Ancient India was quite sensual, all things considered. The whole idea of covering up and protecting modesty generally spread after Islamic invasion and brutal tape and pillaging.
You can even see this through historic statues, statues of women and goddesses before 10th century were topless more often than not and then you start to see a blend of the two till 13th century and then after 13th cebtury it’s mostly covered up version of women and godesses.
And historically most societies are patriarchal, India no exception. As such, did women really get a say in society if they wanted to be ‘sensual’ or not?
Prolonged societies where women would stay naked/or partially covered including indigenous tribes, generally had high degree of autonomy when it comes to choosing when to have intimate relations. Best case scenario is “complete freedom” , worst case scenario is “marital rape but protection from third party rape”. Indian society probably was somewhere between the two.
A lot of knowledge about ancient India was oral so already not very reliable, only a fraction of knowledge was written. Added with the fact that in only a fraction of the written work survived about that period as “blasphemous” texts were burned. From the limited texts that survived such as kamasutra due to their popularity, that talks about focusing on pleasure for both genders, suggests societal focus was more on consensual pleasure than forced pleasure. Hard to definitely know, but more likely that they had some degree autonomy on when to be sensual and when not to.
Ancient India was quite sensual, all things considered. The whole idea of covering up and protecting modesty generally spread after Islamic invasion and brutal tape and pillaging.
You can even see this through historic statues, statues of women and goddesses before 10th century were topless more often than not and then you start to see a blend of the two till 13th century and then after 13th cebtury it’s mostly covered up version of women and godesses.
And historically most societies are patriarchal, India no exception. As such, did women really get a say in society if they wanted to be ‘sensual’ or not?
Prolonged societies where women would stay naked/or partially covered including indigenous tribes, generally had high degree of autonomy when it comes to choosing when to have intimate relations. Best case scenario is “complete freedom” , worst case scenario is “marital rape but protection from third party rape”. Indian society probably was somewhere between the two.
A lot of knowledge about ancient India was oral so already not very reliable, only a fraction of knowledge was written. Added with the fact that in only a fraction of the written work survived about that period as “blasphemous” texts were burned. From the limited texts that survived such as kamasutra due to their popularity, that talks about focusing on pleasure for both genders, suggests societal focus was more on consensual pleasure than forced pleasure. Hard to definitely know, but more likely that they had some degree autonomy on when to be sensual and when not to.