How Ancient India Celebrated Women’s Bodies as Divine Temples - Can We Bring That Back?

There’s something quietly tragic about the way we talk about women today. On the surface, there’s a lot of noise—about rights, beauty, choice, strength. But somewhere under all that buzz, there’s a silence too. A kind of forgetting. A collective amnesia about a time when womanhood wasn’t just respected. It was sacred. Let’s go back—not for nostalgia, but for memory. Not to idolize the past, but to remember what we unlearned.

In ancient India, womanhood wasn’t defined by how she looked, who she pleased, or what she sacrificed. She wasn’t a trope. She was a temple. Not in a metaphorical “queens and goddesses” way that we post on Instagram, but in a living, breathing, embodied reality. Temples were built with sculptures of women—gracefully dancing, thoughtfully resting, casually adjusting anklets—as if to say: Her existence is worthy of art. These weren't ornamental—they were spiritual. In Tantra, the female body wasn’t seen as temptation but as a sacred tool for transformation. The body was not shame. It was shakti—power.
She wasn’t asked to hide. She was the portal through which life entered. She was the ritual. The space. The offering. In Vedic texts, women like Lopamudra, Gargi, and Maitreyi debated the deepest philosophical questions, not as exceptions, but as rightful inheritors of wisdom. Knowledge wasn’t gendered. The mind of a woman was considered as fertile as the earth—capable of bearing truths that could feed entire civilizations.

History doesn’t always break. Sometimes it just bends... slowly, until one day it no longer resembles what it used to be. What happened to this reverence wasn’t one moment—it was many. Foreign invasions, political shifts, colonial distortions, and a deepening of patriarchal interpretations all played their part. Slowly, the divine was taken out of the feminine. What was once sacred became suspicious. The body was no longer a temple—it was a site of control, shame, and silence.
And here’s the part we don’t like to admit: we normalized it. We forgot that reverence isn’t about putting women on pedestals or printing her on currency. It’s about seeing her as whole. Seeing her body not as a battleground for purity or desire—but as life itself.

No. We shouldn’t go back. But we can remember. Because this isn’t about idolizing the past. This is about restoring a memory buried in our cultural DNA—a memory that reminds us: reverence isn’t a gift you give to women. It’s a worldview. A way of seeing the feminine in all life. A way of seeing dignity as the starting point, not the reward. So how do we reclaim it?
We stop calling women divine only when they suffer. We stop measuring their worth by sacrifice. We start by honoring the body—not by hiding it, not by selling it—but by respecting its intelligence. We stop making purity a prize. We remember that divinity was never modest or loud—it was present. Steady. Embodied. We begin again with girls—teaching them that their body is not a problem to solve, but a power to understand. We raise boys who see worship not as submission, but as deep recognition. We change language. We change gaze. We change what we celebrate.

If you’ve ever heard someone say “we used to worship women” with a nostalgic sigh, challenge that. Ask them: What does worship look like today? Because worship is not what you say. It’s how you see. It’s how you speak to a woman when she’s loud. Or tired. Or bleeding. Or aging. It’s how you talk about her body when it is not convenient or curated. That’s where reverence begins.
Ancient India remembered this. We forgot. But we can remember again. And if we do, maybe the next time we say “every woman is a goddess,” it won’t sound like a slogan. It’ll sound like truth.