The Earth Turns Over: Raja, Womanhood, and the Archive of Indian Women's Minds
- Soumyaranjan Sahoo
- Jun 13
- 14 min read
There is a festival in Odisha that has always troubled the tidiness of scholarly categories. Raja — or Mithuna Sankranti, as the solar calendar names it — arrives each June at the precise threshold where the earth is said to menstruate. For three days, the ground is left unploughed, the soil unreaked, and the agricultural body of Odisha permitted its own bleeding. Women swing on the swings (dolis) suspended from mango trees. Games are played in red dust. The earth is bathed, adorned, rested. What is being celebrated, with an intimacy that resists sentimentality, is the menstruating body as sacred precondition — the body that bleeds as the ground that yields, the body that is cyclically renewed as the soil that receives seed and returns abundance.
This is unusual, in a civilisational landscape that has more often treated menstruation as pollution to be segregated, the female body as a threshold to be policed, and womanhood as a category requiring perpetual definition by those exterior to it. Raja refuses that logic. It does celebrate womanhood as metaphor, as inspiration, as maternal selflessness, or as national allegory. It celebrates it as physiology — as a generative biological fact that the land itself participates in. The earth, in the idiom of Raja, is Bhudevi, and Bhudevi bleeds, and that bleeding is the very source of what sustains us.
The anthropological implications have been underexplored. But what Raja gestures toward — this insistence on locating feminine generativity in the body rather than in its transcendence — is perhaps the appropriate frame through which to encounter the extraordinary archive of Indian women’s intellectual, creative, and political life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The women this essay turns toward did not transcend the conditions of their womanhood to achieve what they achieved. They worked through it, with it, sometimes against the grain of what their era permitted, always with an acute awareness of what it meant to occupy a gendered position within the structures of knowledge, of power, of narrative, of soil — that they were simultaneously examining.
This is an attempt at what Raja itself performs: a seasonal reckoning, a time set apart, in which we return to the ground to understand what it has given us.
The Archaeologists of Buried Time
To excavate is to refuse amnesia. The archaeologist works against the logic of forgetting, against the gravity of time that presses the past into indistinction. That two of the most significant archaeological minds of twentieth-century India were women — Debala Mitra and Nayanjot Lahiri — is worth pausing over, because the discipline of archaeology has historically been one of the more aggressively masculinised sciences, organised around the figure of the lone discoverer, the physical field worker, the man who unearths.
Debala Mitra spent decades at the Archaeological Survey of India, accumulating a body of work on Buddhist monuments, temple architecture, and sculptural programmes that remains foundational in the scholarship of Indian material culture. Her monographs on Sanchi, on Ajanta, and on the iconographic systems of early medieval India were produced with a rigour that owed nothing to theoretical fashion and everything to sustained attention. What Mitra brought to her work was the capacity for granular, unillusional looking — for sitting with an object, a site, a stratigraphy, long enough that it yielded what it had actually preserved rather than what one wished it to have. Her scholarship is exemplary in the precise sense of the word: it models a discipline of perception that the humanities have frequently abandoned in favour of more glamorous interpretive manoeuvres.
Nayanjot Lahiri operates in a different register; her work is oriented toward the social biography of archaeological sites and the politics of heritage memory. Her book on Ashoka represents one of the finest examples of what biography can accomplish when released from the tyranny of the anecdote — it reconstructs an emperor from inscriptions and monuments, from the materiality of edicts and stupas, from the long afterlife of a man who chose words carved in stone as his primary instrument of governance. But Lahiri’s deeper preoccupation is with what archaeology reveals about belonging, about the way certain pasts are made legible and others are deliberately obscured. Her excavation of the Harappan world — its urbanism, its mysteries, its refusal to be conclusively decoded — is an act of sustained intellectual humility in the face of complexity. She understands that the most honest thing an archaeologist can say about the past is: what the evidence permits, and the gap between the evidence and our desire to fill it is precisely where ethical thinking must live.
Together, Mitra and Lahiri represent an archaeological tradition in which the act of excavation is also an act of testimony — testimony to what has been covered over, misread, or appropriated by the dominant historical imagination. That both were women situates their work within a broader feminist epistemology, even where neither would have claimed that label with any urgency: the insistence on attending to what has been buried, on resisting the triumphalist narratives that archaeology is frequently conscripted to produce, is itself a form of intellectual dissidence.
The Historians Who Refused Consolation
Romila Thapar is the most consequential historian of ancient India of the twentieth century, and that sentence requires no qualification. What Thapar accomplished — across six decades of scholarship, through the universities, through the public sphere, through the sustained acrimony of those who found her readings of the past inconvenient — was the creation of a historical methodology for India that took seriously both the evidence and the interpretive frameworks brought to that evidence.
