History & Ideas
The Forgotten Superpower: How Ancient India Shaped the World — and Why We Were Made to Forget
The numbers we use to do every calculation on every computer in the world were invented in India. The religion practiced by over half of Asia spread from India. The greatest university of the ancient world stood in Bihar. Historian William Dalrymple‘s new book asks a pointed question: how did we forget all of this — and who decided we should?
There is a carved ivory figurine in the collections of the Museo Nazionale in Naples, Italy. It is small, exquisitely detailed, shows a woman in a classic Indian posture, and was found in the ruins of Pompeii — buried under volcanic ash since 79 CE. It is one of the clearest physical proofs that Rome and India were not merely aware of each other but traded with each other at scale, across thousands of miles of open ocean, centuries before the Christian era.
Rome was buying Indian luxuries — cotton, spices, ivory, gems — in such quantities that the Roman historian Pliny the Elder complained that India was draining the empire’s treasury. He estimated the outflow at 50 million sesterces a year. That, he wrote, was what India cost Rome. The money flowed east. So did something far more durable: ideas.
This is the world that historian William Dalrymple recovers in his 2024 book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World — a New York Times instant bestseller.
Dalrymple spent five years travelling through the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia, tracing the routes along which Indian civilisation flowed outward for nearly fifteen centuries. Speaking to Fareed Zakaria, he described the book’s central argument simply: ancient India was “the cultural superpower of Asia,” and the world has largely forgotten it.
The forgetting, as it turns out, was not an accident.
I. The Golden Road — and the World It Built
Dalrymple’s central concept is what he calls the “Golden Road” — a network of maritime trade routes, cultural exchange, and intellectual transmission that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific for approximately fifteen centuries, from around 250 BCE to 1200 CE. This is not a metaphor for a single physical highway. It is a name for a phenomenon: the sustained, multidirectional flow of Indian goods, religions, philosophies, mathematics, art, architecture, and language across the known world.
The scale of India’s influence during this period is difficult to absorb. More than half of the world’s population today lives in countries that were shaped, in their foundational cultural identities, by ideas that originated in India.
Buddhism — which spread from India into Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, China, Korea, and Japan — was not carried by armies. “India spread its ideas through culture and trade, not conquest,” Dalrymple told Zakaria. He calls it “an empire of the spirit.“
India’s Reach, in Objects and Evidence
- An ivory figurine of a courtesan in the Indian style, found in Pompeii, buried since 79 CE
- Grains of Indian pepper discovered in the mummified nostrils of Pharaoh Rameses II
- Indian diamonds believed to have been used in cutting the stones of the Egyptian pyramids
- A cuneiform tablet mentioning a whole village of Indians in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq)
- The majority of Roman gold coins found anywhere in the world — found in India and Sri Lanka
- Angkor Wat — the largest religious monument ever built — a Hindu temple in Cambodia
- Borobudur in Java — the world’s largest Buddhist monument, built in 9th-century Indonesia
- Indonesia’s national airline, Garuda, named after the mount of the Hindu god Vishnu
- Scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata carved on temple walls in Thailand and Sumatra
Between 200 BCE and 1200 CE, Dalrymple argues, Sanskrit played the same unifying role across Asia that Latin played in medieval Europe. A scholar or ambassador in 10th-century Java or 7th-century Afghanistan would have written and spoken in Sanskrit. The great Indian epics — the Mahabharata and the Ramayana — were retold across the continent.
The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who in 629 CE undertook a perilous six-year journey to India to reach the great university at Nalanda, crossing the Pamirs through bandits and civil war, returned home with 657 Sanskrit texts, statues, and relics. He knew, writes Dalrymple, that Nalanda was the greatest centre of learning in the world. The Harvard, Oxbridge, and NASA of its day, all in one campus in Bihar.
II. The Numbers That Run the World
The most consequential of all India’s exports to the world was not a religion, or a piece of art, or even a trade route. It was a mathematical idea so fundamental that it is now invisible — taken so completely for granted that its Indian origin has been forgotten even in the countries that depend on it most.
We call them Arabic numerals: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. The Arabs gave them to Europe. But the Arabs received them from India — and have always called them Hindu numerals. Dalrymple made the point pointedly to Zakaria: “We call our numbers Arabic numbers because that’s where the West got them from. But the Arabs got them from the Indians.”
The origin story is specific. In the 5th century CE, the mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata — who studied and later headed the observatory at Nalanda University in Bihar — formalised the place-value positional number system that makes it possible to express any number, however large, with just ten symbols.
His 499 CE text, the Aryabhatiya, contained breakthroughs in algebra, trigonometry, and astronomy. Aryabhata calculated the value of pi to 3.1416 — correct to four decimal places — and appears to have understood that it was irrational, a fact that would not be formally proved in Europe until 1761.
A century later, in 628 CE, Brahmagupta wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta — the first mathematical text to treat zero as an independent number with its own arithmetic rules. Before Brahmagupta, zero was a placeholder — a blank space.
He made it a number: something you could add, subtract, multiply, and reason about. He established that 1 + 0 = 1, that 1 − 0 = 1, that 1 × 0 = 0. These seem trivially obvious now. They were not obvious before someone wrote them down for the first time.
How Zero Travelled from Bihar to Baghdad to Brussels
The Journey of the Most Important Number in History
In 773 CE, a delegation from the Raja of Sindh arrived in Baghdad bearing gifts for the Caliph. What caught the Caliph’s attention was not the jewels or the cotton — it was a single manuscript containing the mathematical theories of Brahmagupta. The Arabs called it “The Great Sindhind.” The scholar who translated and expanded on Brahmagupta’s work was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. His name, Latinised, became “algorithm.” His book on Indian arithmetic gave us the word “algebra” (from the Arabic al-jabr, a term in his title).
