Therigatha: Deconstructing the Gendered Narratives of Renunciation

Historical reconstruction, whenever and by whomever undertaken, always remains an attempt at nothing more than a representation. Efforts to strive for a complete historical reconstruction are doomed to failure, for we can never know the past as it was. However, this, by no means, connotes that historical enterprise is but mere imagination about the past. Given its nature, the historian has to write their particular piece of history only by corroborating, crosschecking, and if need be, validating his sources. This exercise of historical reconstruction is a continuous process. The present paper too, without any claims to historical exactitude, attempts to reconstruct a specific dimension of early Indian history, viz. - the gendered nature of early Buddhism as reflected in the Pali canonical literature. As it were, early Buddhism in an age of emerging urbanism in between c. sixth-third centuries B. C. E. posed an alternative framework to the status quo of the existing social echelon. But the march of this process was often dialectical in nature, and this dialectical nature was also evident in the gendered character of early buddhist tradition. Among the myriad facets of this gendered identity, this paper makes a stride to analyse the gendered tenor of renunciation in the context of early buddhist monastic setting.