Her early A History of India (1966) introduced generations of students to a secular, materialist, non-teleological reading of the subcontinent’s past. Her later work on early Indian history, on the construction of Aryan identity, on the Somnath temple and its many interpretive afterlives, demonstrated a historian at the height of her analytical powers: precise where the evidence permitted precision, speculative only where speculation was clearly marked as such, and unflinching in the face of the political pressures that would have preferred a more pliable history.
Thapar’s central argument — that the past is always a construction produced in the present, that the question is whether we interpret history consciously and ethically — became one of the great epistemological contributions of Indian scholarly life. She understood, long before the culture wars of the 1990s made it inescapably visible, that the writing of ancient history was a political act with contemporary stakes, and that the historian’s responsibility was precisely to hold that awareness while maintaining an equal obligation to the evidence. Her intellectual courage, maintained across a career that attracted considerable institutional and political hostility, is the kind that does announce itself: it simply continues, seminar after seminar, book after book, decade after decade.
Irawati Karve brought to this tradition of historical and anthropological inquiry a sociological precision that was, in many ways, ahead of its time. Karve was trained in physical anthropology and sociology, worked across caste, kinship, and regional identity in Maharashtra, and produced the now-classic Yuganta (1967) on The Mahabharata — a work that belongs to an altogether different category of intellectual achievement. In Yuganta, Karve read The Mahabharata as a social document, stripping away the mythological scaffolding to ask: what kind of human beings are these? What are their kinship obligations, their emotional contradictions, their social roles as women, as younger sons, as disadvantaged heirs? Her chapter on Draupadi remains one of the most clear-eyed analyses of a female figure in Indian literature: Karve refused to either worship or pathologise, insisting instead on a woman whose polyandrous situation produced specific psychological consequences, whose pride was a structural response to structural humiliation, whose tragedy was the tragedy of exceptional intelligence trapped within a world organised to disregard it.
Leela Dube, meanwhile, worked in a quieter register, her scholarship on gender, kinship, and the symbolic dimensions of caste offering the kind of analysis that is genuinely difficult — structural yet attentive to the lived experience of women within patriarchal systems, a sensibility that declines to sentimentalise that experience. Dube’s work on the symbolism of seeds and earth in the construction of Indian femininity — the woman as the field, the man as the cultivator, the woman’s body as the passive receptacle for male generative power — reads, in the context of Raja, as a corrective counter-argument. Raja insists that the earth is active. The earth bleeds; the earth rests; the earth decides when it is ready. Dube’s scholarship prepared the analytical ground for understanding why that insistence carries such weight.
The Freedom Fighters Who Were Also Poets
Sarojini Naidu occupies an unusual position in the Indian imagination — simultaneously the Nightingale of India and the political figure who shared platforms with Gandhi, who presided over the Indian National Congress, who served as the first woman governor of an Indian state. The oscillation between these two identities — the lyric poet and the political actor — is frequently treated as a paradox in the cultural memory, as though the capacity for metaphor and the capacity for governance were surprising bedfellows. But the paradox dissolves once one grasps that for Naidu, as for many of the women in this archive, the literary and the political were continuous vocations. Both were instruments for naming what was real, refusing what was false, and creating what was possible.
Naidu’s poetry operated in an idiom that owed more to the late Romantic tradition than to the modernism already reshaping English verse in the early decades of the century. That assessment has sometimes been used to diminish her. It should be read, instead, as evidence of her strategic situatedness: she wrote in a register that English audiences could receive as beautiful, and in doing so, she made a claim for Indian interiority, Indian landscape, Indian feeling, on a stage that had previously organised itself around the assumption of Indian absence. To write a poem about the Deccan in 1905 was to assert that the Deccan had an aesthetic life worth articulating — that it was a place where grief and joy and the precise colour of evening had names and earned attention.
Mahadevi Varma was doing something comparable in Hindi, though her project was philosophically more radical. Varma’s chhayavaadi poetry operates in a space of intense interiority, a lyric subject perpetually reaching toward a transcendence it desires while never possessing. Her female speaker is in a relationship with a priya — a beloved — who remains constitutively absent, constitutively beyond, and that absence structures an entire emotional and spiritual universe. The feminist implications of Varma’s lyric project have been extensively debated: some read her poetry as the displacement of sexual longing into mysticism, others as the construction of a female subjectivity that refuses masculine possession by making its beloved permanently unreachable. What is certain is that Varma’s speaker is not subordinate. She suffers, but her suffering is the suffering of a consciousness that demands more than the world has provided — a demand that is itself a form of dignity.
