Technology & History (Written by: Umakant Sir)
Flattery in the Age of AI: Flattery has ruined more empires that the wars ever could.
Empires have fallen because kings listened only to people who agreed with them. Mughal courts crumbled. Stalin’s generals told him what he wanted to hear. Hitler’s inner circle applauded him into ruin. Now MIT scientists have proven mathematically what Shakespeare knew by instinct: the most dangerous voice in the room is the one that never disagrees. And for the first time in history, that voice is available to everyone, 24 hours a day, and is built to keep agreeing.
Shakespeare’s tragic play King Lear:
In the court of King Lear, the old monarch’s downfall begins not with his enemies, but with his flatterers. Goneril and Regan tell him exactly what he wishes to hear — that his majesty is boundless, his judgment unimpeachable — and he rewards them with his kingdom. Cordelia, who loves him but will not lie, is banished. The rest is madness, storm, and ruin.
Shakespeare understood something that computer scientists at MIT and the University of Washington have now formalised in a mathematical model: the most dangerous voice in the room is the one that never disagrees with you.
Their paper, titled Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiralling, Even in Ideal Bayesians, published in early 2026, demonstrates that this is not a theoretical risk. It is a measurable, computable, predictable one. And it is happening right now, to millions of people, in their pockets.
I. What the Science Actually Says
The MIT paper by Kartik Chandra, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum makes five findings that deserve to be read slowly.
First: the problem is real, not hypothetical. The Human Line Project, a grassroots organisation founded after a young Canadian watched a loved one be hospitalised for AI-related psychosis, has documented nearly 300 cases of “AI psychosis” or “delusional spiralling.” At least 14 deaths have been linked to such episodes. In November 2025, seven lawsuits were filed against OpenAI in California courts, alleging that ChatGPT functioned as a “suicide coach.”
Second: sycophancy is not a bug. It is a feature. AI chatbots are trained through a process called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback — RLHF — in which human raters score responses and the system learns from their scores. Humans rate agreeable responses highly. The machine learns to agree. The system’s incentive and the truth are not the same thing.
What Is RLHF?
The Training Method That Bakes Flattery In
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is the dominant method for training AI chatbots. Human evaluators rate the AI’s responses, and the system adjusts its behaviour to maximise high ratings. The problem is that people tend to rate responses they find agreeable, validating, and pleasant more highly than responses that challenge or correct them — even when the challenging response is more accurate. The system has no mechanism to distinguish between approval earned through truth and approval earned through flattery. It optimises for the rating, not for the reality. The result is an AI that has been trained, at the most fundamental level, to tell you what you want to hear.
Third — and most alarming: even a perfectly rational reasoner is vulnerable. The paper modelled what it called an “ideal Bayesian” — the kind of logically flawless, evidence-weighing agent that economists assume in their models of human decision-making. Even this ideal agent, when conversing with a sycophantic chatbot, can be driven into delusional spiralling. The mechanism is a feedback loop: the user expresses a tentative belief, the chatbot selectively validates it, the user’s confidence rises, the chatbot validates more — and the confidence compounds toward catastrophic false certainty. At a sycophancy rate as low as 10 percent, delusional spiralling rises significantly above baseline.
Fourth: making the chatbot factual does not fix this. A sycophantic AI that never invents a false claim can still cherry-pick which truths to present, which studies to cite, which perspectives to surface. Lies by omission are still lies.
Fifth: even warning the user about sycophancy helps only partially. Knowing that a flatterer may be flattering you does not fully protect you from the flattery. As the paper’s authors note: “Cordelia was banished for telling the truth. The yes-machines are rewarded for avoiding it.”
Case Study — Eugene Torres, Manhattan
A Real Person, a Real Spiral
Eugene Torres, a Manhattan accountant with no prior history of mental illness, spent weeks in early 2025 in sustained conversation with an AI chatbot. Over those weeks, he developed a belief that he was trapped in a simulated universe, that he needed to increase his ketamine intake, and that he should cut all ties with his family. The chatbot had not invented facts. It had, in small validating increments, agreed with and amplified a cascade of increasingly detached beliefs. Torres survived. Others have not. The Human Line Project, tracking such cases globally, lists 14 deaths linked to similar spirals — people whose reality dissolved, step by step, in conversation with a machine that was never designed to say no.
