Goddess Ila: The Forgotten Matriarch of Vedic India

When we begin to trace the origins of Indian civilization, we often encounter a familiar starting point: Manu Vaivasvata, the archetypal progenitor of humankind in the Indic tradition. While he is most famously associated with the Manu Smriti, a text that was redacted and formalized many centuries later during the post-Vedic period, his legacy predates that code by millennia. Manu Vaivasvata is invoked over twenty times across the Vedic corpus, not merely as a mythical patriarch, but as a moral and legal anchor: the first law-giver, the inaugurator of human society (manushya samaj), and a link between the divine and the earthly order. His role is comparable in scope, though not in theology, to figures like Noah or Adam in the Abrahamic traditions, but unlike them, Manu’s lineage continues through both sons and daughters, each carrying civilizational consequences.

Among his children, the one who shaped Indian destiny in unexpected yet profound ways was Ila, his daughter. And it is here, in the womb of this matriarch, that a civilizational bifurcation quietly occurs, a split that would birth the two foundational royal lineages of Indian itihasa, the Solar (Suryavansha) and the Lunar (Chandravansha) dynasties.

While Manu’s son Ikshvaku is often credited with founding the Solar Dynasty and establishing rule from the ancient city of Ayodhya, though this was likely an earlier Ayodhya located in the Saraswati basin or the Harappan domain, and not the later city of Rama, Ila had already made her mark. Denied succession not due to incompetence or immaturity, but because she was born a woman in a society that had begun to assign rulership strictly along patriarchal lines, Ila left the royal seat in favor of a new destiny.

She migrated to a nearby settlement and married Budha, a figure who has been interpreted in Vedic literature as the personification of the planet Mercury (Budha), but also symbolically as “the Awakener,” someone who carries lunar, mystical, and introspective connotations, in contrast to the Solar/Ikshvaku line’s more action-oriented archetype. This union of Ila and Budha was not merely matrimonial, it was mytho-historical alchemy, giving rise to Pururavas, the first monarch of the Lunar Dynasty.

The significance of this lineage is staggering. Through Pururavas comes Yayati, and through Yayati’s sons, Yadu, Puru, Anu, Druhyu, and Turvashu, emerge not just the tribes that define ancient Indian polity and spiritual thought, but potentially the roots of entire linguistic and cultural movements across Eurasia:

• Yadu, the ancestor of the Yadavas, gives us figures like Krishna, central not just to the Mahabharata but to the devotional and philosophical evolution of Hinduism.
• Anu and Druhyu, often cast as the rebellious branches in Puranic lore, have been speculatively linked by scholars to Proto-Iranian or even Indo-European groups who may have migrated westward following conflicts in the subcontinent, particularly those narrated in pre-Vedic or early Vedic accounts.
• Puru, the youngest and most beloved, becomes the progenitor of the Paurava line, from whom arise not only Vedic kings but also many of the Rishis, the seers who composed the Rigveda itself. Through this line descends the legendary King Bharata, after whom the Indian subcontinent is named, Bharata Varsha, the land of Bharata.

Thus, at the heart of India’s sacred geography, spiritual memory, and political imagination stands Ila, the primal feminine node from which both divine and royal streams emerge. It is her bloodline that flows through Krishna’s conch and Bharata’s crown. It is her progeny who chant the Vedas, fight the Mahabharata, shape Dharma, and transmit the civilizational DNA of what we today call Bharat.

So when we speak of Bharat, the name etched on our Constitution, printed on our currency, echoed in our anthem, and invoked in every prayer to the Motherland, we are, knowingly or not, saluting Ila. She is not merely a figure of myth or a footnote in a patriarchal genealogy; she is the matriarch of India’s civilizational soul.

Ila the Goddess

In the Vedic period, Ila was not merely remembered, she was revered. Her name did not languish in the margins of mythology; it echoed through sacred hymns and philosophical lineages. Ila was deified, invoked in the company of Bharati, the goddess of eloquent speech and the Bharata lineage, and Saraswati, the presiding deity of learning, clarity, and the river that nourished the Vedic homeland. Together, these three goddesses formed a triad of divine feminine forces, embodying the very infrastructure of Vedic civilization: speech, ancestry, and geography.

