Demographics & Society · March 2026
From Too Many to Too Few: How India Quietly Stopped Worrying About Its Population — and Started Worrying About Something Else
For decades, India was told its greatest threat was too many people. Now its fertility rate has dropped below the level needed to replace the population. The country that once sterilised millions in a panic is now debating whether it has enough children. The story of how that happened is more complicated — and more human — than either alarm would suggest.
There is a photograph that circulates occasionally in Indian demographic circles — grainy, black-and-white, dated somewhere in the mid-1970s. It shows a government camp in rural north India: a row of cots, men lying still, and a banner overhead that reads, in Hindi, “Small Family, Happy Family.” The men had just undergone vasectomies. Some came voluntarily, drawn by the offer of cash and a transistor radio. Others, by numerous accounts, did not come entirely of their own choosing.
That photograph belongs to one of the most troubling episodes in post-independence India — the forced sterilisation drives of the Emergency years, 1975 to 1977. Men and women in certain states were rounded up, pressured, or incentivised into permanent sterilisation. The government tracked numbers. It handed out prizes to districts with the highest “couple protection rates.” It treated human reproduction as a logistical problem to be solved by a determined administration.
Half a century later, India’s problem looks completely different. The country’s total fertility rate — the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime — has fallen to 1.9. That number sits below 2.1, which is the replacement rate, the minimum needed for a population to sustain itself across generations without immigration. India is, in other words, no longer producing enough children to replace itself. The country that once panicked about too many babies is now, in certain circles, beginning to quietly panic about too few.
How did this happen? And what does it mean? Two recent publications — a reflective essay by Bangladeshi public health leader Mushtaque Chowdhury, and a population projection report by the International Institute of Migration and Development and the Population Foundation — offer complementary answers. Together, they trace one of the most consequential and least understood policy journeys in modern Indian history.
I. The Bomb That Wasn’t
To understand where India’s population anxiety came from, you have to travel back to 1968 and a book called The Population Bomb, written by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. The book was a bestseller of a particular kind: urgent, terrifying, and, as it turned out, mostly wrong.
What Is Neo-Malthusianism?
The Theory Behind the Panic
In 1798, an English clergyman named Thomas Malthus argued that human populations grow faster than food supply — and that famine, disease, and war were nature’s way of correcting the imbalance. “Neo-Malthusianism” is the modern revival of that idea: the belief that too many people, especially in poor countries, will overwhelm available resources and cause civilisational collapse. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was its most famous expression. The theory has been heavily criticised — food production has largely kept pace with population growth through technology and trade — but it had enormous influence on Western aid policy and on governments in India that were dependent on Western donors in the 1960s and 70s.
Ehrlich painted apocalyptic scenes of a “population tsunami” in developing countries — mass starvation, social collapse, civilisational overload. The book terrified Western policymakers. It also gave intellectual cover to those who believed the solution lay in controlling the reproduction of people in poorer nations — a project that Western governments and foundations were willing to fund generously, as long as other countries bore its consequences.
In India, this agenda found a willing champion in Sripati Chandrasekhar, a demographer and sociologist who served as the country’s health minister in 1967. Chandrasekhar established a full department of family planning, pushed a “cafeteria approach” to fertility control — offering a menu of contraceptive options to women — and launched sterilisation drives across the country. He raised the legal age of marriage. He persuaded Parliament. He built a bureaucratic apparatus whose entire purpose was to reduce the number of Indians being born.
During the Emergency of 1975 to 1977, sterilisation targets were set at the district level and passed down through the bureaucracy like production quotas in a factory. States competed for awards. Officials cut corners, used pressure, and looked away when consent was not freely given. In some states, men were told they could not receive government services — ration cards, land records, loans — without being sterilised. The numbers were, by official count, impressive. The human cost was vast and unevenly borne, falling most heavily on the poor, the rural, and those with the least power to refuse.
II. The Study That Was Too Good to Be True
While Ehrlich was writing his ‘bomb’, something quieter and more careful was being done in Khanna, a village in Punjab. A team from Harvard University, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, had been running one of the world’s first large-scale family planning trials: offering contraceptive advice and supplies to married women, tracking uptake and birth rates over years. The results looked remarkable. High rates of “acceptance” among participants. The study became a landmark in global family planning advocacy, cited in journals and in donor reports.
There was just one problem. Acceptance and practice turned out to be very different things. The birth rates in Khanna didn’t change.
