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I wonder if women had any say in Mauryan empire or they were just objectified

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    Are you specifically interested in royalty (as suggested by the title) or in the situation of all women? Where have you already looked for information? What do you already know?
    – Steve Bird
    Commented Jun 21, 2020 at 9:37

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The Mauryans were the first native Indian society to develop their own writing system that we can decipher. Being first, they can perhaps be forgiven for being a bit slow out of the blocks in achieving the kind of minute biographical detail that would be required to answer this kind of question. In fact, all we have in contemporaneous records is some royal edicts. Only one of those of which I'm aware mentions a queen. It mentioned her in relation to the prince she sired, and her charitable contributions. So that is all we have definitive record of the Mauryans valuing in a queen.

We do have a lot more biographical information about Asoka, but it is largely from Buhdist writings many generations later. In other words, legends. However, that's the best we have, so if you want to get them credence...

They record Ashoka as having 16,000 wives. I think its fairly safe to say that just the sheer number of them puts said wives squarely in the "objectified" column.

I'm not sure if all 16k were styled as queens, but it appears that more than one at once were, and there was a kind of "chief queen".

The stories I'm seeing about Ashoka's queens mostly seem to indicate the kind of palace intrigues one typically sees out of people whose power entirely derives from having the favor of an autocrat. So it indeed doesn't look much like they were typically valued for the quality of their personal political counsel.

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