Women, Bhakti and the quest for knowledge

Women in the Vedic period are often described as holding a high and respected place. They:

• took part in learning and, in some contexts, in rituals;
• took part in chariot races and attended the sabhā;
• composed hymns: several Ṛigvedic hymns are credited to women sages, Apālā, Viśhvavārā, Ghoṣhā and Lopāmudrā.

Goddesses like Uṣha (dawn) and Aditi (mother of the gods) were revered. The book quotes Manu-smṛiti 3.56: "Where women are honoured, there the gods rejoice."

Over time, women's position went up and down, and even declined, as conditions changed. But women went on working in homes, farms, crafts and religion.

Examples from later times:

• Gupta–Vākāṭaka literature (4th–6th centuries CE) shows women who were highly educated and skilled in the arts.
• Prabhāvatī Gupta, daughter of the Gupta king Chandragupta II, ruled the Vākāṭaka kingdom as regent and gave land grants in her own name.
• Women appear as donors in votive inscriptions: texts carved to record a gift to a deity or sacred place.

In the south, Sangam poems show women planting, weeding, husking and winnowing paddy, rearing cattle, spinning, fishing, making salt and selling garlands. Famous women poets include Avvaiyar and Vennikuyattiyar, who was a potter. Women bards and dancers worked as men did. Later, the Chola queen Sembiyan Mahādevī supported temple building.

Religion. Vedic deities were linked to nature: the sun, rain, fire, earth and dawn. They were worshipped through yajñas, with offerings to the sacred fire. Some of this lives on: sun worship at Chhath and Makar Sankranti. Because people depended on nature, they saw it as sacred, not just a resource.

Around the middle of the first millennium BCE, more people became renunciants: they left home and comforts to live as wanderers. They were called parivrājaka (wanderer), bhikṣhu (one who lives on alms) or śhramaṇa (one who strives). The Buddha and Mahāvīra were great thinkers of this time. But renunciation was already in the Vedic tradition: think of the vānaprastha and saṁnyāsa stages.

Bhakti means devotion: a direct connection with a personal god such as Viṣhṇu, Śhiva or Śhakti, without elaborate rituals, open to all, whatever their class or gender. It has early roots in the Mahābhārata, and spread widely in the 6th-century Tamil region through:

• the twelve Āḻvārs, saint-poets devoted to Viṣhṇu;
• the sixty-three Nāyanmārs, saint-poets devoted to Śhiva.

Education aimed at the whole person, not just a job. Pupils were taught truth, patience, regularity, humility, self-control, purity of self (sattvaśhuddhi) and reverence for all beings, and to do their duty to parents, teachers and the gods.

"What did they study?" The Vedas, grammar, logic, philosophy, ethics, mathematics, science, medicine and astronomy; and also music, dance, painting, physical education and archery, with yoga and meditation. Pupils lived in the teacher's home, the gurukula, like members of the family. The guru–śhiṣhya bond was sacred: the teacher led the pupil from the darkness of ignorance to the light of knowledge.

Great centres of learning (Fig. 5.10) included Takṣhaśhilā (a large, well-planned campus with housing, drains and waste management), Nālandā, Vikramśhilā, Vallabhī and Kānchīpuram, attracting students from India and abroad.

A shelf of early Indian books: