Debt And Honour PART-I.

French anthropologist Jean-Claude Galey encountered in a region of the eastern Himalayas, low-ranking castes referred to as 'the vanquished ones', since they were thought to be descended from a population once conquered by the current landlord caste and lived in a situation of permanent debt dependency. They were obliged to solicit loans from the landlords simply to find a way to eat-not for the money, since the sums were paltry, but because poor debtors were expected to pay back the interest in the form of work, which meant they were at least provided with food and shelter while they cleaned out their creditors' outhouses and reroofed their sheds. For the 'vanquished' the most significant life expenses were weddings and funerals. These required a good deal of money, which always had to be borrowed. Often, when a poor man had to borrow money for his daughter's marriage, the security would be the bride herself. She would be expected to report to the lender's household after her wedding night, spend a few months there as his concubine, and then, once he grew bored, be sent to some nearby timber camp as a prostitute working off her father's debt. Once it was paid off, she'd return to her husband and begin her married life. You would expect mass outrage, but there was no widespread feeling of injustice. By getting dishonoured through conquest and not dying on the battlefield, 'the vanquished' had been stripped of their humanity, condemned to be vessels of pleasure and data points on a creditors' ledger.

In many ways, the history of debt is also one of patriarchy. In early Sumerian society, women were everywhere, from rulers to bureaucrats. Although, one cannot claim utter gender emancipation, but it was closer to the modern world than to medieval times. Over the course of the next thousand years or so, all this changes. The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women's role in government and the liberal professions, and the loss of women's independent legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands.

By the middle of the second millennium B.C., prostitution was well established as a likely occupation for the daughters of the poor. As the sexual regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched, the virginity of respectable daughters became a...