Uploaded August 2022 | Updated September 2026, 45 minutes ago
Contemporary Hindu Woman: Strangled soul or an emancipated one?
Richa Shukla - Assistant Professor of Philosophy OP Jindal Global University
I am a woman of colour, coming from a diverse country named India. I owe thanks to my family for a cosmopolitan background in Benaras (Varanasi), the oldest city in the world, where I was born and brought up, which taught me about the co-existence of multiple cultures. Speaking three to four Indian languages made me understand how beautiful the canon becomes when we have people from different genders, races, castes, ethnicities, and religions. Later, Bombay (now known as Mumbai) played a pivotal role in shaping my understanding of the self and Other. My neighbourhood was full of people from different communities, whether it was Parsis (Zorastrains), Portuguese Christians or Konkani (a term used for the fisherman community in Mumbai), or Marathis. It exposed to me the beautiful rich literary world of words by great social reformers and poets. All these added layers shaped me when I decided to become a student of philosophy. Hindu philosophy has long been debated, critiqued, and dismissed. Debated and critiqued as one of the core scriptural Hindu values. Dismissed as it has been painted as a monolithic category that has nothing to offer apart from spiritualism and abstraction. Whether it’s the Rig-Veda,1 The Ramayana or The Mahabharata, 2 all these can be considered as a valid carrier of epistemology; not because they give us a glimpse of who we used to be and where are we coming from, but also because if we do a symptomatic reading of these texts, it gives us an idea of ‘Who can be a knower?’ and ‘Who has been a knower/ subject?’ All this stands in contradiction when we see how Hinduism is being propagated. The present work shall use auto-ethnography as a toolweb of contemporary Indian women. As a philosopher, I rely on my ‘lived-experience’ as a contemporary Indian woman, and that shall be reflected in the paper. Between the lived experience and theoretically how it has been described in the scriptures, the void that still exists in the contemporary Indian society shall be addressed. During Vedic times, a distinction has been made between two categories of women: brahma vadini (scholarly women who didn’t get married and choose to dedicate their life to knowledge and wisdom) and rajaswala (women who belong to the realm of domesticity, reproduce, and have family). My work seeks to investigate both the categories and investigate the latter in terms of their presence, dissent, and responsibilities. By invoking the latter category, I shall discuss the conflicted issues in the contemporary Hindu society like, menstruation, marriage and most importantly, the life of a Hindu woman. This paper shall aim to understand Hindu women theoretically and empirically; how ideas have been defined in Hindu scriptures and how they are being practised.
Contemporary Hindu Woman: Strangled soul or an emancipated one?
Richa Shukla - Assistant Professor of Philosophy OP Jindal Global University
I am a woman of colour, coming from a diverse country named India. I owe thanks to my family for a cosmopolitan background in Benaras (Varanasi), the oldest city in the world, where I was born and brought up, which taught me about the co-existence of multiple cultures. Speaking three to four Indian languages made me understand how beautiful the canon becomes when we have people from different genders, races, castes, ethnicities, and religions. Later, Bombay (now known as Mumbai) played a pivotal role in shaping my understanding of the self and Other. My neighbourhood was full of people from different communities, whether it was Parsis (Zorastrains), Portuguese Christians or Konkani (a term used for the fisherman community in Mumbai), or Marathis. It exposed to me the beautiful rich literary world of words by great social reformers and poets. All these added layers shaped me when I decided to become a student of philosophy. Hindu philosophy has long been debated, critiqued, and dismissed. Debated and critiqued as one of the core scriptural Hindu values. Dismissed as it has been painted as a monolithic category that has nothing to offer apart from spiritualism and abstraction. Whether it’s the Rig-Veda,1 The Ramayana or The Mahabharata, 2 all these can be considered as a valid carrier of epistemology; not because they give us a glimpse of who we used to be and where are we coming from, but also because if we do a symptomatic reading of these texts, it gives us an idea of ‘Who can be a knower?’ and ‘Who has been a knower/ subject?’ All this stands in contradiction when we see how Hinduism is being propagated. The present work shall use auto-ethnography as a toolweb of contemporary Indian women. As a philosopher, I rely on my ‘lived-experience’ as a contemporary Indian woman, and that shall be reflected in the paper. Between the lived experience and theoretically how it has been described in the scriptures, the void that still exists in the contemporary Indian society shall be addressed. During Vedic times, a distinction has been made between two categories of women: brahma vadini (scholarly women who didn’t get married and choose to dedicate their life to knowledge and wisdom) and rajaswala (women who belong to the realm of domesticity, reproduce, and have family). My work seeks to investigate both the categories and investigate the latter in terms of their presence, dissent, and responsibilities. By invoking the latter category, I shall discuss the conflicted issues in the contemporary Hindu society like, menstruation, marriage and most importantly, the life of a Hindu woman. This paper shall aim to understand Hindu women theoretically and empirically; how ideas have been defined in Hindu scriptures and how they are being practised.
