uncorrected version - Ines G. Županov

m a r t h a a n n s e l b y
by the urge to produce śreyasī prajā, the very best of offspring. Both texts are
very explicit in their language and grammar that the product of choice is male,
for well-documented ritual and economic reasons.
The narratives of the care of a woman during the nine months of gestation
occur in various places for equally various purposes in both texts. The passages
that I wish to examine here have been culled from Caraka-saṃhitā, śārīra-sthāna
IV.1-26 and Suśruta-saṃhitā, śārīra-sthāna III (entire), for in these passages, we
hear yet another loud, booming, and insistent voice, that of the fetus itself, who
communicates his needs to the outside world through the instrument of his mother’s
voice, thereby participating in the creation of his own identity and the traits of his
own personality. I would like to examine these narratives in depth, paying strict
attention to the points at which certain terms are used for “womb”. I would also
like to trace the nuanced flow of the various registers of discourse that appear in
these passages, for here, we find cosmogonic paradigms culled from the Vedas
and sāṃkhya, mythemes from hymns fused with dizzying spins on emanation
theory. This inter-uterine “big bang” language is interspersed with bland, frank,
and pragmatic clinical descriptions of the embryonic tissue mass, obviously
keenly observed in some sort of context, either by men in direct observation or
possibly by female attendants who then report to men. The cosmic language
of conception and that of clinical observation are also augmented by a third
category of information composed of descriptions of what is happening to the
outer bodily surfaces of the woman herself.
First of all, it is necessary to indicate the sorts of phenomena that I characterize
as betraying “religious” qualities or inhabiting “religious” positions in the
examples that I have chosen for discussion below. As Jean Filliozat (1964: 26)
has emphatically stated, “It is only in the case of certain therapeutic prescriptions,
or in the case of ceremonies connected with birth that religion and magic are
brought in” and included in the early medical collections. Some elements are more
recognizably “religious” than others. I would include references to cosmogony —
and the rather ingenious use of cosmogonic ideas to make sense of what happens
at the moment of conception —in the religious category, although it is crucial
to note here that the moment in the texts at which this appears is celebrated in a
discursive shift in which the language is at once hymnic and explanatory. There
are also obvious moments of priestly intervention: I include below translations
and analyses of specific passages from the eighth chapter of the Caraka-saṃhitā’s
śārīra-sthāna (literally, the “section on the body”), in which a priest is brought
in to perform rituals to ensure that a woman will conceive a son with a desirable
complexion and physique, as well as a description of the puṃsavana ritual (“male
production rite”), performed for a woman as soon as conception is confirmed, to
ensure that the embryo she is carrying will be male.
44
02•Selby.indd 44 20/03/09 14:37:10