[INDOLOGY] Gender change in pre-modern Sanskrit literature

Tue Mar 17 18:25:26 UTC 2026

Dear friends,

first of all, I would like to thank everyone who so generously responded to my request for suggestions regarding gender change in pre-modern Sanskrit literature (I hope I haven’t forgotten anyone!): Shubham Arora, Tarinee Awasthi, Daniela Bevilacqua, Simon Brodbeck, Tracy Coleman, Anna Aurelia Esposito, Christian Ferstl, Eli Franco, Elisa Ganser, Robert Goldman, Anahita Hoose, Matthew Kapstein, Petra Kieffer-Pülz, Dmitrii Komissarov, Robert Leach, Steven Lindquist, Valerie Roebuck, Tulika Singh, Caley Smith, Roland Steiner, Eric Steinschneider, McComas Taylor, Christophe Vielle.

I have tried to organise the information I received, separating the episodes of gender change found in the primary sources (Sanskrit literary works) from the academic studies on the subject. I have pasted the result below.

Thanks again to all of you!

Marco
---

Change of gender episodes in Sanskrit literature
- Ila/Sudyumna-Ilā (Rāmāyaṇa, Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Viṣṇupurāṇa, Vāyupurāṇa)
- Bhaṅgāsvana (Mahābhārata)
- Śikhaṇḍin (Mahābhārata)
- Mūladeva (Vetālapañcaviṃśati)
- Arjuna (Mahābhārata). (See several entries in the bibliography)
- The story of Rūp(y)āvatī/Rukmavatī (Divyāvadāna). The story has been handed down in three different versions. (See Dimitrov 2004, 2008; Steiner 2002; Straube 2009.)
- Bhagavadajjukīya by Bodhāyana/Baudhāyana
- Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra; a girl became a man before reaching buddhahood
- Viṣṇu’s appearance as Mohinī (Mahābhārata etc); the story is retold in a funny way in Samudramathana by Vatsaraja
- The story of queen Cūḍālā and king Śikhidhvaja. Cūḍālā transforms herself (through yogic power) into a young sage named Kumbha to instruct her husband; later on, she (in the form of Kumbha) tells Sikhidhvaja that in the past she had offended a sage and consequently was cursed to become a woman every night. (Yogavasiṣṭha and Mokṣopāya VI.81.11–114.32) (Mokṣopāya. Das Sechste Buch. Nirvāṇaprakaraṇa. 1. Teil: Kapitel 1–119. Kritische Edition von S. Krause-Stinner und P. Stephan. Wiesbaden 2018, pp. 319–474.)
- The goddess swapping her female body with the śrāvaka monk Śāriputra in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra 
- Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva are transformed into females on entering Goddess’ Maṇidvīpa (Devībhāgavatapurāṇa 3.4)
- Prajāpati (considered as tha creator of the universe) manifests features associated with both male and female generative power, including lactating breasts (Śatapathabrāhmaṇa [Mādhyaṃdina] 2.5.1-3 etc.)
- The episode of Kṛṣṇa's son Sāmba, who in Book 16 of the Mahābhārata, thirty-six years after the war, dresses as a pregnant woman (as part of a prank that does not end well for him.)
- Story 62 of the Śukasaptati: a young and handsome lover manages to disguise himself as a woman in order to live with the women of a Rajput. With a special trick he can even dance naked without being recognized. (Transmitted in the textus simplicior [11th/12th c., crit. ed. by Richard Schmidt, Leipzig ], not transmitted in the textus ornatior [crit. ed. by Richard Schmidt, München 1898]). (See Artola 1975 [or 1977]).
- The story of “The pregnant Vidyādhara” in the Tantropākhyāna (an incomplete gender change) narrates of the transfer of an embryo from a pregnant female to a male character (and the final death of the latter, unable to give birth). (See Artola 1965)
- Hasyacūḍāmaṇi by Vatsaraja (An ascetic and an old bawd form a couple; they don't exchange genders, but they do exchange gender roles.)
- Atharvavedic hymns that purports to forcibly change ones gender from man to woman/man to neuter or otherwise emasculate/render impotent. (e.g. Śaunakasaṃhitā 6.138 ~ Paippalādasaṃhitā 1.68.)
- Kāmasūtra 2.7.22–23, plus chapter 2.8 (woman playing the man’s part).