In the 12th century, al-Khwarizmi’s works were translated into Latin in Spain. Medieval European scholars encountered the Hindu-Arabic numerals for the first time and gradually adopted them, replacing the cumbersome Roman numeral system.
Every calculation done on every computer, smartphone, and calculator in the world today runs on a numbering system whose conceptual foundations were laid in Bihar in the 5th century CE.
Dalrymple puts the lineage plainly: “Thanks to Aryabhata, we have algebra, algorithms, and binary.” Even the words trace back to translations of Indian texts. And the chain runs unbroken to the present: “Islamic scholars in 12th-century Spain described Indians as masters of mathematics,” he told Zakaria, “and if you go to Silicon Valley today, people will tell you the same story.”
III. The Trade That Fed Rome
One of the more surprising arguments in Dalrymple’s book is the claim that the ancient world’s primary trade spine was not the overland Silk Road connecting China to the Mediterranean, but a maritime route running through India — one that both preceded the Silk Road by centuries and operated at a far greater scale.
The evidence is physical. Roman gold coins have been found in concentrations in India and Sri Lanka that have no parallel elsewhere in the world. Pliny was not exaggerating when he complained about Roman wealth flowing eastward. Archaeological evidence from the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike shows habitation by Indian merchants — inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi script, Indian pottery, Indian spices — suggesting a permanent community of Indian traders based there.
“Every year,” Dalrymple says, “fleets of hundreds of vessels were leaving the Egyptian coast, going down the Red Sea and arriving in India.” The Romans had no direct contact with China. But they knew India intimately, through the sailors, merchants, and scholars who traversed this maritime corridor.
Dalrymple challenges the “Silk Road” framing directly, arguing it is partly a product of Chinese historiographical ambition — a rebranding of trade history that places China at the centre of ancient globalisation. His counter-claim is that India was the actual hub: the point through which both western and eastern trade flowed, and whose cultural exports went with the goods in both directions.
IV. How the Forgetting Happened
If ancient India’s influence was this large, this documented, and this consequential, the obvious question is: why don’t we know about it? Why do students in Europe and America learn about Greece, Rome, and China as the pillars of ancient civilisation, while India appears in the narrative largely as a destination for British colonialism?
Dalrymple’s answer is layered and honest. He points first to colonialism. The early British orientalists — Sir William Jones, who in 1786 identified the kinship between Sanskrit and the European languages; James Prinsep, who deciphered the Brahmi script and unlocked millennia of Indian inscriptions — were genuinely fascinated by Indian antiquity and treated it with respect.
But the colonial establishment that followed them was not. Thomas Macaulay, the Victorian official who shaped India’s education policy, wrote famously that “a single shelf of good English books is worth more than the whole native library of India and Arabia.” The British, Dalrymple notes drily, could hardly celebrate India’s intellectual heritage while simultaneously claiming to be civilising it. So they didn’t.
The dismissal ran deep into how Indian mathematics was taught — or rather, not taught. Aryabhata and Brahmagupta did not appear in European mathematics curricula the way Pythagoras and Archimedes did, even though their contributions were of at least comparable significance. The decimal number system that Europe adopted in the 13th century, the zero that made calculus and computing possible — these arrived labelled as Arabic rather than Indian, obscuring their true origin one step further.
Post-colonial historiography added its own complications. Southeast Asian nations, emerging from colonial rule after World War II, were in no mood to accept that their foundational cultures had been shaped by what amounted to an earlier Indian cultural expansion.
The word “colonialism,” in their recent experience, meant oppression. They did not want to situate themselves as the legacy of an earlier Indian hegemony, however different its character. So evidence of deep Indian influence was minimised or framed away.
Back in India, Dalrymple argues, textbooks written in the early independence period tended to underplay Hindu and Buddhist historical achievements in the interest of secular, pluralist nation-building — a political choice with real historiographical consequences.
The result is a historical lacuna of extraordinary size: an empire of ideas that stretched from the Red Sea to Japan, sustained for fifteen centuries, and then written out of the story that most of the world tells about where it came from.
V. The Return
Dalrymple is not a nostalgist. He does not write The Golden Road as a lament for a lost golden age or as a brief for any political position. The book has been praised by Foreign Affairs as “a riposte to both right-wing and left-wing historiography in India: right-wing historians make fantastic claims that cloak India’s real and substantial achievements, while those on the left prioritise social history in a way that displaces intellectual achievement. Dalrymple finds another India in the past: open to trade, tolerant, scientific, creative, and universalist.”
The India he recovers is not the India of any contemporary political faction. It is the India of Nalanda — an institution that at its peak housed over 10,000 students from across Asia, offered courses in every subject from mathematics and astronomy to medicine and philosophy, attracted scholars from China, Korea, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, and was, by any measure, the greatest university in the ancient world.
It is the India of Aryabhata, who in 499 CE calculated the Earth’s circumference to within 70 miles of its actual value. It is the India of the merchants who built permanent communities in Roman Egypt and left their pottery and their scripts and their pepper in the ruins.
On the question of India’s future, Dalrymple is direct. He told Zakaria that India will overtake both Japan and Germany within five years and will rank among the top three economies in the world by the century’s end.
The continuity he sees is real: “Islamic scholars in 12th-century Spain described Indians as masters of mathematics, and if you go to Silicon Valley today, people will tell you the same story.”
The place-value number system that Aryabhata formalised in Bihar in the 5th century, the zero that Brahmagupta codified in the 7th, the algebra that Arab scholars built from Indian texts in the 9th and transmitted to Europe in the 12th — these are not footnotes to a story about someone else’s civilisation. They are the foundation of every calculation running on every device in the world today.
That foundation was built in India. Dalrymple simply went and found the evidence — and had the temerity, as he says, to give it a name.
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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.