UC Berkeley

Throughout its history, Sanskrit was written almost exclusively by men, while literary theory enshrined the language as inherently male-gendered. This elite male-centric status stands in contrast to the Prakrit language, which represents the voice of women, as well as low-status men and children. Although some elite women did have access to Sanskrit, their contributions are often elided in histories of Sanskrit, or allowed to fade into obscurity. This dissertation examines the unusual literary commentary, the Camatkārataraṅgiṇī, co-authored by Sundarī and Kamalā—two women who were members of the same early eighteenth-century household. Sundarī and Kamalā were the co-wives of a prolific Sanskrit intellectual named Ghanaśyāma, a minister of King Tukkoji I (r. 1730-1735) of Maratha-ruled Tanjavur. Sundarī and Kamalā’s commentary accompanied an earlier commentary written by their husband, the Prāṇapratiṣṭhā. Both of these commentaries focused on Rājaśekhara’s tenth-century Sanskrit play, the Viddhaśālabhañjikā—a play that revolves around a heroine dressed as a man. Together the commentaries are presented as a unitary household project. The project is constructed such that the husband comments disproportionately on the Prakrit-language portions of the play (associated with the female voice), and the co-wives comment disproportionately on the Sanskrit-language portions of the play (associated with the male voice). The division of labor between Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā subverts the fixed binaries of Sanskrit/Prakrit, male/female.

Women who wrote in Sanskrit did not necessarily express their agency as women or challenge the Brahminical male voice that characterized cosmopolitan Sanskrit, adhering instead to the already gendered conventions of Sanskrit linguistic expression. Rather than seeking to recover an authorial “female voice,” this dissertation focuses on identifying the “labor of gender” in the household project of Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā. This entails attending to what gender comes to signify through processes of gendering, how these processes of gendering are interpreted, and how these interpretations are employed in various institutional contexts. I do this by historically situating two unusual features of the commentarial project of Sundarī and Kamalā, and their husband Ghanaśyāma: first is the commentators’ subversion of gender norms in the Sanskrit literary sphere; second is their investment in recovering Rājaśekhara as the pre-eminent “Maharashtrian” poet while writing from Maratha-ruled Tanjavur. I argue that the ideas about gender and sexuality expressed in the commentaries of Ghanaśyāma, Sundarī, and Kamalā, were also modes of articulating the commentators’ investment in a regional Maharashtrian identity as Sanskrit intellectuals, as well as a mechanism for reflecting on the local politics of early-eighteenth century Tanjavur. Through this case study, I demonstrate how symptoms of anxiety about gender and sexuality manifest in the renegotiation of formal features and cosmopolitan conventions in Sanskrit writing and argumentation.