Now that India’s female cricketers have created history by winning the ICC World Cup, everyone is weighing in with the ‘history’ of women in sport in the subcontinent. And, also, rather predictably, ‘feminist readings’ of ancient and medieval literature in Indian languages, including Sanskrit, are being cited as a newfound ‘discovery’ of women’s sporting prowess as opposed to the ‘traditional’ stereotypes of them being restricted to the fringes of that activity.

The truth is that there was never any real reason to believe that Indian women were oppressed and marginalised in ancient and medieval times. There has always been enough epigraphic evidence, mainly on the walls of temples and stupas, and also actual literary, religious and secular written accounts that prove their participation in all activity as equals of their male counterparts. But it suited successive conquering powers to promote a different narrative.

Left-leaning Indian and foreign scholars now ‘discovering’ that women had voices in ancient and medieval Bharat is actually a repudiation of generations of motivated ‘research’ and writing by others of their ideological ilk who peddled theses that women had been sidelined, silenced and suppressed. On the contrary, their voices had been ignored or glossed over due to the imperative of the ruling academia to characterise India’s entire ancient past as regressive.

As the astronomer Carl Sagan often said about all that we do not know about the cosmos: “Absence of proof is not proof of absence". So it has been in the case of the history of India, particularly the ancient period.

The chronicle of the past was contained in shruti or what is ‘heard’ (and thus only orally reiterated and passed down); smriti or what is remembered (and thus........

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