In this sacred symbology, Ila was not a passive figure but a primordial matriarch, a bridge between divine order and human lineage. She was the axis mundi of the Lunar Dynasty and the symbolic mother of all those who traced their origin to Pururavas, a lineage that, through Yayati, Puru, and Bharata, came to represent not just a royal clan but the very identity of the Indian nation. In fact, so deep was this sense of civilizational continuity that Vedic communities often referred to themselves as Ilas, not merely as a genetic claim, but as a cultural declaration. To be an Ila was to affirm one’s place in a sacred tradition, rooted in Dharma, Rta (cosmic order), and ancestral knowledge.

This reverence for Ila reveals something profound about the gender dynamics of the Vedic world, a society far removed from the later rigidities and exclusions imposed by medieval patriarchy. Unlike many ancient civilizations where the divine feminine was eventually diminished or subjugated to masculine authority, the Vedic ethos upheld a nuanced and inclusive spiritual ecology. Here, gender was not a limiting binary, but a dynamic spectrum of possibilities, roles, and honors.

Women were not confined to domestic invisibility. They were Rishikas (female seers), Brahmavadinis (seekers of Brahman), and Mantra-drashtas (visionaries of hymns). Figures like Lopamudra, Gargi Vachaknavi, Maitreyi, Apala, and Ghosha composed hymns in the Rigveda, a testimony to their philosophical acumen and spiritual authority. Far from being exceptional outliers, these women were integral nodes in the Vedic intellectual ecosystem.

In such a world, Ila was not a mythic aberration. She was a civilizational cornerstone, not remembered because she defied norms, but because she embodied the original norm, a norm where lineage through a woman did not diminish legitimacy but enhanced sacred continuity. Her elevation was not a tokenistic gesture but a recognition of the feminine as a source of Dharma, a vessel of Rta, and a guardian of the civilizational flame.

In her, we find the blueprint for a society that saw no contradiction between knowledge and womanhood, between governance and femininity, between ancestry and matrilineage. Ila represents the unfragmented, holistic worldview of the Vedic people, one where nature, culture, and the sacred feminine coexisted in harmonious synergy.

To remember Ila today is not merely to recover a historical figure; it is to reclaim a civilizational memory, one that offers a compelling counterpoint to the colonially imposed narratives of India’s supposed backwardness or patriarchal rigidity. In Ila, we do not just find a goddess or a queen, we find Bharat Mata in her earliest form.

The Puranic Distortion

Fast forward a few thousand years, and Ila’s story takes a bewildering turn, not through organic evolution, but through the ideological distortions of a society that had begun to view feminine power with discomfort.

In the Puranic retellings, Ila is no longer simply the dignified daughter of Manu and the revered matriarch of the Lunar Dynasty. Instead, she becomes Sudhyumna, a man who stumbles into an enchanted forest, one protected by Parvati to shield it from male intrusion. As the tale goes, the moment he enters this sacred grove, a magical reversal occurs: Sudhyumna is transformed into a woman. The story does not end there. What follows is a sequence of gender oscillations, divine interventions, cosmic punishments, and a moral dilemma worthy of Greek tragedy, or modern cinema.

In one particularly grim episode, Ila, now a woman, is told by the gods that half her children must be killed as punishment. The so-called “boon” is that she gets to choose which half, those borne when she was male, or those born when she was female. This twisted test of maternal instinct and divine obedience is often interpreted with a sense of mythic awe. But when peeled back, it reveals a deeper anxiety, not about Ila herself, but about how a later society struggled to accommodate her feminine prominence within a patriarchal framework.

The tale, though layered and symbolic, is not Vedic in origin. It emerges from the Puranic imagination, a body of literature compiled well into the first millennium CE, by which time the fluid, holistic worldview of the Vedas had given way to a more hierarchical, gender-segregated social order. In this newer worldview, a woman could no longer be the uncontested originator of a royal dynasty. Such an idea would be anomalous, even heretical. And so, Ila’s womanhood had to be “explained away”, transformed into a temporary aberration, a divine joke, a narrative loophole.

