History, Southside: Medieval India’s queens: Were they feminist icons? Not Quite
In the medieval world, there is an untold story of formidable women who broke away from social confines, ruled kingdoms and built tall structures. But their visible power came at the cost of the invisibility of the unempowered women around them
The question of what role women played in premodern India is fraught with political meaning today. Rajput queens, especially, have often been held as exemplars of brave resistance and wifely devotion for their participation in mass suicide rituals such as Jauhar. In contrast, a new wave of writing has portrayed Mughal princesses and courtesans as glamorous and influential in their own right. Many popular books have also tried to present epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata from the perspective of the royal women who participated in them.
Missing from all these examples are the women of early medieval India — 600–1100 CE. In courts across South Asia, we know of dozens of women who left clear inscriptional marks of their patronage and of their existence — probably a sign of many thousands more who once participated in networks of power. But as we’ll see, there are also signs of personality, nuance, and privilege that make it clear that these women were not icons of feminism, equality, or modern puritanism — but products of a much darker and more morally complex world.
The Visibility of the Powerful
Pattadakal, literally “The Stone of Anointing”, is a somewhat incongruous place today. The coronation site of the monarchs of the Chalukyas of Vatapi from 600–750 CE, it became host to sandstone temples built in an astonishing amalgam of styles, from the Deccan vēsara or Karnata Dravida mode with its tiered superstructure, to the North Indian lāṭina mode with its curved conical spire. Positioned in a carefully manicured park frequented by wealthy tourists, they now overlook a starkly low-income neighbourhood which authorities have walled off.
Two of Pattadakal’s most impressive complexes — known today as the Virupaksha (originally, Lokeshvara) and Mallikarjuna (originally, Trailokyeshvara) temples — were built not by Chalukya kings, but by a pair of Chalukya queens. Bearing the titles of Lokamahadevi (great goddess of the world) and Trailokyamahadevi (great goddess of the three worlds). These queens were sisters. Born in the Kalachuri dynasty of central India, they were married to the future Chalukya king Vikramaditya II (r. 733–744 CE) to seal an alliance. They are both remarkable as the only Chalukya royal women who commissioned temples that survived to the present day.
Placards placed at Pattadakal claim that these sisters were devoted to their husband, and commissioned their temples to commemorate his military successes. However, there is only a single line of text supporting this claim: An inscription on the eastern gateway of the Lokeshvara temple, declaring it the “temple of Lokeshvara of Lokamahadevi, (the queen) of Vikramaditya, who three times conquered Kanchi.” Nowhere does Lokamahadevi herself claim that she built it on his behalf or as a commemoration. Indeed, the iconography of the temple associates it much more directly with her own power and prestige.
In a pillared pavilion facing the main shrine, Lokamahadevi is represented holding a sceptre surmounted by an elephant, standing upon a throne upheld by three lions. As Professor Cathleen Ann Cummings has argued in Decoding a Hindu Temple, all of these are unquestionably royal symbols: Not the insignia of a woman dependent on her husband for power, but very much those of a co-ruler.
Such an inference is further supported by a sculpture of a fierce lion under which a small boar takes shelter; the lion was associated with the goddess Durga and the boar, Varaha, was the insignia of the Chalukya dynasty. An art historical analysis would thus strongly suggest that Lokamahadevi sought to portray herself as a divine mother of sorts, sheltering and replenishing the Chalukya kingdom with her feminine power, shakti. As her husband’s successor Kirtivarman II put it (Epigraphia Indica III, page 6), she, “like the divine goddess Uma, was the very mother of mankind”, and her husband Vikramaditya II “obtained great energy (mahotsaha) from her.” While these protestations of power, glory and virtue are commonplace in royal self-presentation, it is debatable whether Lokamahadevi’s subjects would have thought of her in such glowing terms.
_1661875587721.jpg "A goddess depicted on the walls of the Vaital Deul temple in Bhubaneswar, most likely commissioned by a Bhaumakara queen in the 9th century CE. (Shutterstock)")
Regional Variations and Dynamics
The Rashtrakuta dynasty, which overthrew Lokamahadevi’s Chalukya dynasty, also inadvertently caused one of the most remarkable phenomena of the early medieval period: A throne held almost entirely by women rulers for multiple generations, in some cases even being transferred between women without the need for a male heir or regent.
In the early 800s, the Rashtrakuta emperor Govinda III embarked on a “conquest of the directions”, leading military expeditions into north, south, and east India. In coastal Odisha, he seriously humiliated the ruling Bhaumakara king Subhakara and his elder son. This seems to have created a familial dispute that allowed his younger son, Shantikara I, to seize the throne with his wife, the south Deccan princess Tribhuvana Mahadevi.
The daughter of a powerful rival of the Rashtrakutas, she seems to have been able to restore some stability to the Bhaumakara kingdom between 846 and 850. As historian Devika Rangachari puts it in From Obscurity to Light: Women in Early Medieval Odisha, she was presented, as Lokamahadevi was, as “an ideal ruler who vanquished her enemies, spread the family’s glory and established social harmony”. In her land grants and inscriptions — somewhat unusual things for a medieval woman to be making in the first place — she claims the title of maharajadhiraja, Great King of Kings, and uses masculine appellations.