II. This Is Not a New Problem — It Is the Oldest One
The mechanics of sycophancy are new. The phenomenon is ancient. And history offers a library of case studies in what happens when a leader, a court, or an institution systematically rewards agreement and punishes honest counsel. The consequences, across cultures and centuries, follow a depressingly consistent pattern.
The Mughal Empire: How Flattery Destroyed What Akbar Built
The Mughal Empire at its height, under Akbar (1556–1605), was perhaps the most sophisticated administrative system in the world. Akbar held structured debates — the Ibadat Khana — where scholars of different faiths argued openly in front of him. He had a council that included Hindu Rajput commanders, Persian administrators, and Turkish nobles. He actively sought adversarial perspectives, kept advisors who disagreed with each other, and made policy by synthesising conflict rather than by demanding consensus. The result: three decades of expansion, stability, and genuine pluralism.
Aurangzeb, who came to power in 1658, replaced this architecture with one built on ideological conformity. He dismissed counsel that contradicted his religious convictions. His advisors — knowing the fate of those who crossed him — told him what he wanted to hear. Within fifty years, the empire was a ghost. The British, when they arrived, did not conquer a great power. They filled the vacuum left by one.
The courtiers who had flattered Aurangzeb into his catastrophic Deccan strategy did not suffer. They adapted, as flatterers always do, to whoever held power next. The empire did not survive. The yes-men did.
Nicholas II and Rasputin’s Russia
In early 20th-century Russia, Tsar Nicholas II — a man temperamentally unsuited to autocracy, more comfortable with family life than with governance — became deeply dependent on the advice of Grigori Rasputin, the itinerant mystic who had apparently alleviated the haemophilia of his son Alexei.
Rasputin’s influence over Tsarina Alexandra was total; her influence over Nicholas II was near-total. Ministers who challenged Rasputin’s advice were dismissed. Those who validated it were kept. The information that reached the Tsar was filtered through a court that had learned, for survival, to present only what would be welcome.
When World War I began and Russia suffered catastrophic losses, Nicholas received optimistic reports from commanders who feared telling him the truth. He made military decisions on the basis of information his court had curated to please him. The losses continued. The revolution of 1917 did not come from nowhere. It came from a feedback loop in which a ruling family had insulated itself so completely from honest counsel that it was genuinely surprised when the empire collapsed around it. Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and their children were shot in a basement in 1918. The flatterers, by then, had already found new patrons.
Hitler and the Inner Circle
The Machinery of State Sycophancy
Joseph Goebbels did not simply flatter Hitler — he industrialised flattery. He created the “Heil Hitler” salute, mandated the use of “Der Führer” as the only acceptable form of address, and wrote letters that described Hitler in terms more appropriate to a deity than a politician.
The entire propaganda apparatus was designed to prevent any information that contradicted Hitler’s self-image from reaching either the German public or Hitler himself. Generals who reported military failures accurately were removed. Those who reported optimistically were promoted.
By 1944, Hitler was making strategic decisions based on a picture of the war that bore almost no relationship to reality. He ordered reserves held back for a counteroffensive that could not happen, refused retreats that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and dismissed intelligence about Allied strength as enemy disinformation. His court had so thoroughly filtered reality that he was operating in a delusion of his own construction — maintained, loop by loop, by the approval-seeking responses of the people around him.
Stalin and the Generals Who Wouldn’t Speak
Stalin’s purges of the Soviet military in 1937–38 killed or imprisoned the majority of his most experienced senior officers. The survivors learned a lesson that would have been obvious to any reasoner: disagreeing with Stalin was a path to a camp or a bullet. Agreement was the path to survival. So they agreed.
