Toward Engendering Early Histories of the Indian Subcontinent

The Indian subcontinent appears to be relatively neatly bounded by the Himalayas on the north, and the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal on the west, south and east respectively. A development, best documented in Karnataka from about the ninth century and subsequently, is visible within the Jaina tradition (Jaini), where a debate about whether or not women were capable of attaining liberation engendered a rich vocabulary destabilizing the binary of gender categories. Historical studies, especially those on gender, have tended to rely on and mine the enormous and diverse textual traditions that have survived. These are in Sanskrit, Pali, Tamil, various Prakrits, and the regional languages that began to emerge from the second half of the first millennium ce, and acquired distinct identities in the course of the second millennium.