I never thought ancestry would become my kink. There was nothing erotic about the discovery. I wasn’t scrolling through the digital debris of my ancestors for pleasure, but there was something perversely fascinating about discovering my love life was largely dependent on family trees.
I had spent an unfortunate number of years building a self out of books, playlists and opinions while someone had already written the prologue to my future. Some rishi’s verdict written eons ago was supposed to be my ancestor and my myth.
This quest began during an arranged marriage proposal in the early 2000s. I was seated across from a polite tall young man and his parents, performing the ritual exchange of degrees and family details, when his father asked – what’s your gotra? His tone was rather gentle. My mother was quick to mention moudgulya. That moment, as I sat there fumbling for this new ancestral red herring, marked the beginning of my descent into what I now call The Gotra Complex.
The more I read about gotra, the more it felt like a spiritual software update. A Sanskrit word that literally means “cow pen”, it once referred to a line of descent from an ancient sage where each lineage is fenced off from the next for ritual reasons. Over time, this fence became a fortress.
It fascinated me that something devised to prevent biological redundancy in the Vedic Age had evolved into a bureaucratic ritual of belonging was meant for brandishing during matrimonial negotiations. Gotra appeared like some barcode of purity. It is easy to laugh at such things, until you realise how deep they run and how I love explaining such a logistical exercise.
There is something seductively archaic about the gotra. It flags continuity of a family story. When I confessed my ignorance to my mother, she looked at me with the pity one reserves for the culturally illiterate. Soon after, the theorist in me was stirred awake by embarrassment, and I reached instinctively for Spivak, that arch-interpreter of the invisible margins.
Spivak might have said that the gotra operates as a “script of difference”, a mechanism that both inscribes and excludes. It classifies the subject before the subject even arrives, producing what she calls the “epistemic violence” of categorisation.
My would-be-groom’s father didn’t intend violence, of course; he merely wanted assurance that my ancestors had never spiritually cohabited with his. But in that moment, I became a “subaltern” of the matrimonial market. I was spoken for, rather than speaking. I had lost my voice primarily because I was a woman crossing the ancestral threshold.
To theorise gotra is to watch metaphysics be renamed as social control. Foucault would have enjoyed its efficiency as well: knowledge arranged as a family tree. But there is no policeman here. The surveillance is self-imposed. We police ourselves with surnames, and our rituals mirror the version we must not be.
And yet, it is not entirely sinister. There is also tenderness in the concept. We are aware that our stories might leak into each other’s, and this is where the gotra reminds us, however, problematically, that intimacy has consequences. Because our origins still rule our choices.
It feels almost poetic that our ancestors once invented a cosmic kinship code long before Tinder discovered our preferences. When I revisited that conversation years later, I realised that my confusion had not been about gotra at all. It was, rather, about the anxiety of belonging.
My knowledge of Beauvoir, Irigaray, Woolf and the likes were a complete failure. I had mistaken lineage for identity, thinking the two must always coincide. I was still on the margin. As a woman, I was born into a gotra and was now surrendering into one through marriage. I was forever trapped in this rehearsal of loss.
My gotra, my surname, my inherited ways of belonging had now formed a complex latticework around me. And to speak in my own voice meant risking exile from the comfort of continuity. I knew how to inhabit the space I was born into, but how could I be asked to shift again?
As a millennial, modernity taught me to be self-made, while tradition ensured I come pre-assembled with its natural weight. And between those instructions lay the modern Indian predicament. None of us can be singular in a world that worships lineage. Perhaps that is why so many of us oscillate between rebellion and reverence, wanting to escape the past yet fearing the void that follows.
Spivak once warned against the temptation to “speak for” the subaltern, but here the subaltern is the one who doesn’t know his own gotra. My ignorance was not a rebellion. My ignorance was erasure. I was a new Indian, the real 90s kid, fluent in English, awkward in ancestry.
In trying to live outside the archive, I had merely lost the index card that told the world where to file me. I wanted to be an ethnographer of my own absurd quest. The list of gotra names and their origins unpacked like an epic footnote. There were rishis I had never heard of, branches and sub-branches that made it murkier.
