Hidden Women of the Rigveda: The Female Voices Most Readers Miss

A different question

Ask a survey on women in the Rigveda and the same names come up: Lopāmudrā, Ghoṣā, Apālā, Viśvavārā, Vāc Āmbhṛṇī. The full list of Rishikas (women whom tradition credits with the authorship of specific hymns) has been catalogued; the headline article on this site, Women in the Rig Veda, runs through the standard names and the goddess theology that surrounds them.

This piece asks a slightly different question. Whose voices are in the Rigveda but easy to miss? That category is larger than the Rishika list. It includes women who speak in the hymns without being credited as authors; women whose hymns were preserved because the ritual needed the dialogue form but whose theology was awkward enough that the later devotional tradition quietly stopped reciting them; women whose names appear in a single verse and nowhere else; and women whose voices the medieval commentarial tradition flattened. Five of them are below.

Headline numbers

The dialogue hymn as a female-voice genre

The Rigveda contains a small but distinctive set of saṃvāda-sūkta, ‘dialogue hymns’, in which two or more speakers alternate verses. Most of them include at least one female voice. The form is itself the principal vehicle for preserving women’s speech in the corpus, because once a verse is fixed inside a ritual dialogue the female line cannot be silently dropped without breaking the rite. [1]

Notice the concentration in Mandala 10, the latest stratum of the Rigveda. The dialogue form is itself a late development. Many of the female voices we have are preserved precisely because Mandala 10’s editors valued the genre.

1. Yamī to Yama (RV 10.10)

Yamī Vaivasvatī is the twin sister of Yama, the first mortal and the king of the dead. Rig Veda 10.10 is a fourteen-verse dialogue in which Yamī asks Yama to have children with her, because they are the only humans and the human race depends on it. He refuses, in part because of spies (spaśaḥ) of Mitra and Varuṇa who would notice, in part because (he says) brothers and sisters are not made for this. She accuses him of cowardice. He calls her, in verse 12, ‘a woman saying the unsaid’ (anūditam vadasi).

Three features of the hymn reward attention. First, Yamī’s case is given the better verses. She argues from the womb (‘we were a single couple in the mother’), from the gods (‘among the gods is permitted what is forbidden among mortals’), and from the practical necessity of perpetuating the human race (‘who else is there?’). Yama is forced into theological scolding. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty notes that ‘the woman has the more vigorous, more colloquial, more imaginative voice; the man retreats into rule-following.’ [2]

Second, the hymn is the earliest explicit textual statement of the Indian incest taboo. The Vedic household was not a place where brother-sister marriage was normal; in the Iranian cousin tradition (the Avesta’s Yima and Yimak, the Pahlavi Bundahishn’s Mashya and Mashyana), the primal sibling couple do marry to populate the world. RV 10.10 is the Vedic branch saying, explicitly, not us. [3]

Third, the hymn is rarely chanted in modern liturgy. Its theme is awkward; its dialogue form is hard to fit into a daily ritual; and Sāyaṇa’s 14th-century commentary treats it briskly, focusing on grammar and avoiding extended theological discussion. The result is that one of the corpus’s most articulate female voices is largely absent from lived devotional practice. [4]

2. Indrāṇī in the Vṛṣākapi hymn (RV 10.86)

Of all the Rigvedic hymns, Rig Veda 10.86, the Vṛṣākapi Sūkta, is the one most likely to surprise a reader who expects Vedic solemnity. It is a twenty-three-verse domestic comedy in which Indrāṇī (Indra’s wife) is jealous of an upstart simian retainer named Vṛṣākapi (‘the manly ape’) and demands that Indra take her side. The verses are by turns bawdy, sarcastic, possessive and very funny.

Sample verse 6 (Indrāṇī speaking):

None among women is more blessed than I, none has a better husband, none yields and presses more eagerly. O Indra, with thee my limbs are like the wood of a chariot, polished and ready.

Sample verse 7 (Indra answering):

None among the gods is more loving than I. My limbs, my body, my mind are all turned to thee.

And by verse 10, Indrāṇī is again threatening Vṛṣākapi with violence, swearing she will ‘cut off his head’ if he disrespects her again.