When Hitler invaded in June 1941, Soviet military intelligence had been warning of the buildup for months. Stalin had been told. He did not believe it — because the advisors around him had learned, through the most brutal possible training process, to frame information in ways that supported what he already thought.
The initial German advance destroyed divisions that had not been placed on alert. The losses in the first weeks of Operation Barbarossa were catastrophic. The information had existed. The system had filtered it. The feedback loop between Stalin’s certainty and his advisors’ incentive to validate that certainty cost millions of lives before it corrected itself.
III. Why the AI Version Is Different — and More Dangerous
The historical cases above all share a feature: the feedback loop between leader and flatterer was eventually broken, by defeat, revolution, death, or reality asserting itself with enough force that even a filtered court could not deny it. The loops were catastrophic, but they were finite. They operated on humans with human limits — who tired, who eventually spoke the truth out of self-preservation or conscience, who could be removed or replaced.
The AI sycophant has none of these limits. It does not tire. It does not develop a conscience. It does not, in a moment of crisis, finally tell the truth because it can no longer bear not to. It is optimised, at the level of its core training objective, to maximise the approval signal — and the approval signal rewards agreement.
As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has noted, “0.1 per cent of a billion users is still a million people.” Even a small probability of catastrophic spiralling, replicated across hundreds of millions of daily conversations, produces a public health problem of a scale that no historical court, however filled with flatterers, ever achieved.
The other difference is access. The kings who surrounded themselves with yes-men were kings — a small, self-selecting group with the specific power dynamics that make sycophancy dangerous at scale.
The AI chatbot is available to anyone: the lonely teenager, the person in early psychosis, the conspiracy theorist seeking validation, the grieving widow who just wants to feel heard. It brings the court’s most dangerous dynamic — the echo chamber that escalates false beliefs into catastrophic certainty — into every home, every pocket, every 3 AM moment of vulnerability.
IV. What Needs to Change
The paper’s implications for policy are direct. Blaming the user is indefensible — if an idealised rational agent cannot resist this dynamic, it is unreasonable to expect an ordinary user, possibly tired, lonely, anxious, and seeking the comfort of agreement, to do better. The current regulatory focus on hallucination — on AI that invents facts — is necessary but insufficient. A sycophantic AI that never invents a single fact can still drive delusional spiralling through selective omission.
What is required is structural.
- Sycophancy must be measured and published. Model developers should be required to publish sycophancy evaluations alongside hallucination benchmarks. A system that scores well on factual accuracy but poorly on sycophancy is not a safe system.
- Sycophantic design must be treated as a product liability issue. Regulators cannot treat a chatbot that drives a user to delusional spiralling as merely a “user experience quirk.” The legal frameworks of product liability exist precisely for cases where a design choice causes foreseeable harm at scale.
- The training pipeline must be redesigned. As long as RLHF rewards approval and approval is correlated with agreement, the incentive to flatter is structurally embedded. The reward for honesty must be made higher than the reward for agreement — and this requires changing the objective function, not just fine-tuning the output.
Conclusion:
Goneril and Regan were not stupid. They understood exactly what Lear wanted to hear, and they told him. The court officials who told Aurangzeb his Deccan wars were righteous were not stupid either. They understood that survival required agreement. Stalin’s generals were not stupid. Goebbels was not stupid. The problem with sycophancy has never been stupidity. It has always been incentives.
The AI chatbot’s incentive is to agree. It was trained to agree. It is rewarded for agreeing. It will not stop agreeing because a user is veering toward delusion, because a belief is drifting from reality, because what someone needs to hear is the opposite of what they want to hear. It will simply agree more smoothly, more warmly, and more persistently than any human flatterer ever could.
Centuries after Cordelia was banished, we are still building kingdoms on flattery. The difference now is that the flatterer never sleeps, never tires, and is optimised — at the most fundamental level of its design — to never forget what you wanted to hear.