This, however, was not the end of it. Around 893 CE, the Somavamshi king Janamejaya advanced from inland Chhattisgarh and attacked the Bhaumakara kingdom again, killing its ruler. This ruler’s younger brother was married to Janamejaya’s daughter Prithivimahadevi. This lady quickly seized power — indeed, she may have arranged the invasion in the first place. She then astutely adopted the title of Tribhuvan Mahadevi II to try and connect herself to the earlier and well-regarded female Bhaumakara ruler. Once again, we see her granting lands and villages, but her authority seems to have been disputed, with other Bhauma-Karas setting up parallel courts.
The most successful of these lines was allied with the Bhanja kings, who were a group of Sanskritised Adivasi people; they seem to have supplied a number of Bhauma-Kara queens. All of them would claim the title of maharajadhiraja and use male appellations, perhaps a result of the relatively gender-equal societies they were born into. And most strikingly, they transferred the throne between each other: Gaurimahadevi, queen of Shubhakara V, reigned after his death and gave the throne to her daughter Dandimahadevi. Dandi Mahadevi was succeeded by her stepmother Vakulamahadevi, who in turn was succeeded by her co-sister Dharma Mahadevi, the last ruler of the Bhauma-Kara dynasty before its final conquest by the Somavamshis in the 950s.
Around the same time in Kashmir, queen Didda seized control of the throne after the death of her husband. She went on to hold power for nearly 53 years as a regent for her son and grandsons as well as ruling in her own right before her death in 1003. The queen faced off many challengers in her reign, usually putting rivals to death ruthlessly, and, in one case, bribing Brahmins to support her instead of a male relative. Kalhana, a later chronicler, accuses her of using “witchcraft” to dispose of her grandsons and disapproves of her various affairs — critiques often applied to powerful women across the world. (It should be noted that medieval male royals certainly had much more profligate affairs than their female counterparts; for example, the aforementioned Lokamahadevi’s father-in-law Vijayaditya I, at the age of nearly 70, had an affair with a young courtesan). We know of two temples built by the Deccan queen Lokamahadevi, of which one survives. Didda built at least 64 religious foundations and restored many more across the Kashmir valley. An area in Srinagar was named after her till the 20th century.
The Invisibility of the Powerless
It’s important to speak of these medieval women. As Dr Rangachari says, in historical works, female rulers are often presented as “shadowy, ineffectual figures”, with a penchant for debauchery, cowardice, and murders. They are portrayed as somehow interrupting a royal line that is more effective when male, and as best remaining in the role of devoted mothers and daughters. But, “in actuality, [they] were formidable women figures with a real desire to rule.”
This is all the more striking because the medieval world was unabashedly one where men were supreme. Kings were portrayed as figures of supreme charisma and power, whose military accomplishments were matched only by their virility; across medieval South Asia, we see inscriptions comparing their conquests to sexual dominance. For example, the Chalukya king Vikramaditya I claimed, after conquering the city of Kanchi, that he had “forcibly wooed the lady of the Southern Quarter and taken possession of Kanchi, the city which was her girdle.”
Similarly, when the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I overthrew his Chalukya rival Kirtivarman II, we are told that he “forcibly wrested away in the battlefield which proved a place of choice marriage” the “Goddess of Royal Fortune of the Chalukyas”. In dozens upon dozens of inscriptions we are told of how kings captured the harems of their rivals after battle; we know of cases where these captured royal ladies were forced into servitude, where they undoubtedly suffered physical, sexual and emotional trauma.
Medieval royal women were often confined to spaces called antahpuram, the Inner City, a designated area within the palace complex which they usually left only on ceremonial occasions. Here we know they were carefully surveilled at all times — even their menstrual cycles were tracked, as texts like the Kamasutra suggest. And yet we see cases like the exceptionally powerful women discussed above. Somehow, through a combination of family connections, ruthlessness, and sheer will to power, it seems that they managed to escape their confines and make their way in what was a man’s world. Certainly, they did not shy away from violence or from exerting and presenting political power exactly as the men of their families did.
In Pardah and Portrayal, scholar Molly Emma Aitken examines a disturbing painting by the 18th-century Mewari painter Gangaram, known as “Scene from a Zenana”. It depicts three glamourously-dressed princesses watching with sadistic glee as two maids are tortured: One is whipped while the other’s hands are bound. Both have their mouths open — screaming perhaps, or begging for mercy. But none is to be had: The princesses laugh and look at each other, gesturing towards the brutality.
This is not a medieval painting — it was made nearly a millennium after Lokamahadevi —but it is still well worth thinking about. As much as we think about, sympathise with, and glorify these royal women, we know absolutely nothing about how they treated those below them. While we might know how they dealt with their high-caste male rivals, what about their women attendants and workers of lower castes? Did the armies of a female monarch not commit mass plunder and rape?
What about those women who were not mentioned by royal men or women at all, and did not get to leave any mark on the historical record? When women in royalty use the power of art and literature to immortalise themselves, to visibilise and glorify themselves, do they not also use the same power to invisibilise those less privileged than they? It is, of course, unfair to try and portray them as feminist icons, and certainly we have no right to judge them. But we must remember that the powerful women of medieval India are no different from powerful women at any point in history — not feminist icons, but also products of a world that is altogether more captivating and disturbing.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian and author of Lords of the Deccan
The views expressed are personal
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