An anthropologist named Mahmood Mamdani — whose son, recently became the Mayor of New York — went back to Khanna and asked a simpler question: why did families who said yes to contraception keep having children? The answer he found was not ignorance or indifference. It was calculation. Poor farming families in Punjab needed children — to work the land, to support parents in old age, to offset the near-certainty that some children would not survive to adulthood. Children were not a problem to be solved. They were a rational economic response to a life with no other safety net.
Mamdani’s finding pointed to something that Western-funded family planning programmes were structurally unable to see: you cannot change fertility rates by distributing contraceptives to people whose lives make large families entirely sensible. The change has to come from somewhere deeper — from economic security, from the education of girls, from falling infant mortality, from a world in which a family can afford to have fewer children because it trusts that the ones it has will survive.
III. “Development Is the Best Contraceptive”
In 1974, India’s health minister at the time, Karan Singh, stood at the World Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, and said something that became one of the most quoted lines in the history of global demography: “Development is the best contraceptive.“
It was a rebuke to the Western population-control agenda — a statement that poor countries’ birth rates would fall not through coercion or external pressure but through the same process that had already driven birth rates down in the West: education, healthcare, women’s economic participation, and rising living standards. India, Singh was saying, did not have a population problem. It had a poverty problem. Solve the second and the first would take care of itself.
What Is the Demographic Transition?
The Pattern Every Developing Country Follows
The demographic transition is a pattern observed in virtually every country that has industrialised. It has four stages: first, birth rates and death rates are both high (many children born, many die young). Second, death rates fall as medicine improves, but birth rates remain high — population grows quickly. Third, birth rates begin to fall as people get richer, women get educated, and children cost more than they earn. Fourth, birth and death rates are both low — the population stabilises or begins to shrink. India has moved through stages two and three faster than expected, and parts of the country are now entering stage four.
The proof came from India’s own south. Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka — states that invested heavily in female literacy, infant healthcare, and economic development — all saw their birth rates collapse without any coercive intervention. Kerala reached replacement fertility in 1988, when the national average was still a child-per-woman higher. Tamil Nadu followed in 1993. Today, Maharashtra’s fertility rate is lower than Norway’s.
The contrast with northern states — which won national awards for high “couple protection rates” while continuing to show stubbornly elevated birth rates — was stark. Handing out contraceptives had not worked. Sending girls to school had.
IV. The Numbers Now
India’s national TFR today stands at 1.9 — below the replacement rate of 2.1 for the first time in recorded history. The country’s fertility fell from nearly five children per woman at independence, to around three in the 1990s, to under two today. The number of babies born in India annually peaked at around 29 million at the turn of the millennium and has been falling since.
India’s Fertility — The Numbers at a Glance
- National TFR (2023): 1.9 — below replacement level of 2.1
- Urban TFR: 1.6 | Rural TFR: 2.1
- Lowest state: Sikkim — 1.1
- Highest state: Bihar — 3.0
- TFR for women with no schooling: 3.3 | TFR for literate women: 1.8
- 18 states and UTs are now below replacement level
- Population projected to rise from 1.36 billion (2021) to 1.59 billion (2051), then plateau and decline
- Lancet projection: TFR could fall to 1.29 by 2050
But these national figures hide a fault line that is shaping Indian politics with increasing intensity. The southern states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana — have had below-replacement fertility for decades. Their populations are ageing, their workforces are shrinking, and their governments are already thinking about how to support growing numbers of elderly residents. Andhra Pradesh’s Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu recently announced his government is exploring a law to incentivise families to have more children — a striking position in a country that spent decades doing the opposite.
The northern states — Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh — still have TFRs above 2.5 in rural areas. Their populations are younger, their workforces are still growing, and they contribute disproportionately to India’s national headcount. Under the current system of parliamentary representation, seats are allocated based on population. When the delimitation exercise — the redrawing of constituency boundaries — eventually happens, states that kept their birth rates high will gain seats. States that reduced theirs will lose them. The south, which did what the national family planning programme asked, may be politically penalised for its success. It is perhaps the most perverse incentive structure in Indian democratic history.
V. The Ageing Country in Waiting
A projection report by the International Institute of Migration and Development and the Population Foundation, led by demographers S. Irudaya Rajan and J. Retnakumar, maps what India’s population will look like between now and 2051. The picture it draws is not of explosion or collapse, but of a slow, structural transformation whose consequences will be felt in every sector of public life.