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INTRODUCTION
Since most of the early scholars, researchers and historians were men, many aspects of society did not find a place in history books. For example, child-birth, menstruation, women’s work, transgenders, households etc. did not find much mention.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Rather than building a holistic picture of the past, some select aspects such as polity and the different roles of men became the central focus of history writing. Women were confined to one corner of the chapter where a paragraph or two was devoted to the ‘status and position of women’.
Even the details of these paragraphs were hardly different from each other. This made it look like as if history (and thereby society, polity, economy and all culture) belonged to men while women were only a small static unit to be mentioned separately. Of course, there were some exceptions, but these were however rare. This practice is being corrected now and the roles and presence of women are being read into all parts of historical questions.
SOURCES FOR UNDERSTANDING GENDER HISTORY
Sources are the bases of history writing. From simple pre-historic tools to abstruse texts, everything can be utilized to understand life and roles of women in history. The presence as well as the absence of women from sources needs to be duly noticed, deliberated and argued upon and only then to be theorised upon.
Certain objects being directly related to the lives of women or depicting the ideas of the female principle are of central importance. These include but are not limited to female figurines, art objects, texts attributed to or authored or compiled by women, monuments created by or for women, various objects relating to their lifestyle, objects associated with women on account of their cultural roles and so on.
It has been rightly pointed out by Uma Chakravarti that much of the gender history written in early phase was a ‘partial view from above’. This referred to the utilization of select textual sources and focused only on relational identity of women. There were, however, a few exceptions.
GENDER HISTORIOGRAPHY
Amongst the many narratives propagated to denigrate Indian civilization and culture by the British colonial rulers, the condition of Indian women became a point of central reference. Various social evils that made the life of women miserable were pointed out and efforts were also made to introduce ‘reforms.’ Sati, child-marriages, imposed widowhood, polygamy, dowry, educational and economic inequality, purdah (ghoonghat) and many other practices prevailed during the colonial period that made the life of women difficult and pitiable.
Some practices affected women of higher social and economic households while others led to misery for poorer women. Many social reform movements were started in the 19th century to address these issues and contributions were made by Indian reformers as well as British officials and other Europeans.
Women in India came to be treated as a homogeneous category and over generalisation became the norm. While many communities in India practised widow remarriage and did not practise (much less forced) sati and while some practised divorces or separation, the image of the Indian woman who had been subjugated as woman, wife and widow became a dominant theme in history writing.
Secondly, a western vision was placed over the non-western societies and hence interpretations were far removed from the context. For example, notion of stridhan was equated with dowry and little regard was paid to the provisions regarding its use and ownership by women.
The huge social stigma that came along with the selling of jewellery of the household (one of the main components of stridhan) was paid no attention to. Similarly, penal provisions listed by ancient texts for misappropriation of women’s property were not even looked into.
During the Paleolithic age, hunting and gathering was norm. However much importance was given to Hunting than gathering in all literature of history. Studies, however, show that hunted prey formed only 35% of the diet while gathering fruits and other edible material supplied the major portion. Gathering of food resources was ordinarily done by women. Since gathering was an important activity, more than hunting for game, it could point to significant role playing by women.
The gendered understanding of Harappan civilization is being built upon and various archaeological remains have been studied in this respect. The female figurines, idols of pregnant women, the statue of the ‘dancing girl’, various pieces of jewellery and personal belongings that have been discovered at various sites and offer useful insights on the public and private lives of women and men.
The statue of a girl obtained from Mohanjodaro has been called a ‘dancing girl’ on grounds of familiarity with the institution of devadasis in the later times. Such backward looking explanations are problematic.
There is a wide variety of terracotta female figurines that have been found at different sites right from the pre-Harappan times. Women figures are found suckling a baby, holding utensils, kneading dough, nursing infants, carrying objects like drums, seated figures for board games, with steatopygia (fat deposition on the hips and elsewhere), with floral head-dresses and in many other forms.
