Despite the surfacing of new concerns and a new will amongst a section of historians, there are many inherent problems in writing a history that is genuinely inclusive of women. The sources of history, here as elsewhere, reflect the concerns of those who have wielded power.

It is sometimes argued, with justification, that the notion of time, and therefore -of history, in the dominant Indian tradition, which may also be called the Brahman cal tradition, has been cyclical and not linear, making for a crucial difference in the understanding of history. One implication of this view is that the contemporary discipline of history in India is a derivative of the western, linear, tradition and violates the spirit of the ‘authentic’ Indian tradition.

The further implication is that, therefore, it cannot be subjected to certain kinds of scrutiny. What is ignored in this argument is that the cyclical notion of history is as much the product of those who have wielded power as the linear view of history is.

It might be useful to note that unlike archaeological evidence, which may be loosely described as the ‘garbage’ of history, as the incidental remnants of material culture, and therefore not associated with the conscious decision to leave something to posterity, written records are self conscious products and are closely tied to those who have exercised power. The Rajatarangini, the Harshacharita or the Ithaca portions of the Puranas are unambiguous narratives of power even if they may reflect a cyclical view of history.

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It might also be argued that these sources constitute only a small fraction of the sources we have for ancient India and the bulk of the sources are not conventional historical sources at all but a variegated collection of myths, religious texts, and other types of literary productions.

Nevertheless the textual sources that have come down to us, even when they are ‘religious’, ‘cultural’, ‘social’, or concerned with the political economy, are products of a knowledge system which was highly monopolistic and hierarchical and thus narrowly concentrated in the hands of a few men – a group that was even narrower here than elsewhere.

In this context it might be useful to explore the manner in which scholars have tried to break out of the limited concerns imposed by the ‘recorders’ of history who have, in a sense, refracted history for us. In contemporary times it is possible to use oral history as a way of countering the biases of ‘official’ history. But the relationship of morality to sexuality is very complex in the case of our early history.

In a sense, all ‘texts’ were orally transmitted and then ‘written’ up much later. Though these texts only ultimately became prescriptive, or were regarded as sacred, they were treated as authoritative and therefore worthy of formal handing down in the traditional way which was oral precisely because it could be carefully controlled. ‘Oral’ texts are not in and of themselves counter hegemonic.

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Further, certain oral traditions which had been brought into the ideological field of the religious literati but nevertheless circulated largely among the humbler folk, and were therefore more widely shared as they were narrated to a heterogeneous audience, such as the Karakas or the Panchatantra, though significant in terms of yielding a different kind of evidence on women and the lower orders, are not necessarily the compositions of such sections, at least in the versions that have come down to us.

The Jatakas for example, comprise a rich repertoire of narratives and often describe the experiences of ordinary women and men with great poignancy; they are, nevertheless, firmly located within a Buddhist world-view. As they stand, the Jatakas are the product of mediations between high cultures and ‘low’ culture; framed by the bhikkhus (the Buddhist monks) these narratives cannot be termed ‘folk’. While they are an alternative to the Brahman cal texts they cannot be regarded as the dichotomized ‘other’ of elite texts.

Similarly, the Therigatha, verses or songs of the bhikkhunis (the Buddhist nuns), a work that is probably one of the earliest compilations of women’s poetry anywhere in the world, while very definitely the compositions of women, have not escaped the editorial hand of the Buddhist monastic compilers.

These factors have complicated the use of oral sources and the writing of a gender sensitive history from below. There are further problems because of the difficulties of dating oral texts, which therefore cannot easily be collated with other evidence available for specific periods; while we gain from the point of view of the richness of the data we 144 GullyBaba Publishing House (P) Ltd.

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Lose from the point of view of specificity of time and region. Nevertheless, despite the many problems inherent in the sources the newer generation of historians, writing from a ‘history from below’ standpoint including feminists, has begun to use these sources creatively. Using strategies such as reading against the grain and between the lines, especially in. the case of prescriptive texts, or looking at the way myths and narratives change in a diachronic context they are raising new questions and bringing in fresh insights.