Two things to say about this hymn. First, it is the single most-debated hymn in the Rigveda after RV 10.129. Hanns-Peter Schmidt’s 1987 monograph runs to 250 pages of interpretive analysis of these 23 verses, and even Schmidt concludes that the narrative situation is not fully recoverable. It may be a ritual celebrating the autumn-equinox sun (Vṛṣākapi as a solar figure being threatened by the dark half of the year); it may be a household joke elevated into liturgy; it may be both. [5]

Second, Indrāṇī’s voice in it is unparalleled. She is neither subordinate nor pious. She is a wife asserting her marital priority with explicit sexual confidence, in verses preserved verbatim for three thousand years. The Anukramaṇī attributes the female verses in RV 10.86 to Indrāṇī herself; modern scholarship debates whether to treat that as a literal authorship claim or a personification, but the voice is unambiguously there.

The hymn is, again, rarely chanted today. Its frankness is uncomfortable for some devotional contexts; its interpretive difficulty is intimidating for ritual use; Sāyaṇa’s commentary is famously coy about some of the more direct verses. The reception history is, in Brian K. Smith’s phrase, ‘an exercise in domestication.’ [6]

3. Sūryā Sāvitrī, the bride speaking at her own wedding (RV 10.85)

Rig Veda 10.85, the Vivāha Sūkta (wedding hymn), is the corpus’s longest hymn on marriage and the textual basis for the Hindu wedding ceremony still performed today. What is less well known is that the wedding hymn’s first-person speaker is the bride herself, Sūryā Sāvitrī (the Sun’s daughter), and the Anukramaṇī credits her with the hymn’s composition. [7]

The hymn opens with a cosmic frame (verses 1-5, the marriage of Sūryā to Soma), shifts to instructions for the bride’s mounting of the wedding-chariot (verses 6-19), and then turns to the bride speaking directly to her new household:

Be empress over thy husband’s father, empress over thy husband’s mother, empress over thy husband’s sister, empress over thy husband’s brothers. (verse 46)

The word translated ‘empress’ is sāmrājñī, the feminine of the imperial title samrāj. This is the Rigvedic textual basis for the bride’s agential entry into the husband’s household. Sāyaṇa glosses it as ‘one who has authority over’ (ādhipatya-yuktā), and the verse is recited in the saptapadī (seven-step) section of the modern Hindu wedding. Stephanie Jamison’s 1996 Sacrificed Wife / Sacrificer’s Wife devotes a chapter to the constitutional position the wedding hymn gives the bride, and argues that it has been systematically narrowed by later dharmaśāstra tradition without ever being formally rescinded. [8]

The hymn’s middle verses also include some of the Rigveda’s most concrete domestic poetry: the colour of the wedding garments, the protections to keep the bride safe on the road, the household animals released to graze, the moment of unbinding the bride’s hair. It is an unusually practical hymn for the Rigveda, and the voice that gives the practical instructions is female.

4. Apālā Ātreyī, the embodied complaint (RV 8.91)

Apālā is the daughter of a Rishi (the text’s framing calls her Ātreyī, ‘of Atri’s lineage’) who finds a Soma stalk near a watering hole, chews it, and is transported into a vision of Indra. Rig Veda 8.91 is the seven-verse hymn she is credited with composing in response. It is one of the Veda’s most personal, embodied, and slightly desperate texts.

Apālā’s request to Indra is unusually specific: she asks him to cure her skin condition and to make her father’s head grow hair again. Verse 7:

Indra, make these three places sprout hair: my father’s head, his field, and this body of mine, below the navel.

Three places where growth is wanted: a bald father, a barren field, and the speaker’s own body. The hymn ends with the assurance that Indra purified her three times, pulling her through the holes of the chariot, the cart and the yoke, and that she emerged renewed. The Brāhmaṇa literature (the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa and the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa) elaborates this into a full narrative in which the chariot-hole, cart-hole and yoke-hole are ritually real apertures. [9]

Apālā’s hymn is striking for two reasons. First, its specificity: where most Vedic prayer asks for prosperity in general, this asks Indra to fix a real physical problem. Second, its embodiment: it is one of the few Rigvedic hymns that speaks frankly about the female body, and the voice doing the speaking is the woman whose body it is. Sāyaṇa’s gloss treats the verses as a model of bhakti directed at the bodily; modern commentary (Patton, 2002) places the hymn in a wider category of personal-distress hymns that the Rigveda preserves but later devotional Hinduism largely lets fade. [10]

5. Romaśā, Vasukrapatnī, Śacī Paulomī: the one-verse women

Several women appear in the Rigveda for a single verse and never again. They are easy to miss; tradition kept them.