Studies and secondary sources
- George T. Artola. 1965. “Ten Tales from the Tantropākhyāna”, ALB 29, pp. 30–73 (st. 2 "The pregnant Vidyādhara", pp. 36, 52-53).
- George T. Artola. 1975. “The Transvestite in Sanskrit Story and Drama”, Annals of Oriental Research (Madras, ed. K. Kunjunni Raja) 25, pp. 57-68, reed. in Id. The banner of Kāmadeva and other topics of Sanskrit literature and Indian culture (Monographs of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, University of Toronto, vol. 3), Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1977, pp. 44-59. (On the topic of the "third nature”; on p. 65 the article deals with story 62 in the Śukasaptati.)
- Simon Brodbeck and Brian Black (eds). 2007. Gender and Narrative in the Mahabharata. Routledge. (Especially the chapters by Andrea Custodi on “Transsexuality and Gender-Bending in the Characters of Arjuna/Brihannadaa and Ambaa/Shikhandin”, and by Georg von Simson on “Krishna’s Son Saamba: Faked Gender and Other Ambiguities on the Background of Lunar and Solar Myth”.)
- Dragomir Dimitrov. 2008. “Some Remarks on the Rūpyāvatyavadāna of the Divyāvadāna(mālā).” In: D. Dimitrov, M. Hahn, and R. Steiner (eds.): Bauddhasāhityastabakāvalī. Essays and Studies on Buddhist Sanskrit Literature. Dedicated to Claus Vogel. Marburg (Indica et Tibetica 36), pp. 45–64. (On the story of Rūp(y)āvatī/Rukmavatī.)
- Dragomir Dimitrov. 2004. “Two Female Bodhisattvas in Flesh and Blood.” In: U. Roesler and J. Soni (eds.): Aspects of the Female in Indian Culture. Marburg (Indica et Tibetica 44), pp. 3–30. (On the story of Rūp(y)āvatī/Rukmavatī.)
- Wendy Doniger. 2016. Redeeming the Kamasutra, pp. 109–113. (Section on traditional and inverted Indian concepts of gender.)
- Wendy Doniger. 2014. On Hinduism. (Especially the section on Transsexual Transformations of Subjectivity and Memory in Hindu Mythology.)
- Wendy Doniger. 2002. The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade.
- Wendy Doniger. 1999. Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. (Especially chapter six might be useful.)
- Wendy Doniger. 1982. Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts.
- Anna Aurelia Esposito. 2013. “Wie man im alten Indien sein Geschlecht verändert: Transformationen von Geschlecht in der klassischen indischen Literatur”, Heike Moser und Stephan Köhn (eds), Frauenbilder/Frauenkörper, Inszenierungen des Weiblichen in den Gesellschaften Süd- und Ostasiens. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 503–524.
- Sanjay Gautam. 2013. “The Event of Sexual Pleasure as De-subjectivization in Foucault and the Kāmasūtra”, South Asian Review, Vol. 34(3), p.19-34. (On raticakra; Gautam discusses how intense passion causes a male-female couple to reverse their genders temporarily.)
- Robert Goldman. Notes on Arjuna’s “transvestism” at Virāṭa’s court (email).
- Anahita Hoose. 2025. “The god with a thousand vulvas: heroic feminisation in ancient India and Greece”, JRAS, Series 3, 35, 505–521.
- Padmanabh Jaini. 1991. Gender and Salvation. Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women. University of California Press. (On the male body as the normative body, the male body as the superior body, and explicit or implicit demonization of women and female sexuality, including (as warnings) stories about sex change in current or future lives.)
- Susanne Mrozik. 2006. “Materialization of Virtue: Buddhist discourses on bodies.” In E. T. Armour and S. M. St. Ville (eds), Bodily Citations Religion and Judith Butler. Columbia University Press.
- John Powers. 2009. A Bull of a Man. Images of Masculinity Sex and the Body in Indian Buddhism. (On the male body as the normative body, the male body as the superior body, and explicit or implicit demonization of women and female sexuality, including (as warnings) stories about sex change in current or future lives.)
- Hidenori Sakuma. 1990. Die āśrayaparivṛtti-Theorie in der Yogācārabhūmi. Stuttgart. (On the notion of āśrayaparivṛtti/parāvṛtti, one of its earliest meanings is “gender change”).
- Roland Steiner. 2002. “Zum ursprünglichen Titel der ‘Rūpyāvatī’-Geschichte.” In: D. Dimitrov, U. Roesler and R. Steiner (eds.): Śikhisamuccayaḥ. Indian and Tibetan Studies. Wien (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde 53), pp. 203–210. (On the story of Rūp(y)āvatī/Rukmavatī.)
- Martin Straube. 2009. Studien zur Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā. Texte und Quellen der Parallelen zu Haribhaṭṭas Jātakamālā. Wiesbaden (Veröffentlichungen der Helmuth von Glasenapp-Stiftung. Monographien 1), pp. 322–324 (“Das Rukmavatyavadāna”). (On the story of Rūp(y)āvatī/Rukmavatī.)
- McComas Taylor. 2013. “Purāṇic Masculinities and Transgender Adventures in the Garden of the Goddess”, International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (August, 2013), pp. 153-179
- Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds). 2000. Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History. (Some chapters on sex and gender change might be of interest.)
- Fernando Wulff Alonso. 2020. In Search of Vyāsa: The Use of Greco-Roman Sources in Book 4 of the Mahābhārata. (On Arjuna’s transvestism at the court of Virata and its parallels in the legend of Heracles.)
- Serenity Young. 2004. Courtesans and Tantric Consorts. Sexualities in Buddhist Narrative, Iconography, and Ritual. Routledge. (On the male body as the normative body, the male body as the superior body, and explicit or implicit demonization of women and female sexuality, including (as warnings) stories about sex change in current or future lives.)
- Leonard Zwilling and Michael J. Sweet. 2000. “The Evolution of Third-Sex Constructs in Ancient India: A Study in Ambiguity”, in Julia Leslie and Mary McGee, eds., Invented Identities: The Interplay of Gender, Religion and Politics in India, 99–132, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. (On Arjuna’s “transvestism” at Virāṭa’s court.)

