| Abstract: |
This paper examines how women’s authorship and literary agency are recorded and represented in a corpus of classical Sanskrit writing. It combines a bibliographic audit with content coding of 17 purposively selected textual units: four attributed anthology verses associated with Vijjikā, Śīlābhaṭṭārikā, and Vikaṭanitambā; nine canto-level units from Gaṅgādevī’s Madhurāvijayam; and four structural units from Tirumalāmbā’s Varadāmbikāpariṇaya Campū. The analysis distinguishes authorial agency the power to compose, evaluate, frame, and claim literary authority from diegetic agency, the speech, desire, judgment, or action granted to women inside a text. Each unit receives one primary agency code and binary markers for explicit authorial self-positioning and female-character or speaker agency. Descriptive findings show that affective or erotic voice is the largest category (5/17, 29.4%), followed by political-historical narration (4/17, 23.5%), authorial self-fashioning and dynastic/reproductive framing (3/17 each, 17.6%); objectification and supernatural plot intervention appear once each. The genre comparison suggests that short attributed verses preserve compact female-coded voices, while the longer court poems create broader authorial and political reach without consistently granting their female characters equivalent autonomy. These patterns support a qualified relationship between archive and agency: the form of preservation shapes what can be observed, and attribution does not make lyric speakers autobiographical. The study is exploratory, not a census of Sanskrit women’s writing; its small, purposive sample and single-coder judgments preclude inferential claims. It contributes a transparent coding framework, five data tables, five figures, and an accompanying observation-level dataset, and argues for future philological, manuscript-based, and collaborative coding of women’s Sanskrit literary production. |