Romaśā, the daughter of King Bṛhaspati, has a single verse at RV 1.126.7 in which she boasts to her husband (the patron-king Bhāvayavya) about the fineness of her own body. The verse comes at the end of a dānastuti (gift-praise) and reads as an inserted personal note; the editorial decision to leave it in is itself notable.

Vasukrapatnī (‘wife of Vasukra’) has the very brief RV 10.28, a dialogue verse in which she speaks to her husband and Indra. The Anukramaṇī names her; the Saṃhitā preserves her speech.

Śacī Paulomī, traditionally identified as Indrāṇī under another name, is credited with RV 10.159, a short and uncompromising victory hymn:

Yonder sun has risen; my own good fortune has risen too. I, knowing this, have overcome my husband; he is mine now.

It is the corpus’s most direct hymn of female triumph over a rival. Six verses long. Standalone. It does not appear in the standard recitation cycles; it does appear in the text.

How later tradition handled them

Three patterns are visible in the reception history.

First, the Anukramaṇī itself preserved the attributions. The Sarvānukramaṇī (compiled in the 4th-3rd century BCE by Kātyāyana) gives each Rigvedic hymn its Rishi, its deity, and its metre. For thirty-odd hymns it gives a female Rishi. That this catalogue was preserved, copied and consulted for over two millennia is itself the most important fact in the reception story: the tradition knew and recorded the female authorships. They were never lost. They were only sometimes ignored. [11]

Second, the medieval commentarial tradition (notably Sāyaṇa, c. 14th c. CE) approached the harder female voices with care that sometimes shades into avoidance. Sāyaṇa’s commentary on RV 10.10 (Yamī-Yama) is comparatively brief; his treatment of RV 10.86 (Indrāṇī-Vṛṣākapi) handles the explicit verses by providing strictly literal glosses without devotional elaboration. He never suppresses; he simply does not amplify. The cumulative effect on later devotional practice is real. [12]

Third, the Dharmaśāstra literature, beginning with the Manusmṛti (c. 200 BCE-200 CE), narrowed women’s ritual access in ways the Veda itself does not warrant. Manu 9.18 famously asserts that women have no right to recite Vedic mantras; Manu 2.66-67 reduces the upanayana (thread ceremony, ritually qualifying access) for women to the marriage ceremony alone. These rules are post-Vedic innovations. The Vedic corpus itself contains women composing, reciting and being remembered as composers. Patrick Olivelle’s critical edition of Manu makes the point explicit: the dharmaśāstra restriction is a subsequent historical development, not a Vedic given. [13]

What modern scholarship recovered

The systematic recovery of these voices is mostly a 20th- and 21st-century project. Hanns-Peter Schmidt’s monograph on the Vṛṣākapi hymn (1987) made Indrāṇī’s verses interpretable to a modern academic audience. Stephanie Jamison’s Sacrificed Wife / Sacrificer’s Wife (1996) read the wedding hymn for its constitutional implications. Laurie Patton’s edited volume Jewels of Authority (2002) gathered essays on women and textual authority across the Vedic and post-Vedic record. Ellison Banks Findly’s essay on Gārgī Vācaknavī (1985), strictly speaking about the Upaniṣadic period rather than the Rigveda, traced the brahmavādinī category (a woman who publicly debates Brahman) that runs forward from the Veda. The cumulative work has reframed the question: not were there women in the Veda but what is the texture of the female voices the Veda preserves, and what has happened to them since. [14]

What follows from this

Two things. First, the Rigveda contains a female register that is older, broader and more articulate than the standard summary suggests. Yamī arguing, Indrāṇī asserting, Sūryā instructing, Apālā complaining, Urvaśī leaving, Lopāmudrā insisting, Vāc declaring. These are not marginal verses. They are inside the corpus, in dialogue with the major theological hymns, in some cases ritually central.

Second, the erasure of these voices is post-Vedic and partial. The Anukramaṇī kept the attributions. The manuscript tradition kept the verses. The medieval commentary glossed but did not delete. The modern reader who opens Rig Veda 10.10 or 10.85 or 10.86 or 10.95 is reading what every previous generation of careful readers also read. The voices have not been silenced. They have only been, for long stretches, not amplified.

Begin with the dialogue of Yamī and Yama at Rig Veda 10.10 and read it next to Sūryā’s wedding hymn at 10.85. The Rigveda you find there is more various, more conversational and more female than its reputation allows.