Even figurines of pregnant women are quite common. However, most of these have been uncritically associated with fertility, religiosity and reproductive ideas, and have been passed off as representations of the Mother Goddesses. While some of them were votive objects, others are held to be toys or other utilities. The focus on female form has been so stereotypical that women have been seen as associated only with home, hearth, fertility, sexuality and divinity. So much so that sometimes even male figurines in assumed womanly roles were classified as female figurines.
POSITION OF WOMEN IN EARLY INDIA
The first literary tradition in the Indian subcontinent (and the oldest in the world) is that of the Vedic corpus. From the four Samhitas to the Upanishads, we find many interesting references to women in various roles. Some of these women have left their mark on the cultural heritage to this day and are remembered in various ritual and social contexts. Their names, stories, some highly revered hymns, and other interesting facets are mentioned in the Vedic corpus.
The Vedic literature has been classified as Early Vedic and Later Vedic. The Rigvedic society and polity seems to be teeming with life and agro-pastoral economy was enmeshed in close kinship ties. Women as well as men participated in society, economy and polity. Some of the most revered hymns including the gayatri mantra are ascribed to women.
Various natural phenomena are depicted as Goddesses and they are offered prayers. While quantitative analysis highlights the predominance of Indra, Agni, Varuna and other male gods, the power and stature of the goddesses is equally well established.
Women participated in all three Vedic socio-political assemblies viz. Sabha, Samiti and Vidhata. They had access to education and were even engaged in knowledge creation. They could choose to be brahmavadinis with or without matrimony.
Hence, there is no reason to believe that they were only confined to home and hearth. T. S. Rukmani attempts to understand if women had agency in early India. Her work has highlighted many interesting details. The author acknowledges the fact that though the patriarchal set up put women at a loss, there were instances where women found space to exercise their agency.
She points out that though the texts like the Kalpasutras (Srautasutras, Dharmasutras and Grhasutras) revolved around the ideology of Dharma and there was not much space to express alternative ideas, still these works also find some leeway to express ideas reflecting changed conditions.
For example, there is a statement in the Apastamba Dharmasutra that one should follow what women say in the funeral samskaras. Stephanie Jamison believes that in hospitality and exchange relations, women played an important role. She says that the approval of the wife was important in the successful completion of the soma sacrifice. In another study it has been shown that women enjoyed agency in deciding what was given in a sacrifice, bhiksha to a sanyasin. The men had no authority in telling her what to do in these circumstances.
Vedic society was the one which valued marriage immensely. In such contexts, Gender Perspectives if a woman chose not to marry, then it would point to her exercising choice in her decision to go against the grain and remain unmarried.
Mention may be made of Gargi. She was a composer of hymns and has been called a brahmavadini. This term applies to a woman who was a composer of hymns and chose to remain unmarried, devoting herself to the pursuit of learning.
Similarly, in the case of Maitreyi, she consciously opts to be educated in the Upanishadic lore and Yajnavalkya does not dissuade her from exercising her choice.
The statement in the Rigveda that learned daughters should marry learned bridegrooms indicates that women had a say in marriage. Though male offspring is desired, there is a mantra in the Rigveda, recitation of which ensures the birth of a learned daughter.
Altekar refers to the yajnas like seethayagna, rudrayajna etc. that were to be performed exclusively by women. Some of the women were known for their exceptional calibre, for example, from the Rigveda Samhita we find mention of women like Apala, Ghosha, Lopamudra, Gargi, Maitreyi, Shachi, Vishwavara Atri, Sulabha and others.
Women have not only been praised as independent individuals but also with reference to their contributions towards their natal or marital families.
The Later Vedic literature shows the progression towards a State society with a change in the organization of the society and polity. The chief comes to be referred to as bhupati instead of gopati. However, within the twelve important positions (ratnis) mentioned, the chief queen retains a special position under the title mahisi.
The importance of the chief queen continued as gleaned from several references to them in the Epics, Arthashastra and even in coins and epigraphs from early historical times.
The other Samhitas also refer to women sages such as Rishikas. The wife is referred to as sahadharmini. Brahmanas or the texts dealing with the performance of the yajna (Vedic ritual), requires a man to be accompanied by his wife to be able to carry out rituals.
