentle-woman was deified as grihalaxmi and kulabadhu, the deviant was marked as an outcast—alaxmi, asati and kulata (the latter also meaning the prostitute).