Kuntala Kumari Sabat brought this combination of literary and civic ambition to Odisha’s cultural landscape with an urgency that her relatively brief life — she died at thirty-two — permitted only to gesture toward. Her poetry participated in the construction of modern Odia literary consciousness at a moment when that consciousness was simultaneously organising itself against colonial erasure and examining its own internal exclusions. Sabat was among the first Odia women poets to claim the lyric ‘I’ as a political instrument, and the conjunction of her short life and her substantial influence makes her one of those figures whose significance is partly the significance of what was interrupted.
The Writers Who Made Language a Site of Resistance
If there is a single figure in twentieth-century Indian literature whose work most relentlessly refuses the consolations of aesthetic distance, it is Mahasweta Devi. Her fiction — set primarily in the forests and agricultural belts of Bengal, populated by adivasi communities, bonded labourers, and women surviving conditions that the liberal literary imagination prefers to keep at a polite remove — operates as a form of documentary activism rendered in narrative syntax. Mahasweta Devi understood that fiction was capable of bearing testimony in ways that journalism and reportage could approach but rarely achieve: the particular weight of a named character, a specific body in a specific situation of suffering, carried a density of moral claim that the anonymising logic of statistics dissolved.
Her most celebrated works — Hajar Churashir Maa (1974), Aranyer Adhikar (1977), the story cycle gathered in Breast Stories — are concerned with what happens to the body when it becomes property: the property of the state, of the landlord, of the feudal obligation, of the postcolonial developmental project that redescribes dispossession as progress. Her women are rarely heroic in the sentimental sense. They survive, they bear witness, they sometimes fail to survive. The ethics of her fiction is an ethics of representation itself: she insists that these lives, this suffering, this particular darkness in the geography of independent India, must be seen, must be rendered in language concrete enough to refuse the comfort of abstraction.
Amrita Pritam was the great chronicler of Partition’s devastation, and her elegy to Waris Shah — Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu — remains perhaps the single most affecting poem to emerge from the catastrophe of 1947. But Pritam’s contribution to Indian literature extends far beyond that one poem: across her novels, her short stories, her autobiography Raseedi Ticket (1976), she constructed a female subjectivity that was, for Punjabi literary culture, genuinely unprecedented in its refusal of the expected. Her women desired. They grieved. They left marriages, claimed lives on their own terms, inhabited their own eroticism with a directness that the moral economy of the mid-century literary world treated as scandalous. Pritam accepted the scandal as part of the project.
Ismat Chughtai was, if anything, more deliberately provocationary. Her story Lihaaf — the quilt, the blanket, the enclosure within which female desire moves and is imperfectly concealed — produced an obscenity trial that Chughtai attended and contested with a combination of intellectual precision and cool contempt for the proceedings. What Chughtai understood, and what her fiction consistently demonstrated, was that the unspeakable in Indian domestic life — the desires of women in purdah, the emotional and sexual textures of female-to-female intimacy, the gap between the respectable surface of middle-class Muslim life and its actual psychic contents — was precisely where the most truthful literature had to go. Her prose had a vernacular energy, a refusal of elevation, that was itself a political choice: the world she wrote about was written in the idiom of the world she wrote about, and that formal decision was inseparable from her feminist and social commitments.
The Odia Voices: Literature as Cultural Sovereignty
Within the specific landscape of Odia literary culture, the tradition of women’s writing constitutes one of the richest and most underattended archives in the subcontinent. Binapani Mohanty, Pratibha Ray, and Sarojini Sahoo each represent distinct aspects of what it has meant to write as an Odia woman — to work within a regional literary tradition that has its own grammar of belonging, its own aesthetics of the river and the forest and the temple complex, its own pressures of caste and gender operating in a particular geographic and cultural density.
Pratibha Ray is perhaps the most widely recognised, her novel Yajnaseni — which retells The Mahabharata from Draupadi’s perspective — representing one of the most significant acts of literary recuperation in modern Indian fiction. Where Karve subjected Draupadi to sociological analysis, Pratibha Ray gave her a voice: a first-person lyric consciousness that moves through the epic events of her life with a self-awareness and an interpretive intelligence that the original texts consistently denied her. Yajnaseni belongs to a tradition of feminist mythological retellings — from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to Volga — that understands mythology as a contested terrain, a place where the distribution of narrative authority is itself a form of power. Pratibha Ray claimed authority for Draupadi and, in doing so, claimed it for every Odia woman reader who had grown up with an epic that had found them worth hearing.
Binapani Mohanty’s fiction operates in a different register: the domestic interior, the village, the textures of Odia rural life rendered with a precision and emotional intelligence that situates her work within a tradition of realism that has often been undervalued precisely because its subject matter — the daily life of ordinary women — fails to register as historically significant. But Mohanty understood, as all the great realist writers understand, that the ordinary is where ideology lives. The negotiations of a rural household, the grammar of female obligation, the economies of affection and withholding that structure domestic life — these are peripheral to the history of Odia society. They are the ground on which that history is built and reproduced. Her fiction is, in this sense, historiographical even in its most intimate moments.
