In the seventeenth century, in western India, menstruating women were not allowed to do what?

They were not allowed to touch the plough or the potter’s wheel.

The correct answer is Option 1 - They were not allowed to touch the plough or the potter’s wheel.

Menstruating women, for instance, were not allowed to touch the plough or the potter’s wheel in western India.

Women in Agrarian Society (Medieval India):

In many different societies, the production process often involves men and women performing certain specified roles. Women and men had to work shoulder-to-shoulder in the fields. Men tilled and ploughed, while women sowed, weeded, threshed and winnowed the harvest. With the growth of nucleated villages and expansion in individuated peasant farming, which characterised medieval Indian agriculture, the basis of production was the labour and resources of the entire household. Naturally, gendered segregation between the home (for women) and the world (for men) was not possible in this context.

Nonetheless, biases related to women’s biological functions did continue. Menstruating women, for instance, were not allowed to touch the plough or the potter’s wheel in western India or enter the groves where betel leaves (paan) were grown in Bengal.