Pāli literature
- The story of Soreyya/Soreyyā (Pali commentarial literature) 
- Dhammadinnā. 2019. “Soreyya/ā’s double sex change: on gender relevance and Buddhist values”, ARIRIAB 22, 9–34. (On the story of Soreyya/Soreyyā.)

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> Il giorno 14 mar 2026, alle ore 23:07, Marco Franceschini <marco.franceschini3 at gmail.com> ha scritto:
> 
> Dear friends and colleagues,
> 
> I would like to sincerely thank everyone who responded to my question, both on- and off-list. I am deeply grateful to you all: in less than 24 hours, I received 25 suggestions – I am amazed by our group’s capacity for cooperation and mutual enrichment.
> Reading your replies, I realised that this topic can take on a scope I hadn’t considered, as it borders on and, at times, overlaps with related topics, such as androgyny, the male body as the normative body, the concept of āśrayaparivṛtti/parāvṛtti, normative literature (Kāmasūtra and Kāmaśāstras), Buddhist literature in Pāli, genderbending/emasculating rituals in Vedic texts – to mention just a few. Perhaps a dear friend is right who, off-list, writes to me that the topic deserves a panel at a conference or, perhaps, an entire conference...
> Over the next few days I will organise your suggestions and recommendations and send you a summary email with a bibliography.
> 
> Thank you again.
> Warm regards to all,
> 
> Marco
> ---
> Marco Franceschini
> ———————————---
> Associate Professor
> University of Bologna
> Department of History and Cultures
> Personal web page <https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/marco.franceschini3/en>
> Academia web page <http://unibo.academia.edu/MarcoFranceschini>
> —
> 
> 
>> Il giorno 13 mar 2026, alle ore 21:46, Marco Franceschini <marco.franceschini3 at gmail.com> ha scritto:
>> 
>> Dear friends and colleagues,
>> 
>> one of my students is writing her undergraduate thesis on the theme of gender change in pre-modern Sanskrit literature.
>> So far, we have identified the following cases:
>> - Ila/Sudyumna-Ilā (Rāmāyaṇa, Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Viṣṇupurāṇa, Vāyupurāṇa)
>> - Bhaṅgāsvana (Mahābhārata)
>> - Śikhaṇḍin (Mahābhārata)
>> - Mūladeva (Vetālapañcaviṃśati)
>> - Rūpāvatī (Divyāvadāna)
>> - Arjuna (Mahābhārata)
>> 
>> As for studies on the subject, we have been able to identify only these three:
>> - M. Bloomfield, On the Art of Entering Another's Body: A Hindu Fiction Motif
>> - N. Brown, Change of Sex as a Hindu Story Motif
>> - R. Goldman, Transsexualism, Gender, and Anxiety in Traditional India
>> 
>> I would be grateful for any additional suggestions you might wish to provide.
>> 
>> Thank you in advance for your suggestions.
>> Best wishes,
>> 
>> Marco
>> ---
>> Marco Franceschini
>> ———————————---
>> Associate Professor
>> University of Bologna
>> Department of History and Cultures
>> Personal web page <https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/marco.franceschini3/en>
>> Academia web page <http://unibo.academia.edu/MarcoFranceschini>
>> —
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 

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