The Vedaz approach

Decolonising Vedic astrology

Vedic knowledge is profound. Much of it reached us through patrilineal, caste-shaped and colonial channels. Vedaz honours the tradition and refuses the distortions. Both, at once.

What got distorted

For centuries, the people permitted to study, write down and teach Jyotiṣa were mostly men of privileged caste. Later, colonial scholars translated those texts into English through their own assumptions about gender, race and religion. Each layer left marks.

• Planets and signs were assigned genders and ranked, with the “masculine” placed above the “feminine”.
• Charts were read to police marriage, fertility and obedience, especially for women.
• Queer and gender-expansive people, who are present throughout South Asian history, were written out or written as defects.
• Karma was used to explain away caste and suffering.
• Fear became a selling point.

What Vedaz does about it

• Returns to the sky and the mathematics. Positions, nakṣatras and timing are calculated carefully and stated plainly.
• Reads energy without gender. A graha is a quality of energy. It belongs to every body.
• Re-reads the houses. Home, roots, partnership and family are read for every kind of household and relationship.
• Names the source. Where an interpretation comes from a patriarchal or colonial reading, we say so.
• Restores what was obscured. Feminine wisdom, matrilineal memory, queer and gender-expansive realities, embodied knowledge and dignity-centred reading.
• Keeps the Sanskrit, and translates it. Every term is explained in the Knowledge Base, so the knowledge is yours and not held behind expertise.

Honouring, not extracting

Vedaz was founded by a South Asian woman and student of Vedic science. Decolonising does not mean discarding the tradition or pretending it has no lineage. It means reading it with reverence and with open eyes.

Questions

What does decolonising Vedic astrology mean?

It means honouring the tradition while naming the patriarchal, caste-shaped and colonial lenses through which it was recorded and translated, and reading the chart without those distortions.

Is Vedaz rejecting traditional Jyotiṣa?

No. Vedaz keeps the astronomy, the nakṣatras and the timing systems. It sets aside fear-based, gendered and fatalistic interpretations.