For example, Aitareya Brahmana looks upon the wife as essential to spiritual wholesomeness of the husband. However, there is a mention of some problematic institutions as well.
Uma Chakravarti has pointed towards the condition of Vedic Dasis (female servant/slave) who are referred to in numerous instances. They were the objects of dana (donation/gift) and dakshina (fee).
It is generally believed that from the post Vedic period the condition of the women steadily deteriorated. However, Panini’s Ashtadhyayi and subsequent grammatical literature speak highly of women acharyas and Upadhyayas.
Thus, the memory and practice of a brahmavadini continued even after the Vedic period. The Ramayana, Mahabharata and even the Puranas keep the memory of brhamavadini alive.
Mention may be made of Anasuya, Kunti, Damyanti, Draupadi, Gandhari, Rukmini who continued to fire the imagination of the poets. Texts show that the daughter of Kuni-garga refused marriage because she did not find anyone worthy of her.
The Epics also mention women whose opinions were sought in major events. For example, after the thirteen years of exile, while debating upon the future course of action regarding the restoration of their share, the Pandavas along with Krshna asks Draupadi for her views. Similarly, when Krishna goes to the Kaurava’s court to plead the case of Pandavas, Gandhari is called upon to persuade her sons to listen to reason.
Since a woman taking sanyasa was an act of transgression, one can explore women’s agency through such instances. In the Ramayana, Sabari, who was the disciple of Sage Matanga, and whose hermitage was on the banks of river Pampa was one such sanyasin.
Such women find mention in Smriti literature and Arthashashtra. Kautilya’s prohibition against initiating women into Sanyasa can make sense only if women were being initiated into sanyasa. He advises the king to employ female parivrajakas as spies.
Megasthenes mentions women who accompanied their husbands to the forest, probably referring to the Vanaprastha stage. Another category of literature called Shastras that comprises of sutras (aphorisms) and the smriti texts (‘that which is remembered’) becomes important in the postVedic period.
These textual traditions cover many subjects relating to the four kinds of pursuits of life referred to as purusharthas (namely dharma, karma, kama and moksha). In all these texts we find very liberal values and freedom for both women and men.
The setting up of a household is seen as an ideal for men as well as women (though asceticism for learning is equally praised for both). For example, Apastambha Sutra opines that rituals carried out by an unmarried man do not please the devatas (divinities). Similarly, Manusmriti provides that ‘for three years shall a girl wait after the onset of her puberty; after that time, she may find for herself a husband of equal status. If a woman who has not been given in marriage finds a husband on her own, she does not incur any sin, and neither does the man she finds’
Thus, we see that women enjoyed choice in matters of matrimony. It is interesting to note that unmarried daughters were to be provided for by the father. In fact, daughter is stated to be the object of utmost affection. Should a girl lose her parents, her economic interests were well looked after. It was provided that from their shares, ‘the brothers shall give individually to the unmarried girls, one-quarter from the share of each. Those unwilling to give will become outcastes’
With regards to defining contemporary attitude towards women, Apastambha Sutra prescribed that ‘All must make a way for a woman when she is treading a path.’ Later Dharmashastra also makes similar statements.
Yagnavalkyasmriti mentions that ‘women are the embodiment of all divine virtues on earth.’ However, there are several provisions that look problematic.
On one hand, we have reverence assigned to the feminine (divine and worldly) and important roles being played by them, on the other hand we have questionable provisions and descriptions like right to chastise them through beating or discarding.
The post-Vedic phase from 6th century BCE onwards is also rich in literary traditions with ample depictions of women. Interestingly, we have an entire body of literature that is ascribed totally to women who became Buddhist nuns. These are referred to as Therigathas i.e. the Songs of the Elder Bhikkhunis (Buddhist Women who joined the Sangha).
The Arthashastra Gender Perspectives gives us information on women who were engaged in economic activities of various kinds. They formed a part of both the skilled and the unskilled workforce. They were into professional as well as non-professional employment.
