INDIANS A brief History of a Civilization by Namit Arora: An Excerpt

INDIANS A brief History of a Civilization by Namit Arora takes the reader through nearly 5000 years of India’s history. An excerpt on Ikshvaku queens:

As with the Satavahanas, a key legacy of the Ikshvakus is to have advanced into the south both Buddhism and Brahminism, and their associated arts and architectural styles. Both faiths were patronized by the Ikshvaku state but, curiously, the kings leaned strongly towards Brahminism and the queens towards Buddhism. Ikshvaku kings, following their clan tradition, subscribed to Vedic rituals and Puranic worship of Brahminical deities—as evident from inscriptions and the Ashvamedha complex inside the citadel, where a sacrificial horse’s skeleton was also found. In this, they built upon the royal practices of the Satavahana Empire. What’s also amply clear is that Ikshvaku queens played an extremely pivotal role in turning Vijayapuri into a great and famous centre of Buddhism, and presided over the rise of Mahayana. This ‘suggests a significant degree of power and authority vested in the women of the royal family, in spite of the fact that succession to the throne remained firmly patrilineal’.

The most prominent of the royal patrons of Buddhism was Chamtisiri, the sister of the first king, Chamtamula, and mother-in-law to Chamtamula’s son and second king, who married his first cousin and took four other wives. A big donor to many Buddhist sites, including the Great Stupa, Chamtisiri ‘is praised, or rather praises herself, in the inscription for her munificence and compassion, especially for those who are destitute and poor. She carefully lists her material donations and asks in return for the attainment of nirvana for herself and for the welfare and happiness of all the world’. A goodwill gesture common with donors of the day was to name many members of their kinship group as benefactors—Chamtisiri listed thirty relatives in one inscription thereby hoping to accrue the merits of religious charity more broadly.

Patrons of Buddhism also included wealthy commanders and the urban merchant class. A lay woman named Bodhisiri appears in donor records at multiple Buddhist sites, including temples, monasteries, pillars and tanks. Many other Buddhist women are recorded too, such as Mahadevi Bhatideva, Chandrasiri, Mahadevi Kodabalisiri, etc. ‘Ninety percent of the donors were women,’ estimates one scholar. ‘Taken together,’ writes historian Upinder Singh, ‘the epigraphic evidence points to a dominant role played by royal and non-royal women in the emergence of Vijayapuri as a premier Buddhist centre.’ Perhaps the south’s old matrilineal sensibilities, though eroding with the spread of northern culture, were still alive in Vijayapuri’s social substrate. Could this also help explain the relatively better status of women in south India versus in the north even today?

Powerful women weren’t just passive donors but were active participants in the spiritual–philosophical life of the community. An early Mahayana Buddhist text, The Lion’s Roar, attributed to a woman named Srimala, a Buddhist queen of unknown historicity, is believed to have been written at Nagarjunakonda. Lost in Sanskrit and available only via Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist canons, it is ‘one of the chief scriptural sources for the theory that all sentient beings have the potentiality of Buddhahood within them’. Its translator from the Chinese, Diana Y. Paul, admires ‘its egalitarian and generous view concerning women, portraying, on the one hand, the dignity and wisdom of a laywoman and her concern for all beings, and, on the other, the role of woman as philosopher and teacher’. In the text, ‘Srimala is praised for her intelligence and compassion, not for her beauty or wealth, which are implicit’. Advancing the then radical idea of female Buddhas, Queen Srimala embarked on the bodhisattva path, and gained the ‘lion’s roar’ or eloquence of an enlightened being. Scholars have noted striking similarities between the textual style of Srimala, aspiring to nirvana, and Chamtisiri doing the same in her inscriptions. The Srimala text may well have been influenced by Chamtisiri herself, or written to honour her.

Excerpted with permission from INDIANS A brief History of a Civilization by Namit Arora, published by Penguin.

Namit Arora