India’s population will continue to grow — from 1.36 billion in 2021 to approximately 1.59 billion in 2051 — but the pace slows sharply. The annual growth rate of 0.5 percent is about a third of what it was during the high-fertility decades.
More importantly, the composition changes radically. The share of children in India’s population — already halved from 40 percent in the 1960s to 20 percent today — will continue to fall. The share of people over 60 will nearly double, reaching over 20 percent of the population by 2050. In Kerala alone, the elderly will constitute 25 percent of the state’s population by 2036.
What Is the Demographic Dividend? (Simply Explained)
The Window That Opens — and Closes
The demographic dividend is the economic boost that happens when a large share of a country’s population is of working age — neither very young (needing to be supported as children) nor very old (needing pensions and healthcare). With more workers than dependents, savings rise, productivity grows, and economies accelerate. China’s rapid growth in the 1980s–2000s was partly driven by its demographic dividend. India is currently in the middle of this window. The problem is that windows close. Once the working-age population starts ageing without a sufficient supply of young workers to replace them — as is already happening in south India — the dividend reverses into a burden. Japan is the most extreme example: it has more elderly citizens than children and an economy that has struggled with stagnation for decades.
India’s working-age population is expected to keep growing until 2041, which means the demographic dividend — the economic advantage of having more workers than dependents — is still available to harvest. But it will not wait indefinitely. The window is open. It will not stay that way.
The challenge is compounded by technology. Artificial intelligence and automation are eliminating the kinds of jobs — routine manufacturing, data processing, basic administrative work — that countries at India’s stage of development have historically used to absorb large numbers of young workers and generate the savings that fund industrialisation.
The jobs that automation cannot easily replace are in human-facing services: healthcare, teaching, social work, elder care. These are precisely the sectors where India’s growing elderly population will create the greatest demand. The demographic and technological challenges, read together, point to the same answer: invest in training a large health and care workforce.
VI. What the Policy Should Look Like Now
For most of independent India’s history, population policy meant one thing: getting the numbers down. The language of “couple protection rates,” of targets, of “cafeteria approaches” to contraception — all of it was oriented toward subtraction. The success of that project, paradoxically, has now made it obsolete. India no longer needs to reduce its birth rate. It needs to manage the consequences of a birth rate that has already fallen — and fallen faster, in some places, than anyone planned for.
What this means in practice is a shift in the entire purpose of population-related policy — from controlling numbers to improving the quality of life of the people who exist. This involves several things that India has historically underinvested in.
The New Policy Agenda — What Needs to Change
- From population control to population health. Policy energy should shift toward keeping people well at every stage of life — maternal and child health, chronic disease in middle age, mental health, elder care.
- Malnutrition in all its forms. India still carries a heavy burden of both under-nutrition in children and over-nutrition (obesity, diabetes) in adults. Both require attention across the entire lifecycle.
- Ageing infrastructure. Health systems built to handle infectious diseases and childbirth need to be expanded to handle the ailments of an older population: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, disability.
- Health workforce as employment. Since India’s working-age population won’t peak until 2041, there is still time to train a large corps of doctors, nurses, paramedics, and community health workers — creating jobs and addressing a chronic shortage simultaneously.
- Climate and pandemic readiness. Large populations remain ecologically significant. Expanding human settlements erases natural barriers between ecosystems, increasing the risk of zoonotic disease spillovers. Population health and environmental health are linked.
There is also the question of ecology — one that both publications flag and that rarely enters the demographic debate in India. Even a slower-growing population of 1.59 billion people places enormous demands on land, water, food, and energy.
The pressure on natural ecosystems — the forests, wetlands, and wild corridors that buffer human settlements from the microbes and climate shifts beyond them — does not diminish simply because birth rates have fallen. The absolute number still matters.
There is a particular kind of historical irony in the fact that Singapore and South Korea— two of the Asian economies that most aggressively pursued population control programmes in the 1970s and 80s — are now paying couples cash bonuses to have more children. The incentives have simply reversed. The anxiety has simply reversed. The bureaucratic apparatus that once tracked how many people could be prevented from being born now tracks how many can be encouraged into existence.
India is not at that point yet, and may never reach it at the national level. Its demography is too large and too uneven for a single policy lever to work everywhere. But the direction of travel is clear: the old language of the population bomb — of targets and drives and “protection rates” — belongs to a chapter that is now closed.
The question now is not how many Indians there will be, but what kind of country those Indians will grow old in.
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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.