Decoding gender in the Rig Veda: The rhetoric of women's discourse

The goal of the present study is to discover what information about women and men and their social roles is encoded in the discourse of the hymns. It is achieved not only by focusing on the subject matter of the texts, as it has been traditionally done before, but also by concentrating on gender-related patterns of language use, which generate certain gender-related stereotypic representations throughout the R&dotbelow;g Veda.; This is an empirical study with synchronic comparative aspects. The initial stage involves data gathering through word-search, text scheming and scanning procedures with the purpose of finding passages relevant to the scope of the present study, i.e. gender representations. The data selection is based on criteria such as frequency of occurrence, repetition, commonality and consistency relevant to the specific goal of the study. I concentrate on discovering not only the content of the commonly constructed gender images but on the ways they are realized through specific linguistic-rhetorical choices of the hymn-composers by examining categories such as agency, transitivity, collocation, etc., which I find extremely important in terms of their relation to the issue of gender. In addition, I explore female characters-speakers, what circumstances they are described in and what kinds of wishes they formulate in the hymns. Also, I look closely at several aspects traditional for discourse analysis, such as topic choice, topic shift, interaction initiation, etc. along gender lines. Furthermore, I examine speech function choice, which is closely related to politeness and is realized at the lexico-grammatical level. The analysis of the data has revealed gender polarization as an ideological construct in the R&dotbelow;g Vedic hymns, and in particular, the perpetuation of a type of social organization, in which women and men do not participate on equal terms, and validate the male and his activities as of great importance and value, and the female and her activities as of lesser importance and value. The unique contribution of my research is the way in which I have been able to locate what might be generally intuitive in the very diction of the hymns when male and female voices are heard.