Female Voice in Rig Veda

The Rig Vedic hymns were composed over 3000 years ago most probably by children of men who migrated into India with horses from Central Asia and married local women The hymns mostly reveal the valour of the fathers but occasionally the longings of the motherThe marriage hymn tells us about a girl called Surya who is fetched by the Ashwins and taken to her husband We learn how the woman already has had three husbands Soma Agni and Gandharva before receiving her fourth husband Does it mean women had four husbands a preVedic practice frowned upon by Aryan menThis hymn gains significance when we read the epic Mahabharata composed at least 1000 years after Rig Veda Here Kunti argues why a woman can have only four husbands and not five Besides her husband she therefore summons three gods Yama Vayu Indra only to beget sons She hides the fact that before marriage she had summoned a god Surya secretly This is the underlying reason why Draupadi is insulted in the gambling hall as a prostitute because she has more than the acceptable limit of four husbands This is a far cry from the popular contemporary concept of women who are supposed to be faithful to a single husbandRig Veda also tells the story of Apala who offers the Soma juice to Indra and gets her beauty restored There is the story of Saswati She sings Vedic hymns that transform her impotent husband Asanga into a virile potent man We hear Lopamudra trying to tell her old ascetic husband Agatsya to pay her more attention which is his duty as a husband We have stories of Saranya who runs away from her husband the sungod because she canrsquot bear his radiance We hear the story of Urvashi who leaves Pururava as she is bored of her relationship with him We hear of Indrani who argues about the sexual prowess of her husband There is another story of Yama and Yami Yami is the sister of Yama the first male He refuses to marry Yami because shersquos his sister As a result with no progeny he gets trapped in the land of the dead Yami turns into Yamini the night All these stories refer to the desire of women their longing for a virile man their joy when they find oneRig Veda tells us how Aditi the fetterless one is married to Daksha the ambidextrous one to give birth to the gods What does this mean Does it refer to how a free preVedic woman became bound to the talented Aryan male who controlled horses and built chariots Goddesses do not dominate Rig Veda but they are there There is the goddess of dawn Usha the goddess of the forest Aranya the goddess of devotion Shradda the goddess of speech Vak goddess of the ritual spoon Juhu and the goddess of the servicefee Dakshina In later Brahmana literature we learn of the longtongued woman who is sexually entrapped and killed by Indrarsquos friend Kutsa In Upanishads we encounter Jabala who has many lovers and so is not able to name the father of her son SatyakamaWhat we get from these verses is that women were associated with love longing and yearning They craved sensory and sexual fulfilment and often found their husbands inadequate These were demanding women whose passions are obscured by commentators who spotlight the valour of male gods such as Indra or focus on desexualised spiritual ideas of the VedantaThe author writes and lectures on the relevance of mythology in modern times Reach him at devduttpattanaikmiddaycom