| Abstract: |
This paper presents a critical review and meta-analysis of past scholarship on gender representation and women's roles in Sanskrit literary traditions, spanning Vedic hymns, epic narratives, classical drama, Puranic literature, and medieval kavya. Rather than generating primary textual interpretation, the study systematically synthesizes existing research to map how women have been constructed, contested, and re-read across three millennia of Sanskrit composition and its modern scholarly reception. Drawing on a corpus of thirty peer-reviewed sources, the review classifies prior work into philological, feminist, comparative-mythological, socio-historical, and performance-oriented strands, and traces the evolution of interpretive paradigms from colonial-era Orientalist readings to contemporary feminist and subaltern re-evaluations. The meta-analysis reveals persistent tensions between normative archetypes the chaste wife (pativrata), the goddess-identified heroine, and the ascetic renunciant and counter-currents of female agency, intellectual authority, and erotic subjectivity documented in figures such as Draupadi, Shakuntala, Gargi, and the courtesan-poets of classical drama. The paper further identifies methodological gaps in existing literature, including insufficient attention to regional and vernacular intertexts, underuse of digital textual corpora, and a scarcity of comparative cross-genre frameworks. By consolidating fragmented scholarship into a coherent critical architecture, this review clarifies where consensus exists, where interpretive disputes remain unresolved, and where future research on gender in Sanskrit literature should be directed. |
