WOMEN IN GEOPOLITICS AS A GREATER INDIAN IDEA

Indian civilizational consciousness is mixed with riddles : reverence and relegation, agency and acquiescence, omnipresence and occlusion.

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Nowhere is this duality more starkly manifest than in the discourse on women's participation in the arenas of power—most notably, the labyrinthine theatre of geopolitics. While the global narrative often renders women as belated entrants to the corridors of realpolitik, Indian thought, in its loftiest incarnations, has always gestated the notion of the feminine as a sine qua non of cosmic and terrestrial order.Let us not indulge in the shallow triumphalism of tokenistic representation, nor in the melancholy of atavistic exclusion.

Instead, we must interrogate the very substratum of India's political philosophy, which, long before the West's suffragist awakenings, envisaged feminine agency as both an epistemic and existential necessity. The Manusmriti, much maligned and oft-misquoted, nevertheless proclaims: “Yatra naryastu pujyante ramante tatra devata”—where women are worshipped, there the gods rejoice. It is an injunction not merely of ritual, but of ontological import. Yet, the modern geopolitical landscape, with its Machiavellian intricacies and Hobbesian contests, appears resistant to the harmonics of the feminine. Why so? Is it that the Indian conception of feminine power—Shakti—remains entombed in mythology, untranslatable into the argot of diplomacy and strategy? Or is it that the very grammar of geopolitics is masculinist, privileging the calculus of force over the arithmetic of empathy, negotiation, and what might be termed “relational sovereignty”?