Beyond Resistance: Rethinking Women's Agency in Ancient India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55544/ijrah.3.3.26Keywords:
Women’s agency, Ancient India, Patriarchy, Contestation, Compliance, NegotiationAbstract
This article rethinks women’s agency in ancient and early medieval India, arguing that agency should not be equated exclusively with resistance or emancipation. Instead, it proposes understanding agency as the capacity for consequential action within historically specific relations of power, expressed through compliance, negotiation, contestation and resistance.
The discussion traces the movement from nationalist accounts celebrating women’s elevated status to feminist critiques of patriarchal structures. A. S. Altekar’s emphasis on privileged Hindu women obscured differences of caste and class, while Uma Chakravarti and Janaki Nair redirected attention towards gender relations and the complexities of agency. Gender history and subaltern approaches further demonstrated that subordinated groups could act within restrictive social arrangements. Drawing on Saba Mahmood, the article questions the assumption that meaningful action must necessarily challenge established norms.
Through examples from epic narratives, Puranic traditions and inscriptions, it shows how women exercised authority through household management, ritual observances, property, patronage and political office. Draupadi’s invocation of wifely virtue and dharma illustrates how normative identities could enable claims and interventions. Women’s ritual practices could reinforce domestic expectations while creating recognised domains of religious competence. Female donors, temple women and ruling queens likewise participated in institutional and political life without necessarily overturning gender hierarchies.
The article stresses that exceptional women cannot establish general female equality, just as normative restrictions cannot demonstrate universal oppression/passivity. Sources must be interpreted according to their chronology, regional setting, institutional context and evidentiary limitations. Caste, class, kinship and religious affiliation shaped both opportunities and constraints.
Ultimately, it advocates an approach that examines what women did, the resources they used and the consequences of their actions. Agency must be demonstrated rather than assumed. This framework moves beyond celebratory and victim-centred narratives, recognising women as historical actors who could reproduce, negotiate, contest or transform relations of power within their social worlds.
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References
A. S. Altekar, The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day (Benares: The Culture Publication House, 1938).
Uma Chakravarti, “Beyond the Altekarian Paradigm: Towards a New Understanding of Gender Relations in Early Indian History,” Social Scientist 16, no. 8 (August 1988): 44–52.
Janaki Nair, “On the Question of Agency in Indian Feminist Historiography,” Gender & History 6, no. 1 (April 1994): 82–100; Chakravarti, “Beyond the Altekarian Paradigm,” 44–52.
Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, “Recasting Women: An Introduction,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 1–26.
Uma Chakravarti, “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State,” Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 14 (1993): 579–85.
Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–8; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 28–35.
Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject: Some Reflections on the Islamic Revival in Egypt,” Temenos 42, no. 1 (2006): 31–71.
Leslie C. Orr, Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God: Temple Women in Medieval Tamilnadu (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Shatarupa Bhattacharya, “The Bhaumakara Queens, Identity and Epigraphs: Exploring Queenship in Early Medieval Odisha,” in Of Thieves and Therīs, Potters and Pativratās: Essays on Early Indian Social History for Kumkum Roy, ed. Uma Chakravarti, Naina Dayal, Bharati Jagannathan, and Snigdha Singh (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2023), 345–72.
Laurie L. Patton, “How Do You Conduct Yourself? Gender and the Construction of a Dialogical Self in the Mahābhārata,” in Gender and Narrative in the Mahābhārata, ed. Simon Brodbeck and Brian Black (London: Routledge, 2007), 97–109, especially 100–104.
Jaya Tyagi, “Redefining Domesticity through Ritual Observances,” in Contestation and Compliance: Retrieving Women’s ‘Agency’ from Puranic Traditions (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 89–136.
Tyagi, “Redefining Domesticity through Ritual Observances,” 89–136.
Kumkum Roy, “Women and Men Donors at Sanchi: A Study of the Inscriptional Evidence,” in The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power: Explorations in Early Indian History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38–52.
Orr, Donors, Devotees, and Daughters of God.
Bhattacharya, “The Bhaumakara Queens,” 345–72.
Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens, rev. ed. (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2018).
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Agency, and the Liberatory Subject,” 31–71.
Chakravarti, Gendering Caste; Mahmood, Politics of Piety.
Nair, “On the Question of Agency,” 82–100; Chakravarti, “Beyond the Altekarian Paradigm,” 44–52.
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