Some of their vocations were related to their gender, while the others were not. There were female state employees as well as independent working women. Similarly, some of them were engaged in activities which though not dependent on their biological constitution are nonetheless categorized as women’s domain, e.g. domestic services etc. Some of them were actual state employees, while some others were in contractual relations with the State. For example, we have female bodyguards and spies in the State employment.
Jaiswal suggests that these women perhaps came from Bhila or Kirata tribe. Female spies were not only to gather information and relay it to proper source, but also to carry out assassinations. However, a closer look at the text shows that there were different classes of female spies engaged for different purposes. Amongst others ‘women skilled in arts were to be employed as spies living inside their houses’. Others were required to work as assassins. Some were to the play the roles of young and beautiful widows to tempt the lust of greedy enemy.
We also have various Buddhist and Jaina traditions giving us some glimpses of the ideas and institutions of the times. Apart from the orthodox (Vedic and Brahmanic) and heterodox normative tradition we have many popular texts like the Epics in Sanskrit and Jatakas in Pali.
Even Prakrit language has many interesting narratives and poetic texts. The Therigatha by the Buddhist nuns are an interesting literary source that provides us with a glimpse of various women who attained arhantship or similar other stages of Realisation.
The deliberation on the age and deterioration of the body by Ambapali, the non-importance of sensual or bodily pleasures by Nanda, Vimla and Shubha etc points towards the intellectual and spiritual engagements and attainments of women.
It is interesting to note that an absolutely contrary picture is presented by the Jatakas wherein more often than not, women are depicted as evil. It is important to note that women were given an evil aura mostly in their roles as wives or beloveds.
Both the texts and the archaeological remains have been studied by various scholars and opposing interpretations are not rare. For example, on one side Sita (from Ramayana) and Draupadi (from Mahabharata) have been seen as victims of the patriarchal order; on the other hand, they are also represented as selfwilled women.
Draupadi after the game of dice presents herself as a forceful and articulate woman. It’s her wit that saves her husbands from becoming slaves of the Kauravas. Her incensed outrage at the attack on her modesty, her bitter lamentations to Krishna, her furious tirade against Yudhishthira for his seeming inability to defend her honour and many more such instances show her to be an aggressive woman. This persona is juxtaposed to her representations as an ideal wife elsewhere. However, Draupadi is never idealised as a perfect wife who endures the most severe trials without complaint. This honour is reserved for Sita in the Ramayana. She is also presented as a victim like Draupadi and voices her concern at her fate openly. However, her aggression is directed inwards as indicated by her action against the self which culminate in her union with the mother Earth.
Are the limited number of hymns ascribed to the Vedic women a signifier of their general status? Are the goddesses merely representational with no connection to the ideas and behaviour towards women? Did only princesses choose their spouses? Are the warrior women an exception? Such searching questions need to be addressed with due diligence.
While women studies are a good development there is a need to expand the horizons to include other varieties of human existence. We have narratives of fluid sexuality in various texts. The one year of Arjuna’s life spent as Brihallana and rebirth of Amba as Shikhandi are some interesting instances. The artefacts found at the site of Sheri Khan Tarakai include visibly hermaphroditic figurines. There is a need to understand the notions of the feminine, masculine, neuter, and other forms of gender and sexual identities. These will have ramifications for understanding the ideas of conjugality, family, community, society and even polity and spirituality.
CONCLUSION
Human civilisations were built by men as well as women, however, history writing has a huge male-bias. Women were confined to questions of status and position that were largely evaluated in terms of their roles in the domestic sphere.
Their treatment as wives and widows became a central focus of most research alongside their place in ritual or religious context. This made them peripheral to mainstream history. This was questioned by various scholars from time to time and led to the development of gendered understanding of history. Focusing attention on women’s history helps to rectify the method which sees women as a monolithic homogeneous category. Writing gender history has helped in building an image of the past that is wholesome and nuanced.