History · Ch 3 — Kinship, Caste and Class — Early Societies
The gotra of women
The gotra of women
Understanding the Gotra System and Women
The Brahmanical practice of classifying people by gotras — lineages named after Vedic seers — began around 1000 BCE. Each gotra was believed to descend from a specific seer, and two rules governed it: women had to exchange their father’s gotra for their husband’s upon marriage, and marriage within the same gotra was forbidden (exogamy). But did people actually follow these rules? The names of Satavahana rulers and their wives, preserved in inscriptions, offer a revealing test case.
The Satavahana Evidence
The Satavahanas ruled parts of western India and the Deccan from roughly the second century BCE to the second century CE. Their inscriptions list kings with titles like raja and names ending in -puta (Prakrit for “son”). Crucially, many kings are called Gotami-puta (“son of Gotami”) or Vasithi-puta (“son of Vasithi”). Gotami and Vasithi are feminine forms of the gotra names Gotama and Vasistha — the seers after whom those gotras were named. So a king’s identity was tied to his mother’s gotra, not his father’s.
This use of metronymics (names derived from the mother) is also found in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the earliest Upanishads, which lists teachers and students by their mother’s name.
Women’s Gotra Names: A Challenge to Brahmanical Rules
Satavahana rulers were often polygynous (had multiple wives). When historians examined the names of these queens, they found something striking:
- Many women had names derived from their father’s gotra (e.g., Gotama, Vasistha).
- They did not adopt names from their husband’s gotra, as Brahmanical rules required.
- Some of these women belonged to the same gotra as each other — meaning the king married women from his own gotra.
This directly violated the Brahmanical ideal of exogamy (marrying outside one’s gotra). Instead, it reflected an alternative practice: endogamy — marriage within the kin group. Such cousin marriages were (and still are) common among several communities in South India, as they helped maintain a close-knit community.
What This Tells Us …
This is a rare sculptural depiction of a Satavahana ruler and his wife, carved on the wall of a cave that was donated to Buddhist monks. The sculpture dates to around the second century BCE. It is one of the very few visual representations of a ruler from this period, which makes it valuable for historians studying early Indian society.
The image shows a royal couple standing side by side. The ruler is shown with his queen, and the carving is simple but dignified. The cave itself was a gift to the Buddhist monastic community, which tells us that Satavahana rulers patronised Buddhism even while they followed Brahmanical social norms in other respects.
What makes this figure directly relevant to the textbook section is its connection to the discussion of gotras and marriage practices. The Satavahana kings are known from inscriptions that use metronymics — names like Gotami-puta ("son of Gotami") and Vasithi-puta ("son of Vasistha"). These names show that the rulers identified themselves through their mother's gotra, not their father's. This is unusual because Brahmanical rules required women to adopt their husband's gotra after marriage. The fact that Satavahana queens retained their father's gotra names (like Gotami or Vasithi) in their sons' titles suggests that the strict Brahmanical rules about gotra exogamy were not always followed in practice. …
Source 4 — Names of Satavahana kings from inscriptions. Names of several generations of Satavahana rulers, recovered from inscriptions. Note the uniform title raja and the term puta (Prakrit for "son"); Gotami-puta means "son of Gotami":
raja Gotami-puta Siri-Satakani · raja Vasithi-puta (sami-) Siri-Pulumayi · raja Gotami-puta sami-Siri-Yana-Satakani · raja Madhari-puta svami-Sakasena · raja Vasathi-puta Chatarapana-Satakani · raja Hariti-puta Vinhukada Chutukulanamda-Satakamni · raja Gotami-puta Siri-Vijaya-Satakani
(Gotami and Vasithi are feminine forms of Gotama and Vasistha, Vedic seers after whom gotras were named.) …