Tracing Femininity through Gender Performativity in the Vedic Scripture Sāmaveda
Abstract
The paper explores the gender roles of feminine figures in the Sāmaveda through the performativity lens popularized by post-feminist theorists, who assess the status of females in the text from the perspective of their actions, whether they are imposed or self-willed. This paper has used two translated versions of the Sāmaveda and applied an academic approach to find how these religious texts construct heavenly goddesses and earthly women as feminine figures, and how they are empowered or marginalized, and thirdly, how the egalitarian worldview of the Vedic society about femininity can be interrogated through the comparative study of the performances and exposure of goddesses and earthly women. The researcher used Tropes V8.4 (English) Software to locate referent sentences, metaphors, and allusions in the texts, and then critically examined the gender roles of the goddesses and earthly dames to explore how this androcentric text blurred the expected varying status of goddesses and earthly women on the point of femininity, though women were, distinctively, marginalized. The phenomenological interpretation of the translated texts reveals that Sāmaveda uses identical epithets to describe both goddesses and earthly females. However, females were domesticated and subjected to typical performances preferred and imposed by priests or hermits. This sheds light on the apparent egalitarian Vedic worldview that translates women as equal to men and a worldly portion of heavenly goddesses. This study underscores that earthly women failed to reciprocate heavenly goddesses based on the justification of the gender performativity lens, and these goddesses are far less emblematic of power like I̅ndra and A̅gni. Thus, the androcentric lens categorizes goddesses as belonging below gods and above earthly women, testifying to the feeble versions of bi-polar gendered politics.
