I keep hearing that ancient India was very egalitarian and there was a golden age for women.
Most of this comes from interpretation of Hindu scriptures like the RigVeda. For example, there are many goddesses and in Hindu thought, humans are just souls—and the soul has no gender. However, this is not a good argument showing that ancient India was gender egalitarian—Hindus just found some feminine qualities divine and worthy of worship—it should be noted that they found animals like cows, to have divine qualities. That doesn’t mean the society was cow dominated and not human male dominated (patriarchal). So to me, this argument that having strong goddesses means women were equal in power as men in ancient India doesn’t make sense. Greeks had strong goddesses yet were very patriarchal.
Let me define patriarchy: by Patriarchy, I mean a general trend towards gendered division of labor such that males are involved in jobs external to domestic duties (eg. Hard laborers, doctors, poets, philosophers) and females are involved predominantly jobs that are domestic (child-rearing, caretakers of the home etc.). Any general systematic oppression of females by males in roles outside of childcare is an automatic qualifier for patriarchy. But so is gendered division of labor such that males hold the external power in society.
Now there is a Harvard University Studywhich concluded that many biased Hindus have been trying to erroneously rewrite history to show that ancient India was a gender equality golden age, and through this study’s discussion of some texts in the Vedas, it concluded that females were underrepresented in being authors of the Vedas and
This, by now rather dated rewriting of history should finally be thrown of literary history. As could again be seen here, the Indians of today and their imagination of the past are different from those of 1000 BCE, and it is time to recognize this and describe the ancient period properly -- instead of constantly imagining a golden past that never existed.”
So I require your help. Based on your studies of ancient India (whether scriptural or non-scriptural), was ancient India patriarchal? (Or was there an age in ancient India, ie Vedic Age, in which females and males on average worked outside the home freely, females had equal power and control as males in society and there was no systematic oppression of females by males.
Patriarchy, more or less in the literal sense of "rule by the father", is at the heart of every ancient Indo-European culture. The chief deity of the reconstructed PIE pantheon is "Father Sky", a patriarch who sustains law and social order; next to him, the "Storm God of War", a club-wielding strongman.
In the Rgveda, these two figures are best reflected in Indra and Varuna (Agni, Rudra, and others could also be discussed, but for simplicity we will forget them for now). Their dynamic is one of complementary opposites; Indra is a transgressive, youthful and energetic deity who fashions the cosmos (by e.g. tearing heaven and earth apart and releasing the cosmic waters) as an incidental event to exerting his brutal strength; he subdues his foes by beating them with his club (vajra). Varuna is a more princely, paternal and restrictive deity; he holds up the sky, sustains the cycle of waters and upholds the law by binding transgressors with his dreaded fetters. Indra, conversely, can escape any fetters!
Indra is the most celebrated Rgvedic deity, and these two figures together are portrayed as responsible for both cosmic and social order (and disorder) in e.g. Rv 4.42 (hymn to Indra-Varuna). While Varuna is concerned with lordly duties, Indra proclaims:
Men who drive swiftly, drawn by noble steeds, summon me when the battle turns against them - for I provoke strife, I, the mighty Indra!
The combination of responsibilities for primal natural and social order accorded to Indra-Varuna reflects a fundamentally male-focused society, exalting male generative power, the authority of the elderly patriarch, and the youthful warrior's show of strength.
But... extrapolating from religious tradition is tricky. It is interesting to note that in fact, Gathic Avestan hymns (reasonably close and similar to the Rgveda) contains the phrase "[whether] man or woman" (na va nairi va) in reference to good rulers and proper clerics. I don't know off-hand if a counterpart exists in the Vedic hymns, but those phrases are certainly not reflected in recorded pre-Islamic Iranian history, which features virtually no female rulers or clerics whatsoever.
Moreover, these are hymns directed at gods, not descriptions of societies. Analysis of this kind obviously rests on a premise that a culture's understanding of the divine reflects, to some extent, its social order. But this isn't always so straightforward - I cite Indra as a patron of chariot-riders above, yet there are Indo-Iranian traditions where female deities fulfill a similar role (e.g. Anahita/Nana). So my interpretation more or less presumes chariot warfare to be a predominantly masculine activity in this time and place, taking its close association with cosmogony as indicative of a society preoccupied with masculine virtues.
But generally, the preoccupation with male kinship (fatherhood, brotherhood, etc), male generative power, masculine activities, etc in the Proto-Indo-European lexicon is so great that anyone wishing to argue that it wasn't patriarchal would need an extremely compelling argument.
For a deeper general understanding of this, I would recommend consulting a work on PIE society such as The Horse, the Wheel and Language, or the Oxford Introduction by Mallory & Adams. Let me know if you require more scriptural verse references; I don't know them all by heart but I can look them up.