JSAWS - Vol. 9, No. 1 - Common Representations of Women and Men in the Ṛg Veda

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.

Introduction. 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.

During the course of the present study certain problems have been encountered, as this has been the case with a number of previous studies on the Ṛg Veda. It is the most ancient Indo-European monument of religious poetry, ca. 1300-900 BCE¹. Some of these problems are due to the very nature of the Ṛg Vedic hymns, such as scarcity, fragmentation, obscurity and allusiveness of the materials overtly or covertly dealing with gender issues, as well as intermixture of aesthetics and religion, prescriptiveness and descriptiveness. In addition, the problems arise from the complexity and non-homogeneity of early Aryan society, which along with the deficiency of archeological records make unfeasible the attempt to identify what sections of this society are being represented in these texts. In other words, judging what reality or segment of reality is or is not reflected in the songs and how distorted its reflection is, has proved to be an almost impossible undertaking. In addition, it is important to maintain an awareness that the present study deals with data scattered throughout 1028 songs and that the themes, which are in the scope of the present analysis, are not central in the texts, but rather marginal or secondary. For this reason, the collected body of evidence is fragmentary and disassociated and does not provide, nor aims to provide, a complete picture of the subject matter. Therefore, assembling or re-constructing a comprehensive picture of the gender dynamics in early Aryan society is not the goal of this study. Also, it should be noted here, that the linguistic data selected for this work have not been used for gender-oriented analysis before and has not been studied by the application of a gender framework. However, the findings of this analysis speak to the results of such previous research, which I will try to show later.

Generally, Indian scholars have projected a high degree of excitement and pride in their claims that the Vedic hymns give a picture of early Vedic society as fairly egalitarian and that women enjoyed very similar rights and opportunities to the ones that men did². Unlike the Indian scholars, on the other hand, Western scholars have tried to highlight the activities in which women, usually wives, could participate independently or along with their husbands, noting the restrictions of this involvement without being detrimental to the evidence. Generally, they are more reserved and to some degree skeptic in the discussion of issues of egalitarianism in this period, an issue, which was generally approached from a philological and religious studies perspective³. There is an opinion shared at the turn of the century by Winternitz (1920: 60) which can be used to illustrate this skepticism, according to which the position of women in the earliest time of Ṛg Veda was not yet as low as it became later in the classical period, and that it was neither equal nor high, but 'low'. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, scholars have not conducted their research exclusively on the ṚgVeda and have considered the later Vedic literature as well. That widens the chronological frame, which again, is not what I intend to deal with in my analysis.