Journal of South Asia Women Studies

This paper examines a number of selected passages and fragments of hymns related to the representations of women and men from the perspective of the lexical and grammatical-rhetorical aspects of the texts and the differences based on gender. The analysis focuses on words in relative isolation and in their relation to the other words within the phrase, the sentence and the larger scale context structures, because their semantics generates an overall gender presentation. Thus, the study concentrates on discovering the content of the commonly constructed gender images as well as on the ways they are realized at the linguistic-rhetorical level of the compositions, by examining categories such as agency, transitivity, grammatical and lexical collocation, etc. The focus is on whether there is gender-based predictability about what semantics the verbs have and what type of agency is involved in the execution of the processes expressed in their meanings, as well as who and what is at the receiving end. In other words, these issues are investigated in terms of the types of roles and domains in which women and men are described to function, as well as the centrality and/or marginality of these domains.

The goal of the present paper is to discern patterns of gender indexing in the language of the Ṛg Veda. A conscious attempt has been made here to illustrate and discuss how women and men are talked about differently in the songs in order to reveal what information about gender is encoded there, particularly with regards to their roles and their domain-based distribution. This study is based on quantitative observations and it outlines those gender-related aspects and topics, which are most common and popular in the hymns. Thus, based on the consistency, with which men and women are portrayed differently, it is possible to introduce here the notion of stereotypes about gender reflected in the hymns.