Motherhood Without Power: The Paradox of the Mother in Brahmanical Social Thought, C. 500 BCE–300 CE

Abstract

The extraordinary elevation of the mother in Brahmanical texts has often been taken as evidence of women's honoured position in ancient India. Yet the same textual traditions regulate female sexuality, subordinate wives and privilege male descent. This article argues that these positions were structurally connected: motherhood was exalted as a socially authorized form of reproduction through which lineage, caste, inheritance and household continuity could be sustained. Drawing principally on the Dharmasutras, Manusmrti and selected epic narratives, it distinguishes maternal reverence from independent reproductive, proprietary and juridical authority. Duties to honour and maintain mothers, protections for pregnancy and recognition of maternal care were consequential but did not necessarily authorize women to determine their children's affiliation or the disposition of household resources. The preference for sons, regulation of legitimate descent, seed-and-field imagery, birth impurity and the privileging of initiation over bodily birth disclose the institutional conditions of this reverence. However, textual disagreements and occasional narratives of maternal intervention prevent the reduction of Brahmanical thought to a uniform system or of all mothers to passive subjects. The article asks what social and political work maternal idealization performed and locates that idealization at the intersection of authorized sexuality, legitimate reproduction and the reproduction of a hierarchical social order.