Sarojini Sahoo brings to contemporary Odia writing a feminist theoretical self-consciousness that situates her work at the intersection of the literary and the political in ways that are still being fully absorbed. Her fiction engages with female sexuality, with desire and agency, with the institutional and cultural structures that regulate women’s bodies, with an explicitness that continues to generate controversy. That controversy is, itself, telling: it maps the precise contours of the cultural anxieties that her writing disturbs. Sahoo’s project is, at its core, a project of visibility — insisting that what has been rendered invisible, unspeakable, or shameful about female experience must be brought into language, must be given the dignity of representation, must be allowed to exist in the literary record as something other than deviation or pathology.
The Women Who Made History in the Open World
Nandini Satpathy’s trajectory — from independence-era activism to Chief Ministership of Odisha to a last, extraordinary phase as a writer and intellectual — represents a form of public life that resists the single-dimension categories that political biography tends to impose.
As Chief Minister during the Emergency period, Satpathy’s record is complex and contested; she was among those who initially supported emergency provisions before her disillusionment and eventual break with the Congress establishment. But what is less frequently attended to is Satpathy’s sustained literary and cultural life: her writing in Odia, her engagement with the question of what regional language and culture could claim in a postcolonial national framework, her understanding that political sovereignty and cultural sovereignty were inseparable projects.
Yashodhara Mishra represents a more recent iteration of this conjunction, her work in cultural policy, heritage advocacy, and public life situated at precisely the intersection where institutional power and cultural memory must negotiate their relationship. Her presence in Odia public life is a reminder that the women in this archive are continuous with the present — that they constitute a living tradition, actively shaping the conditions within which culture is made, preserved, and contested.
Rama Devi Choudhury and Malati Choudhury — the two Choudhuris whose activism shaped Odia civil society across the nationalist and post-independence periods — exemplify a form of public womanhood that is perhaps most difficult for contemporary frameworks to categorise. Rama Devi’s satyagraha, her imprisonment, her work in the constructive programme, her sustained commitment to a Gandhian vision of social transformation that was simultaneously feminist in its implications, even where it did use that vocabulary — all of this constitutes a form of political practice that resists reduction to either the heroic nationalist narrative or the retrospective feminist critique. She was working in her moment with the tools it provided, and what she built with them was a model of civic engagement that remains instructive.
Malati Choudhury’s radicalism ran deeper and in more unexpected directions: her engagement with socialist politics, her work on behalf of adivasi and Dalit communities, her refusal of the safe middle-class feminism that was content with formal political rights while leaving structural inequality intact. Together, these two women represent the breadth of women’s political participation in Odisha during the first half of the twentieth century — the range of positions, commitments, and strategies that women brought to the project of making a different world.
Parbati Giri and Annapurna Maharana extended that tradition into new domains: Annapurna Maharana’s work in handloom weaving and craft preservation represents an understanding that cultural production is inseparable from economic life, that the women who weave are simultaneously producing material objects and maintaining a living archive of aesthetic knowledge, and that the preservation of that knowledge is a form of feminist practice even where it is entirely unarticulated as such.
The loom, in this light, is Raja’s other symbol: the generative body, the cyclical process of making and unmaking, the thing that the earth and the woman share.
What the Soil Has Given
Raja ends, as all festivals end, in the ordinary. The swings are taken down. The earth resumes receiving the plough. The red dust settles. But for three days, something was insisted upon: that the body — the earth’s body, the woman’s body — has a right to its own rhythms, its own rest, its own cyclical renewal that is structured by interiority rather than by the requirements of production.
The women in this archive exhibited a comparable insistence across their diverse disciplines over more than a century of Indian intellectual, creative and political life. They insisted on the right to excavate what had been buried, to re-examine what had been canonised, to give voice to what had been silenced, to inhabit their own desire and intelligence and grief with the fullness that those things required. They did this within the structural conditions of their times — the constraints of gender, caste, class, language, region, political affiliation — and they did this as scholars, as poets, as novelists, as politicians, as activists, as weavers of cloth and weavers of argument.
What connects them is less a shared ideology than a shared orientation: toward the real, toward the specific, toward the body that bleeds and the land that yields and the word that, when set down with sufficient precision and sufficient courage, refuses to be misread indefinitely. They are, in the most accurate sense, the earth’s gifts to its own interpretation — the minds that the soil produced to understand what the soil is.
The festival is for them, too. The swing lifts, holds, returns. The earth breathes beneath it.
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