Women’s Spiritual Voices in Early India: A Comparative Study of the Therīgāthā and the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad

Abstract

Given their social standing at the time, women’s participation in the religious sphere of ancient India appears to have been an almost impractical aspiration. Nevertheless, traces of female voices are found in some of the earliest Indian religious texts. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, a seminal Vedic text, and the Therīgāthā, a Buddhist work that forms part of the Khuddaka Nikāya of the Pāli Canon, both preserve significant expressions of women’s thought and experience. Though emerging from distinct traditions, these writings reflect comparable voices of women negotiating spaces of spirituality within patriarchal structures. The Therīgāthā is particularly remarkable as the earliest extant work of literature composed by women themselves. It records the struggles, reflections, and spiritual triumphs of early Buddhist nuns, some of whom boldly challenged prevailing gender norms and articulated their own paths to liberation. In contrast, the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, authored by men, only occasionally includes women philosophers—such as Maitreyī and Gārgī— whose presence nonetheless demonstrates the possibility of female intellectual engagement within the Vedic tradition. This article, therefore, seeks to foreground the voices of these women, examining how they represented early forms of feminist consciousness in ancient India, as preserved in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad and the Therīgāthā.