POSITION OF WOMEN IN ANCIENT INDIAN SOCIETY

Abstract

The proposition that women held a high position in Vedic society and lost it in later centuries took its classic form in Altekar's survey and has since been challenged by Uma Chakravarti, who reads the same record through caste, property and Brahmanical patriarchy. This paper asks whether the surviving evidence supports either account and what each category of source can demonstrate. The design is descriptive-analytical and source-critical, resting on published editions, translations and scholarship, and it re-examines Vedic and Dharmaśāstric texts, the epics, Buddhist and Jaina sources, Greek and Arthaśāstra notices of the Mauryan court, and inscriptions from the Ashokan period to the Gupta age. Three findings emerge. The apparent decline owes much to a shift in the available sources, as liturgical texts that idealise women give way to legal texts that regulate them. The Eran inscription of 510 CE, usually cited as the earliest epigraphic evidence of satī, records a single woman's act without naming any practice, and the revised edition identifies the enemy in a way the 1888 translation left open. Donative inscriptions, analysed in detail by Kirit K. Shah, show women acting as patrons in the same centuries in which the normative literature restricted them. The paper concludes that a differentiated reconfiguration of gender relations, shaped by caste endogamy, property and early state formation, fits the evidence better than a general decline, although the argument applies chiefly to propertied, upper-varṇa households.