Absent Women Philosophers from Past to Present in Indian Thought: Ṛṣikās, Sarojini Naidu, and Jaishree Odin

Abstract This essay seeks to retrace, retrieve, recover, and reclaim the voices of women thinkers and philosophers throughout the history of Indian philosophy. The aim is to initiate a discussion on the conventional and ‘malestream’ character of established knowledge in philosophy. We focus on a few women thinkers to underline the fact that by acknowledging and elevating their previously erased and marginalized works, an alternative, and enriched, trajectory of the entire philosophical corpus of Indian thought is possible. To create a slice of such an alternate trajectory, we discuss the contributions of Ṛṣikās (women sages), Sarojini Naidu, and Jaishree Odin in the ancient, modern, and contemporary domains of Indian philosophy to argue and underline that these otherwise erased and absent women are thinking-beings actively involved in the give and take of philosophical progress in the Indian context.