But maybe that is the true genius of tradition. It survives majorly because we don’t understand it, and perhaps keep bumping into it in the middle of perfectly ordinary conversations about marriage. This gotra discussion was absolutely like that pop-up window. You can close that window or block it, but somewhere deep in the background, it keeps running, reminding you that even the most modern identities come with a legacy of tradition.
This enigma, in short, became strangely interior. It wasn’t just about who I could or couldn’t marry; it was about who I thought was allowed to become. The gotra question, I realised isn’t really about bloodlines.
As a matter of fact, it was about boundaries. Every culture invents a story about origins, and every individual has to decide how much of that story to carry forward. I had to decide to be respectful of tradition, but I was also allergic to its bureaucracy. The deeper I thought about it, the more the gotra began to look like a metaphor for identity itself.
This was a line drawn to remind me that freedom is never absolute. It is always inherited, bounded, borrowed. We imagine ourselves as autonomous beings, but our names, languages, rituals, and even our ways of loving are inherited scaffolds.
The gotra, in its most primitive form, is just a naming of limits: a reminder that we come from somewhere, that every choice, however radical, is anchored in an unseen lineage. There is grace in that thought that I hadn’t experienced before.
For all its exclusions, the gotra also contains a yearning for continuity. My ancestors, whoever they were, may not have been philosophers, but they understood that the self, if left unchecked, can dissolve into anonymity. The line was drawn not just to forbid, but also to remember. Every such fence was also a frame.
When I look back now at that evening of the arranged marriage interview, I see a younger version of myself sitting at the edge of two civilisations: the one of ritual and the one of reason. I was polite, embarrassed, eager to appear modern but not faithless.
I did not realise then that both sides of me were speaking the same language: one of belonging. I had confused my then rebel-nature with authenticity, but perhaps true independence is something deeper, maybe poignant as well. It lies not in rejecting inheritance but in choosing which parts of it to make porous.
Sometimes I wonder if the gotra is less about ancestry and more about the deep human fear of repetition. We are terrified of becoming our parents, our families, our pasts and so we draw genealogical maps to assure ourselves that we are distinct. But what if distinctness is overrated?
What if the self is not a fortress but a rivulet flowing through many names, gathering fragments of others and dissolving certainties? In that sense, I no longer resent the gotra. I read it differently. This was absurd and sublime—something that walked me into accidentally understanding a philosophical truth: my identity is not singular.
Yours isn’t, too. Maybe that is what I was learning, unknowingly, when I failed to answer the question all those years ago. The silence that followed then wasn’t ignorance; it was possibility. A small space had opened up for me to understand the lineage I was born into. In that fissure, the gotra ceased to be a rule and became something else entirely: We are all in one way or another, the children of stories we don’t fully understand. We are all still learning how to speak to them in our own voice.
If the pyramid is inverted, gotra will be the triumph of our time. Perhaps it shouldn’t be completely abolished as ancient labels but be worn as a thread without binding the wrist too tightly. In retrospect, my tradition isn’t the opposite of freedom, but it is only its first language and gotra will always be as obvious as gravity.
Aditi Dasgupta is an ordinary feminist, a storyteller and researcher at heart. An MPhil scholar in English literature, her work probes postcolonial traumas and the shifting identities within Indian writing in English. Residing in Mumbai, Aditi is an Institute for World Literatures, Harvard alumnus and completed a residential program at Yale University to understand the nuances of modern storytelling. Some of her works have been published in Borderless Journal, The Wise Owl Literary Magazine, The Hooghly Review, Quillmark, Contemplit Magazine, The Chakkar, WritingWomenCo, The Hemlock Journal, InkNest Poetry (in print), MeanPepperVine, SheThePeopleTVXUsawa, Ikusei (in print: https://amzn.in/d/geXvIrb) and The Writer’s Hour Magazine. Currently, she is associated with Usawa Literary Magazine as a contributing Book Reviewer.