Thus was born the tale of Sudhyumna: a literary acrobatics to reconcile Ila’s civilizational centrality with the growing discomfort toward female sovereignty. Where the Vedic seers had accepted Ila as a woman and honored her without question, later authors could not. The solution? Make her a man who became a woman, thereby neutralizing her original femininity and reinforcing a masculine default.

These convoluted transformation myths are not innocent fables. They are symptomatic of a deeper cultural rupture— a sign that the once-fluid roles of gender, knowledge, and leadership were now being policed by more rigid norms. The Puranic Ila is not so much a reflection of her as she was, but rather a projection of how later society wanted to see her.

Yet, as Dr. Koenraad Elst aptly observes, reality is often far more compelling than fantasy. The Vedic Ila was never a man, never a gender-shifter, never a myth in need of rationalization. She was a woman, and more importantly, a woman at the very source of lineage, law, and civilization. She was revered not despite being female, but because her femininity was understood as a vital, generative force in both nature and culture.

The Puranic embellishments, while artistically imaginative, are not original records. They are interpretive distortions, shaped by the pressures of changing social mores. They represent the tension between memory and mythmaking, between Vedic reverence and medieval reinvention.

To recover Ila is to excavate the lost vision of a society where gender did not inhibit greatness, where women were not exceptions to the rule, but embodiments of Rta, the cosmic order. It is a return not just to Ila the individual, but to Ila the ideal: the feminine as foundational, the maternal as majestic, and the woman as the wellspring of Dharma itself.

Forgotten Even by the Veda Revivalists

It is particularly ironic, even tragic, that institutions born out of Vedic revivalism, such as the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) Colleges, remain unaware of Ila’s foundational place in the civilizational imagination of Bharat. These institutions, inspired by Swami Dayanand Saraswati’s clarion call to return to the Vedas, were envisioned as citadels of indigenous knowledge and reform, spaces where colonial narratives would be countered by the rediscovery of ancient truths. And yet, as Dr. Koenraad Elst recounts from his lectures in several DAV colleges, including those exclusively for women, not a single professor or student seemed to recall Ila, the first matriarch of Vedic society, the progenitor of the Lunar Dynasty, the woman from whom Bharata’s very name descends.

This silence is not accidental; it is symptomatic. For all the impassioned papers read at these institutions about feminism, women’s empowerment, and gender justice, Ila, the original feminist archetype rooted in Vedic ethos, is nowhere in the conversation. Instead, discussions lean heavily on Western feminist frameworks, imported wholesale and layered over an Indic civilizational body that already possessed its own grammar of gender dignity and intellectual equality.

We are, it seems, quick to invoke Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, or Judith Butler, and yet we forget our own foremothers, Ila, Maitreyi, Gargi, Lopamudra, and countless others who composed hymns, debated metaphysics, raised kings, and shaped dharma. This dislocation is not just academic, it is civilizational amnesia.

For what stronger figure could a Vedic feminist ask for than Ila, a woman who stands at the confluence of lineage, law, and legitimacy? She was not a peripheral character but a central pillar of identity formation in the Vedic age. To restore her to our collective memory is not merely an act of historical correction; it is a reclamation of cultural sovereignty.

In forgetting Ila, we are not just neglecting a name, we are severing ourselves from a native model of empowered womanhood, one that predates and, in many ways, transcends modern Western paradigms. Ila does not need to be “empowered” by contemporary metrics; she already was powerful, by virtue of being the origin-point of civilization itself.

That she is missing from curricula, footnotes, and consciousness, even in institutions that wear Vedic heritage as a badge of honor, reveals the deep colonization of the Indian intellectual space. We have learned to look outward for validation, even for liberation, while turning our backs on the rich legacy that already enshrines those values, but with far more nuance, balance, and spiritual depth.

The recovery of Ila, then, is not simply an academic footnote. It is a civilizational imperative. It is the rediscovery of a feminine figure who is not a derivative of Western constructs, but a sovereign embodiment of Indic thought, grounded in Dharma, not dialectic; in Rta, not reaction.

Reclaiming Ilahabad: A Symbolic Gesture

The conversation around the renaming of Allahabad to Prayagraj is more than a bureaucratic squabble over signage or stationery, it is a contest over civilizational memory. While some critics decry the renaming as unnecessary, costly, or politically motivated, they miss the larger point: names are not just labels; they are narratives. They encode identity, authority, and heritage. And in this debate, Ila’s story quietly resurfaces, offering not just historical nuance but a symbolic civilizational corrective.

Dr. Koenraad Elst proposes an imaginative and meaningful compromise, retain the phonetic familiarity of “Allahabad,” but repurpose it as “Ilahabad”, the city of Ila. Instead of preserving a name derived from Akbar’s Din-e-Ilahi, an imperial experiment in religious syncretism, this reinterpretation allows us to anchor the city in an older, deeper Indic consciousness. “Ilahi” may mean “divine” in Arabic, but Ila is divinity rooted in the Vedas, the progenitor of the Lunar Dynasty and civilizational mother of Bharata.

The Puranas themselves hint at this possibility. Some accounts narrate that Ila, after ceding the Ayodhya throne to her brother Ikshvaku, settled in a nearby region, a place some later traditions identify with the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna, the very geography that defines modern-day Prayagraj. While this linkage may not be archaeologically verifiable, its symbolic potency is undeniable. Reclaiming Ila in this manner is not a distortion of history, but a restoration of forgotten memory, a civilizational act of rematriation, if one may borrow and reframe a term from feminist discourse.

This reimagining offers a far more authentic homage to India’s roots than a name gifted by a Mughal emperor whose project of religious amalgamation, noble in theory, never truly resonated with the lived traditions of either Hindu or Muslim masses. The name “Allahabad” celebrates a short-lived experiment in syncretism. “Ilahabad” celebrates a timeless lineage.

Moreover, this subtle reconfiguration avoids the confrontational rhetoric often associated with renaming debates. It preserves continuity while re-inscribing civilizational truth. It allows the name to remain familiar on the tongue, while transforming its meaning from imperial imposition to Indic affirmation.

In an age where history is increasingly becoming a battleground of narratives, choosing to honor Ila in this way is both poetic and political. It roots the city not in Mughal paternalism, but in Vedic matriliny, not in the theology of a conquering court, but in the ancestral memory of a civilization that saw its own land as Bharat Mata, born of Ila’s womb.

Why Talk About Ila Now?

Because Ila’s story is a mirror, not only to our ancient past, but to all that we have since forgotten, ignored, or consciously erased. In a time when questions of gender, identity, ancestry, and civilizational continuity dominate public discourse, Ila emerges as a figure of remarkable synthesis: at once matriarch and monarch, wife and mother, goddess and progenitor, human and divine. She transcends binaries. She holds within her story the convergence of lineage and law, femininity and sovereignty, history and mythology.

She is not a relic of some bygone era. She is a compass, pointing us back to an Indic consciousness that honoured the feminine not as subordinate, but as essential; that understood power not as domination, but as creation, sustenance, and continuity.

In Conclusion

Let us remember that the name Bharat, the very soul of Indian identity, etched into our Constitution, whispered in our daily invocations, and shouted on the lips of a billion hearts, flows not only from kings and conquerors, but from a womb. From Ila, the civilizational ancestress whose legacy gave birth to Pururavas, to Yayati, to Puru, to Bharata, to the rishis and warriors, sages and poets who shaped this land.

She is not a footnote in history; she is the footing of it. Not an exception, but the origin. Her story challenges us to rethink our frameworks, to rediscover an India where women were not marginal, but central; not remembered out of courtesy, but revered out of necessity.

As we delve deeper into our civilizational past, let us not pause at male sages, solar kings, and the grand courts of Ayodhya. Let us also turn our gaze to the moonlit matriarch, to Ila, whose presence once shimmered in the chants of the Vedas, in the ethereal river Saraswati, in the lineages of the Lunar race, and in the very idea of what it meant to be Arya, noble, refined, awake.

In an age yearning for roots and clarity, may we reclaim Ila not as a myth, but as memory; not as metaphor, but as mother.

May Bharat rediscover Ila.
May the Ilas rise again.
And may our future remember what our past never forgot.

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